Vox Populi
Today I had one of these coincidences of picking up ideas and knowledge. First, I heard the news item that China, for the first time if I understood it correctly, wants to measure how long the Great Wall is. This brought the thought to my mind: Why don’t they just pay 100000 Chinese to walk the whole length (or 1000000 to walk a tenth of the length) and count their steps, then multiply by their average step length and average all counts of the lenghts. Shouldn’t that result in a pretty good value at the end? I wonder how much different that value would be from an accurate measurement, I would guess only few metres wrong.
Now, I read a blog item on Crowdsourcing, which ultimately lead me to Francis Galton, who discovered this effect when he was trying to prove that if he let a bunch of people together are dumb. He let 787 guess the weight of an ox, and wanted to show that the average guess wouldn’t be a good guess. He failed and instead found that the average was a really good guess!
February 13th, 2007 @ 8:25
Vox Populi:
“The voice of the people is the voice of God”,
or
“Do not listen to those who say that the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the common people always is close to insanity.”
Not sure which it is but I am with the people every time. In days gone by it might have been the weight of an Ox but now it’s weapons of mass destruction and my intuition leads the way! Alan.
February 13th, 2007 @ 12:29
Woo, I kicked a hornet’s nest by mentioning crowdsourcing, that’s probably why it’s called a buzzword
I found the links mentioning this here (german)
/edit: Wow, my own spam filter just filtered me out
February 13th, 2007 @ 16:18
Hornets nest, buzzword, you’ve got me running for my life. Not yet ubiquitous, possibly idiomatic but hopefully on it’s way to perpetuity. Alan.