I wanted to get down a few more thoughts on the wisdom of crowds.
When I first signed up for Facebook, I noticed a trivia game on the right-hand side of the page. It asked fairly simple questions about movies, and you answered them. Then it showed your ranking against your friends.
I answered maybe a hundred questions over the course of a few weeks. It wasn’t that fun to answer, but it was fun to see how I was stacking up against my friends.
However, the most interesting thing I noticed was when the game displayed the answer to the question. It showed you if you got it right, and then it showed you how everybody else had voted. So for example, what percentage chose A, what percentage chose B, etc.
What was most surprising was the fact that every single time (and I kept track for over 100 questions), the crowd chose the right answer more than any other question. So even on the difficult questions, 35 or 40% of the people had picked it.
If you think about it, it’s not surprising. Let’s say you’re given a hard question. You don’t know so you pick at random. Statistics tell you that if everybody did that, you’d end up with each question getting about 25% of the vote.
But any time somebody actually knows the answer, they won’t pick random. They’ll pick the right one. So the right answer ends up with a larger percentile.
James Surowiecki, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, tells the story of Francis Galton. Galton went to a county fair where somebody was asking people to guess the weight of an ox. The one closest to the right weight won some kind of prize. Galton went up after the completion of the event and asked if he could have the guesses. Most were very far off, but when he added up all the votes, he was surprised to find that the average guess was closer to the true weight than any single entry, and also closer to any single entry from several ‘cattle experts’.
How does this relate to writing? I wrote a few days ago about how we might be able to wade through all the self-published works that will come out, as more and more authors realize that publishing their work is getting easier. I suggested one way we’ll be able to find good books is by using ratings systems (like the one Amazon employs for all it’s products). Sometimes these systems can be ‘gamed’, but often they are a great way for the good stuff to rise to the top.
