Recess Monkey & the wisdom of crowds

Amidst all the hilarity over Recess Monkey's "Maggie Dead" post, the question was put of whether this discredited bloggers. Certainly Iain Dale commenting on the Blogger TV show on 18 Doughty Street thought so.

I must say that anyone who thinks this is missing the fundamental point about the blogosphere. Wisdom is found in the crowd as a whole, not in any particular member of it. For every sloppy blogger claiming that Margaret Thatcher is dead, there is another fool saying that she will live for ever. Both are wrong but their errors cancel each other out. The crowd as a whole moves quickly to the more accurate position that she is alive, but she's getting on a bit. 

So as I commented on Blogger TV, the blogosphere did exactly what it is supposed to do. We shouldn't expect any more from it. 

Comments

[bludnok]

Jude Wanniski,now alas departed, would have appreciated this argument. He told the tale of a relative who ran a restaurant. The relative would put a jar containing sweets(a thousand or so) by the door of the restaurant and invite customers to guess the number of sweets. Although no-one usually got the right number, the average of all the guesses would be very close to and sometimes exactly correct.

Wanniski used this example (amongst others) to justify his belief that the electorate would always come up with the right answer in an election provided only that the right choices were among those available.

[Bishop Hill]

Have a look at "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki. He starts the book with a very similar story about the origins of the idea in the work of the scientist Francis Galton who noted how the average of the entries in a "guess the weight of the cow" competition at a country fair was usually amazingly close to the true weight.