The wisdom of crowds is an idea backed by experimental validation that a big group of random

people can collectively guess at something and do better than trained experts, a very

frustrating proposition for those experts.

But while this concept sounds like it might be the miracle solution everyone's looking

for to solve any complicated problem, the reality is very different.

The wisdom of crowds is coming right up on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com, the wisdom and stupidity of crowds.

There's an old saying that a person is smart, people are stupid.

And while we might see examples that seem to support that frequently, it turns out that

under certain conditions, the reverse can be true.

Surprisingly, crowds consisting of non-experts who have no tools at their disposal other

than guesswork can come up with a better answer to certain questions than even an expert

in that field when certain conditions are satisfied.

Today, we're going to look at how and why this works, and also how and when you should

and shouldn't rely on it.

The actual term Wisdom of Crowds comes from the title of the 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds.

Why the many are smarter than the few, and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies,

societies and nations.

By journalist James Surawicky, he opened the book by telling a famous anecdote.

It's one of the best known stories about the British polymath, Francis Galton.

In 1906, Galton was at a livestock fair where he encountered a very popular type of contest

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