If you haven’t already read it, I’d like to direct your attention to an absolutely fantastic book called Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. In it, Surowiecki argues that the decision-making and predictive power of diverse groups of people greatly exceeds that of most individual “experts”. The book is remarkably comprehensive and convincing, and the case studies in it will inspire and amaze you.
Wisdom of Crowds opens with a nice example: 800 people at a livestock exhibition participated in a contest to guess the weight of a live ox (on display) after slaughter and preparation. Some of the 800 were butchers and so-forth; people who should make a good guess. Many contestants were ordinary people with less “relevant” knowledge. But no expert within the competing pool beat the average guess of the group as a whole, which came within one pound of the true weight (1,197 lbs instead of 1,198).
