The Wisdom of Crowds: the science of getting smarter together
Channel: Hypermind
Date: 2021-12-01

We're often told groups make us less smart, but recent discoveries in cognitive science contradict this conventional wisdom.

Cognitive scientist Emile Servan-Schreiber takes you through the science of collective intelligence, from Galton's 1906 discovery of the wisdom of crowds to the last 20 years of research.

Collective intelligence has a recipe, and its 3 ingredients all matter for smarter groups :
- a diversity of opinions,
- a healthy dose of independence so diversity can flourish,
- an aggregation method to extract consensus

(see Scott Page on diversity, and James Surowiecki for a more general overview of the wisdom of crowds)

The 3 laws of collective wisdom :

1) The error of the average (the crowd's error) is smaller than the average error (that of an individual chosen at random)
2) The larger the crowd, the wiser its judgment 
3) Error exhibits diminishing returns: the greatest gain in accuracy comes at the start, meaning small groups can still be wise.

00:00 intro
00:37 Francis Galton's discovery
01:55 Average and median estimates
03:06 1. Collective judgment outperforms individual judgment
03:57 2. Larger crowds are smarter
04:06 3. Diminishing returns
04:44 The Math behind Crowd Wisdom
05:42 Scott Page's Diversity Theorem
06:38 increase diversity to compensate lack of expertise
07:04 Experts vs Amateurs: predicting trial jury awards
08:36 Surowiecki's recipe: Independence, Diversity and Aggregation

#Future
#Forecasting
#Science