Wisdom of the crowd

But, on the other hand, there's no other solution.

We are looking for the wisdom of the crowd here.

Yeah.

And this is one way to get it, by, by letting people look into it.

And there's a ton of research on just experiencing this.

There's a book called Wisdom of Crowds, and in it, just to give you an example about how a community can be more intelligent than individuals.

the author describes a fair where you're guessing the weight of a bull.

I'm not too sure of the exact circumstance.

So, great, you've got all these individual neurons or small neuronal reverberating circuit things generating different rhythms and then funneling it down to the striatum.

So how does the striatum put all of these different rhythmic inputs together into a single stable rhythm? And this is where we bring in the totally cool concept of wisdom of the crowd.

19th century Francis Galton, required that I now call him an English polymath, required that I also note that he was Darwin's cousin, which is kind of cool, and that he was one of the pioneers of eugenics, which is not so cool.

Galton.

And the winner came within like three pounds of the exact answer, the accurate answer.

Galton had this inspiration where he collected all the ballots afterward and averaged them out.

And the remarkable finding, first evidence of wisdom of the crowd, remarkable finding was you average out everybody's estimates individually.

and it came down with incredible accuracy to the actual weight, more accurate than the actual winner did.

She was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by Prospect Magazine in 2022 and received the National Press Club's Nell Minow Award for Cultural Criticism in 2024.

Ms. Emma is a contributing editor at Comment Magazine, a board member at the American Institute for Boys and Men, and an editor-at-large at Wisdom of Crowds.

She's the author of Rethinking Sex and Provocation, A Provocation.

It's her 2022 book.

Today on Breaking Math, we talk with professional forecaster Molly Hickman about what it means to assign probabilities to the future and whether doing so can actually make us better at anticipating what comes next.

We explore prediction markets, the wisdom of crowds, the surprising power of generalists, and a new question for the age of artificial intelligence: What happens when machines become forecasters, too? I'm Autumn Phaneuf, and as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Noah John Siracusa.

Today, we ask a deeper question: If we could see the future a little more clearly, would we make better decisions in the present? A quick note before we begin.

The views Molly expresses in this conversation are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of her employer.

Right.

So there, there's something called the wisdom of crowds, and that's, you know, if you get enough people wagering on a market- You're gonna get a pretty accurate reflection of what the, the true probability is.

It's no different than how we treat, you know, in the past, Sharper Sportsbooks, Pinnacle, you know, BetChris, um, Bookmaker, Circa as, like, sources of truth in the, in the betting market because they're taking the biggest bets.

Early, too.

But you know what? You actually joke.

I know it's a joke, but you can actually do this stuff.

Like, there is some utility in the wisdom of crowds, right? Like, a r- an example I would give, but l- let's, this is, I always use extremes to illustrate a point.

Um, but let's say you, you could wager on, uh, the price of gasoline by the end of 2026, which is probably a market you can wager on right now.

When I did that deal, when I was at Parify, it was predicated on this idea that markets are arbiters of truth.

And therefore, if you have a prediction market, and go read the book Wisdom of the Crowds, if you have a sufficient, if you try to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar and you ask a big enough sample set, they will approximate that to 5% plus or minus.

It's crazy.

And so that was the general idea of prediction markets.

Because Piaget also wasn't an abnormal psychologist.

Piaget would have been like Malcolm Gladwell, in the wisdom of crowds.

The crowds are wise because they imitate each other, and this is how a lot of stuff works.

Right, but

Although, you know, at some point, you get 99.99% of the people who vote for something and you're in North Korea.

And so, you know, it's a very important question.

When do you go from wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? And I think- Yeah,

that's a very

I really hope there's much more diversity in this intelligence here.

Because the more each of us are expressing our true individual enthusiasm about a theory, I think the wisdom of the crowd, which by the way is a very real thing, starts to produce itself.

However, The wisdom of the crowd teaches you.

You guys can look this up on Wikipedia.

It teaches you.