Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rphv 1061 days ago
James Surowiecki's book "The Wisdom of Crowds" explores this the idea of harnessing collective intelligence in detail.

The basic idea is that when everyone in a crowd makes a prediction or an estimate, the average of all those guesses will often be more accurate than any individual's opinion because individual errors, biases, and idiosyncrasies tend to cancel each other out in a large enough group.

1 comments

There's also the related idea of Superforecasting (explored initially by Tetlock): some people seem to just be really damn good at assigning probabilities to events. A platform like Metaculus allows finding those people and, at least to some extent, training them.
Yeah, Metaculus trains, identifies, and hires "Metaculus Pro Forecasters" for particular projects: https://www.metaculus.com/help/faq/#what-are-pros