Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
solex
on 30/05/2015, 10:37:09 UTC

You can never win with the masses. They will always be wrong, for as long as they demand to organize themselves in collectives.


The Internet is essentially the mass of masses. Extrapolate the audience averaging effect in the popular game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire:

"But there’s a third option: You can use your “Ask-the-Audience" life line. You can poll the entire studio audience on the four possible answers, and their responses are instantaneously assembled into a bar graph. Invariably, this graph shows one overwhelming choice, and with rare exceptions the audience is right. “I’ll trust the audience,” you tell Regis. “Final answer.”

Good move. But why? No person in the audience is any more likely than you to know where grapes come from, yet the collective intelligence of the group is almost always a better bet than your best guess. Psychologists are very interested in this perplexing statistical phenomenon. If the crowd is always wiser than any individual, what does that say about the way knowledge is stored and arranged in our minds? And can it help us make better choices, even beyond game shows?

...

That’s actually what Vul and Pashler found when they ran the experiment. As reported in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, the average of two guesses for any individual participant was better than either guess alone, regardless of the time between guesses. So polling the “crowd within” does indeed yield a statistically more accurate answer. What’s more, this internal crowd gets more independent-minded with time: Contestants who were asked to second-guess themselves three weeks later benefited even more by averaging their two guesses than did those who second-guessed themselves immediately. The psychologists speculate that the cognitive pull of the original answer loses its power and allows more mental flexibility over time."
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/06/polling-crowd-within.cfm

@vokain You have probably seen this already, but in case not: enjoy!
BBC - The Code - The Wisdom of the Crowd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU

PS. Interesting how every single block size limit poll, since the first one in Feb 2013, has had majority support for the increase.