Wisdom of the crowd

The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources which rely on collective human knowledge. An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise. Trial by jury can be understood as at least partly relying on wisdom of the crowd, compared to bench trial which relies on one or a few experts. In politics, sometimes sortition is held as an example of what wisdom of the crowd would look like. Decision-making would happen by a diverse group instead of by a fairly homogenous political group or party. Research within cognitive science has sought to model the relationship between wisdom of the crowd effects and individual cognition. A large group's aggregated answers to questions involving quantity estimation, general world knowledge, and spatial reasoning has generally been found to be as good as, but often superior to, the answer given by any of the individuals within the group. Jury theorems from social choice theory provide formal arguments for wisdom of the crowd given a variety of more or less plausible assumptions. Both the assumptions and the conclusions remain controversial, even though the theorems themselves are not. The oldest and simplest is Condorcet's jury theorem (1785). Aristotle is credited as the first person to write about the "wisdom of the crowd" in his work Politics. According to Aristotle, "it is possible that the many, though not individually good men, yet when they come together may be better, not individually but collectively, than those who are so, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man's cost".

Tailoring the Hybridization Density of DNA Biosensors through Tunable Surface Functionalization

Sandrine Gerber, Mounir Driss Mensi, Perrine Agnes Edith Robin, Pauline Skigin, Lucas Mayoraz

DNA biosensors are promising candidates for the development of point-of-care diagnosis methods. They can be inserted in microfluidic platforms, are often non-expensive, and can be produced for a variety of targeted analytes. However, their development face ...

2023

Toward a mixed-initiative QA system: from studying predictors in Stack Exchange to building a mixed-initiative tool

Tiziano Piccardi

This article envisions a new customer support solution that merges the efficiency of crowd-based Question and Answer (QA) sites with the effectiveness of traditional customer care services. QA sites use crowdsourcing to solve problems in a very efficient w ...

Academic Press Ltd- Elsevier Science Ltd2017

Tailoring the Hybridization Density of DNA Biosensors through Tunable Surface Functionalization

Three Essays on Collective Forms of Organizing for Production and Innovation

Toward a mixed-initiative QA system: from studying predictors in Stack Exchange to building a mixed-initiative tool

Tailoring the Hybridization Density of DNA Biosensors through Tunable Surface Functionalization

Three Essays on Collective Forms of Organizing for Production and Innovation

Toward a mixed-initiative QA system: from studying predictors in Stack Exchange to building a mixed-initiative tool