| The "wisdom of the crowds" doesn't mean what many people think it means. The wisdom of crowds works best when: 1. participants are independent (otherwise you may get failure modes, such as "groupthink" or "information cascades") 2. participants are informed, but in different ways, with different opinions; 3. there is a clear, accepted aggregation mechanism, where individual errors "cancel out" to some degree I view the topics in James Surowiecki's book (or the Wikipedia summary of it, at least) as required thinkinpg for everyone, preferably synthesized with a study of statistics and political economy. In particular, the Wikipedia article's section on "Five elements required to form a wise crowd" is a slightly different slicing of the required elements that I offer above. * If you read that section, trust is listed. I, however, don't see trust as a necessary condition for a "wise crowd". Trust is often useful (or even necessary) when a collective decision is used for governance, decision-making, and policy. |