My own experiment with crowd wisdom
Crowdsourcing is a very powerful concept and has become amplified through the growth of social media. There are 4 main branches to crowdsourcing:
In this post I’m focusing specifically on crowd wisdom as I am particularly fascinated by the concept. Jan Lorenz describes the concept nicely, that “the aggregate of many people’s estimates tend to be closer to the true value than all of the separate individual or even expert guesses” (Lorenz. J, 2011).
After watching Lior Zoref’s fascinating Ted Talk on crowdsourcing, specifically the TedOX he brought on stage to prove the experiment of crowd wisdom, I was inspired. I just had to test out the theory of crowd wisdom with my own cricles on different social media platforms because the theory seemed almost too good to be true.
So I took to my many social media platforms with a simple and age old question: how many almonds (ok maybe almonds aren’t so ‘age old’) are in the jar?
How many do you think are in the jar?
With posts on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Twitch, and email, I found and pestered anyone I could find to share their guesses and share the post with their own friends, creating a decentralised network throughout the internet.
After just 48 hours, I managed to receive over 100 guesses. Incredible! Also a little scary to see how many people I interact with online every day.
The results ranged between a measly 58 almonds to over 860 almonds. When I averaged out all of these, the total average came out to be 340 almonds. The correct number was actually 379 so the error margin was just 39 almonds below which is just incredible.
Although the error margin of my experiment was higher than Lior Zoref’s amazing 3kg off the actual weight of the Ox, I was still unbelievably happy with the results. I can assume that the reason my error margin was higher was because my pool size was smaller. In Lior’s experiment, he had over 500 answers, so it’s assumed that if I were to receive more answers to add to my average, I my error margin would slowly shrink smaller and smaller.
After doing this experiment, it’s clear that crowd wisdom is definitely possible and true to the basic theory. The power that a crowd has over an individual is very powerful and could be used in many instances for the good.
Really the only downfall to this experiment was the copious amounts of almonds I ate.