Dan Phiffer, a blogger I met at SXSW, has set up a little “wisdom of crowds” experiment on his blog. Check it out, and see if you can make the crowd a little wiser. 🙂
Dan Phiffer, a blogger I met at SXSW, has set up a little “wisdom of crowds” experiment on his blog. Check it out, and see if you can make the crowd a little wiser. 🙂
Mar 12 2008
Inside Higher Ed has the scoop. the majority of full-time professional employees in higher education are in administrative rather than faculty jobs. A university consists of a faculty attached to a fundraising apparatus, where it used to be the other way around.
Mar 12 2008
The true author of each of these sentences is a noted Nobel prize-winner. Still, if a grad student wrote any of them, he should be embarrassed. I italicize the words that make each sentence blush-worthy, and follow each with a suitable snide remark to write in the margin in red ink:Embarrassing Sentence: These rules ...
Mar 12 2008
Dan Phiffer, a blogger I met at SXSW, has set up a little "wisdom of crowds" experiment on his blog. Check it out, and see if you can make the crowd a little wiser. :-)
READER COMMENTS
sikantis
Mar 12 2008 at 11:18pm
I checked it out and it was great. I like the idea of posting an email exchange, it’s like reading a dialog.
Mason
Mar 13 2008 at 10:30am
I think his “experiment” proved your point. Anyone can post will low costs, and all posts recieve the same weight – not a good way to sort information.
Now if he had created a market (as the word experiment lead me to hope) in which I could have longed markets and shorted organic blogs, I may have done more than give the site a cursory glance.
Dan Phiffer
Mar 13 2008 at 11:27am
Mason — how would you design a market like this?
Also, how would you guys respond to commenter Abe’s claim that there’s an inconsistency between trusting non-experts in the marketplace but not in the voting booth?
Dan Phiffer
Mar 13 2008 at 11:38am
Also, Bryan, looks like somebody took your suggestion for a kidney market to heart.
Mason
Mar 13 2008 at 12:30pm
I didn’t say it was easy or that I could do it, if either of those were the case, it wouldn’t have excited me, and I wouldn’t have followed the link to investigate because .
Robin Hanson is really the person to talk to about designing markets like this.
In-trade is a good working example: http://www.intrade.com/
But I’ll throw out an idea; ask some math people to come up with a complex problem, post the problem on blogs and on a market. Solicit answers, accept 10 answers, let the market put a price on each answer, let bloggers vote on each answer. Then see if the winning blog answer is closer to the correct answer than the market answer (the one with the highest price).
Rob Domanski
Mar 14 2008 at 10:27am
I like the idea a lot. I’m running a “wisdom of the crowds” experiment of my own. Basically, I’m planning my wedding based on aggregate crowd decision-making. Would love any feedback:
http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2008/03/wedding-to-test-wisdom-of-crowds-theory.html
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