Glia
04-28-2014, 10:49 PM
Maybe the Palm Drive Hospital Board of Directors should give this a try.
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Do people (and animals) make better decisions in groups than on their own? How many people (and what conditions) does it take to make an best decision?
<header style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: minion-pro, Georgia, serif; line-height: 16px;">The Wisdom of (Little) Crowds (https://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/22/the-wisdom-of-little-crowds/)
by Carl Zimmer
</header>In 1785, a French mathematician named Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat (known as Marquis de Condorcet) used statistics to champion democracy.
Democracies are based on the collective decisions of large groups of people. But citizens aren’t experts on every topic, and so they may be prone to errors in the choices they make. And yet, Condorcet argued, it’s possible for a group of error-prone decision-makers to be surprisingly good at picking the best choice.
Condorcet’s logic was simple. Assume you have a group of people each independently making a choice about a question. Assume that they have a chance of making the wrong choice–but that their choices are better than random. If the decision they’re trying to make is either thumbs up or thumbs down, for example, their chance of picking the right answer only needs to be greater than 50 percent. The odds that a majority of them will pick the right answer is greater than the odds that any one of them will pick it on their own. What’s more, Condorcet argued that the group’s performance gets even better as its size goes up.
Condorcet’s argument is the foundation of what’s now commonly called the “wisdom of crowds.” Individuals who have imperfect understanding of a situation can band together to become good at collective decision-making.
Continues here:
https://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/22/the-wisdom-of-little-crowds/
(https://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/22/the-wisdom-of-little-crowds/)
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Do people (and animals) make better decisions in groups than on their own? How many people (and what conditions) does it take to make an best decision?
<header style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: minion-pro, Georgia, serif; line-height: 16px;">The Wisdom of (Little) Crowds (https://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/22/the-wisdom-of-little-crowds/)
by Carl Zimmer
</header>In 1785, a French mathematician named Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat (known as Marquis de Condorcet) used statistics to champion democracy.
Democracies are based on the collective decisions of large groups of people. But citizens aren’t experts on every topic, and so they may be prone to errors in the choices they make. And yet, Condorcet argued, it’s possible for a group of error-prone decision-makers to be surprisingly good at picking the best choice.
Condorcet’s logic was simple. Assume you have a group of people each independently making a choice about a question. Assume that they have a chance of making the wrong choice–but that their choices are better than random. If the decision they’re trying to make is either thumbs up or thumbs down, for example, their chance of picking the right answer only needs to be greater than 50 percent. The odds that a majority of them will pick the right answer is greater than the odds that any one of them will pick it on their own. What’s more, Condorcet argued that the group’s performance gets even better as its size goes up.
Condorcet’s argument is the foundation of what’s now commonly called the “wisdom of crowds.” Individuals who have imperfect understanding of a situation can band together to become good at collective decision-making.
Continues here:
https://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/22/the-wisdom-of-little-crowds/
(https://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/22/the-wisdom-of-little-crowds/)