The Wisdom of the Crowd

In this excerpt from The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, a brief story of British scientist Francis Galton is told about his witnessing of a contest that challenged people to guess the weight of an ox. Much like the guessing games that you might see in a mall that ask you to guess the number of gumballs in a giant container, the person with the closest guess to the actual weight of the ox won a prize.

Now Mr. Galton was a pretty skeptical person, believing that the majority of people were uneducated and therefore were a detriment to society and/or a democracy. Most of the people entering the contest were not experts on ox weights, so he was curious to take a look at the results of the contest, stating “The average competitor was probably as well fitted for making a just estimate of the dressed weight of the ox, as an average voter is of judging the merits of most political issues on which he votes."

But what he found was surprising... he took the average of all the 800 or so guesses and, it came to 1,197 lbs., which is an almost exact match to the correct answer of 1,198 lbs.!! Much like a colony of ants can achieve much more than any single ant can alone, the entire group of humans averaged as a whole had better insight than any single person.

This is routinely proven time and again in any contest of this kind - following the rule that the greater the number of people participating, the more accurate the average guess will be (so only a handful of people is probably not big enough). This makes me wonder about the collective power that we have as a species, and about how much goes to waste or unnoticed.

Being a democracy consisting of mainly 2 parties of political ideologies, both seem to push toward either extreme, repelling like opposite poled magnets, and these extremes are usually how they are represented in the media. But if we could train ourselves as a society to see the power of the average, I think we might find that the answer is almost always a compromise found somewhere in the middle.

I dont know how much faith I put into polling, but if only we could express the big, dividing issues of the day into a mathematical vote, and go with the average, maybe we would be better off, or at least cut through some of the bureaucracy tying down our representatives. Or maybe that's what American Idol already is, a sophisticated test to see if the masses can come to the right conclusion in the end... nah...