Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Massimo Pinyu, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, today's topic is crowdsourcing, which is using a large group of people of strangers, often over the internet, to solve

some problem or answer some question. And there's a ton of examples of crowdsourcing. People

are doing it more and more to design parks or to solve research problems or to create

comprehensive encyclopedias online of all of the world's knowledge.

And some of the approaches to crowdsourcing work better than others.

So we're going to talk today about the relationship between the consensus opinion of a crowd and truth.

And what kinds of methods of crowdsourcing are more likely to generate truth and useful answers.

So let me get this straight. Crowdsourcing in general is sort of a kind of a distributed problem solving approach or a distributed approach to problem solving or whatever it is.

Sure. I suppose we could crowdsource two answers from the two of us and pick, let the best one rise up to the top.

It's a small crowd, but yes.

Now, let's, one of the things that I read is that some people tend to think of crowd sourcing as a phenomenon that arose with the internet.

In fact, the term crowdsourcing actually is pretty recent.

It comes from a Wire magazine article published in 2006.

It's that recent, really?

Wow.

So it was coined by Jeff Howey for Wired.

But the thing is, in fact, there are historical examples of things that if it were not

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