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I cannot agree. This sort doesn't prove nothing about "Wisdom of the Crowds" because the wording is too broad. But it is evidence that crowd can outperform the

by ordu 9y ago

I cannot agree. This sort doesn't prove nothing about "Wisdom of the Crowds" because the wording is too broad. But it is evidence that crowd can outperform the best individual at least theoretically. The worst mistake the crowd had made was openness of dicussion allowing Kasparov to read this discussion. It gave him the advantage and by his own words it was cruicial advantage to win. Chess is the good candidate for hive-mind, because it is computational task which can be parallelized. You can hire tons of minds, and made them to solve different parts of the common task. There was some issues with management with mind-resources, the worst at the end-game, when many people lost their faith and started to discuss not a next move, but what is wrong with hive-mind. > The most rigorous experiment I've seen performed, tested a group of reddit users on estimating lines in an image [3]. Some expert individuals were far more accurate than the group average. I'm not convinced by this. There are few objections. 1. There was no discussion between elements of hive-mind. So the abilities of hive-mind remains unused. 2. Suspicious statistics. a. The articles compares estimates of individuals with estimates of hive-mind. Hive-mind have one set of answers, while answers of individuals are combined with knowledge of true answer. There are no example of individual outperforming hive-mind on all four data points at once. b. There are no attempt to estimate probability to get top individual answers by chance. Maybe those selected individuals are no better than average person, but just lucky ones? 3. There are different tasks. Different tasks needs different data processing, different data processing needs different processors. For example, there are tasks that benefits from parallelizing, and there are tasks that do not. Here we come close to (1): if you want hive-mind to outperform individual, you need to find a way how to use superpowers of hive-mind with this task.

thret 9y ago
Perhaps Deep Blue (or current equivalent) vs the World would be an interesting match, where the AI did not have access to the discussion.
CuriouslyC 9y ago
Wisdom of the crowds works when you're able to pool a large number of independent, unbiased estimates to produce a distribution. If the crowd communicates, it is no longer independent. This produces a distribution weighted towards the answers of loudest or most persuasive fraction, which is probably going to be less accurate. In fact, communication between crowd members in many cases significantly reduces the quality of the answers. This has been clearly demonstrated in studies of group brainstorming, where the number and quality of ideas is significantly better when group members come up with ideas independently and pool them at the end than when they come up with ideas together.

by ordu 9y ago

thret 9y ago

Perhaps Deep Blue (or current equivalent) vs the World would be an interesting match, where the AI did not have access to the discussion.

CuriouslyC 9y ago

Wisdom of the crowds works when you're able to pool a large number of independent, unbiased estimates to produce a distribution. If the crowd communicates, it is no longer independent. This produces a distribution weighted towards the answers of loudest or most persuasive fraction, which is probably going to be less accurate. In fact, communication between crowd members in many cases significantly reduces the quality of the answers. This has been clearly demonstrated in studies of group brainstorming, where the number and quality of ideas is significantly better when group members come up with ideas independently and pool them at the end than when they come up with ideas together.