Understanding the Wisdom of Crowds (WoC)?

Community Ethical Investment
#1

Hello Pynksters :wave:

The idea of the wisdom of crowds can be traced back to Aristotle’s theory of collective judgment as presented in his work Politics. He used a potluck dinner as an example, explaining that a group of individuals may come together to create a more satisfying feast for a group as a whole than what one individual might provide.

Wisdom of crowds is the idea that large groups of people are collectively smarter than individual experts when it comes to problem-solving, decision making, innovating and predicting.

The predictive power of crowds is a well-documented phenomenon. The underlying mathematical models behind WoC were first developed by Sir Francis Galton in 1907, and more latterly Hogarth 1978 and Treynor 1987.

The wisdom of crowds concept was popularized by James Surowiecki in his 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which shows how large groups have made superior decisions in pop culture, psychology, biology, behavioural economics, and other fields.

Pynk leverages WoC statistical models with machine learning to form the basis of our predictive capabilities.

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#2

Nice overview thanks Zack.

In Surowiecki’s book he lists 5 key criteria for crowd Wisdom.

Diversity of opinion - that’s where Pynksters from around the globe come in. People from all walks of life predict every day and we love that!

Independence - a Pynksters opinions should be their own, not influenced by those around them. That’s why a forum like this will work better for Pynk than the direct methods of Telegram for example.

Decentralisation - due to the nature of our crowd, that they are spread out over the globe people bring their own, unique biases and specialized opinions

Aggregation - some method by which we can collect and use our crowd data. In Pynks case that would be our in house AI - Rose

Trust - This one is really important! It’s important that we learn to trust each other. That we know that each individual.member is working for the good of the group. Regrettably that’s why from time to time we have to remove members who try to cheat or use false methods to predict or obtain wisdom points. We all have ‘skin in the game’ here so it’s important that we try to work all together to make things better.

Invest better together people.

:heart:

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#3

I read that Surowiecki also pointed out that the crowd is far from infallible. He explained that one requirement for a good crowd judgement is that people’s decisions are independent of one another. If everyone let themselves be influenced by each other’s guesses, there’s more chance that the guesses will drift towards a misplaced bias.

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#4

Hey @kaabayahaya, thanks for your reply, good point :+1: and congrats with your first post at Pynk Community :clap:

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#5

Thanks. I am loving this forum.

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#6

Hi and welcome to the Pynk forum @kaabayahaya. The guys have been working very hard on this as you can see. It looks great doesn’t it?!

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#7

It does, I can spend the entire day here

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#8

This podcast episode is essential listening if interested in Crowd Wisdom…effectively a summary of ‘Super Predictors’ by Philip Tetlock, a book that covers the Good Judgment Project and how it has proven WoC: https://podplayer.net/?id=24093071

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#9

I see what you mean @kaabayahaya ! I spent quite a bit of time exploring yesterday, yet when I came back today, I discovered more features. This is a great forum. Having different topics and threads makes it easy to navigate.

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#10

Glad we on the same page.

#12

Glad to hear this Loves alot

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#13

If I can add my 10 cents:

it touches on evolutionary anthropology.

Human brain, and its neural networks have been honed over millenia, but can be easily manipulated: just look at nicotine addiction spreading with good advertising, and people buying things ( or at least feeling bad if not buying things) if shelves are full of it, even if it is deleterious for their long term well being (if our peer group does it, we deeply believe it is safe to do).

For most or its evolution, the brain existed in social groups of less than 100. The prevailing social structure used was that of multiple families, council of elders, chief and shaman.
There was a super strong social contract that they will all look after each other, and trust was essential within the group.

The individuals held knowledge and opinions: they were the “Wisdom of Crowds” participants. Council of elders posed questions and brought the answers, if there was discrepancy between most proferred answers, the chief was invaluable in choosing (calculating) the mean and executing the decision.

The brains evolved to make judgements about things in their environments (things they were familiar with) Galtons’ experiment with the weight of the ox worked because he asked farmers for the answer, not, for example, victorian society ladies of his acquaintance.

I do wonder if size of Pynkster communities are relevant to obtaining the most useful result when gathering data for predictions.

Would creating smaller groups of Pynksters, who interact in a way that increases trust, and share knowledge of their environment ( in this case category:
Healthcare, Environment, Finance, Tech etc etc) would elicit best performance from our brains?

Eva

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