Crowds Are Wise (And One's A Crowd) - by Scott Alexander
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The long road to Moscow
The “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis claims that the average of many guesses is better than a single guess. Ask one person to guess how much a cow weighs, and they’ll be off by some amount. Ask a hundred people and take the average of their answers, and you’ll be off by less. I was intrigued by a claim in this book review that: You can play “wisdom of crowds” in single-player mode. Say you want to know the weight of a cow. Then take a guess. Now throw your guess out of the window, and take another guess. Finally, compute the average of your two guesses. The claim is that this average is…
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