Wisdom aggregates

At Wizer we say, a wise crowd knows more than the wisest person in the crowd. But how exactly does a wise crowd know something? How does it become wise?

There’s no magic involved – no mind-mingling or ‘hive mind’. Rather, it’s something that emerges from people simply sharing information. Each person adding their bit to the mix of information held by the group. Wisdom emerges bit by bit. It aggregates.

Caltech economist Charlie Plott has a lot of experience in this field. I worked with him on an experiment we called Box Office Prophecy. In this experiment, we asked film school students to predict the box office of movies that had not yet been released. In fact, we asked them to ‘bet’ on the outcomes – and paid out sizable cash prizes to the winners. (They were pretty good at it.)

Charlie called the betting market we created an ‘information aggregation mechanism’. Bit of a mouthful, but what he meant was, we’d created a way for the movie insights held by each of the students to be shared – or aggregated – through the bets they placed on the outcomes.

Charlie’s other big interest in life is fishing, and the way he explained the idea drew on that interest. Imagine, he said, you’re out on your boat, bobbing up and down and trying to guess where the fish are. It’s hard to see them from the boat and you might be looking in the wrong direction. 

One way to solve the problem is to stop looking down in the water and instead look up. Then you might see half a dozen birds circling and diving. Each one of them has a piece of the answer – the bit of the ocean they can see and perhaps the fish they’ve spotted. 

Together they’re like a big sign-post, pointing to where the fish are. Or as Charlie would say, they’re an information aggregation mechanism. Or as we would say, a wise crowd. 

Everyone has a piece of the puzzle. The challenge is to bring the pieces together. That’s what Wizer does, simply and efficiently. It’s an amazing tool.