• The “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis claims that the average of many guesses is better than a single guess.
• Nick Bostrom speculates that in the far future, a multigalactic supercivilization might be able to support 10^46 simulated humans per century. If all of them took the survey, the error would be within 12 km.
• Van Dolder and Van Den Assem did a much bigger wisdom-of-inner-crowds experiment, which found that outer crowds are much more effective than inner crowds.
• An inner crowd of size infinity performs about as well as an outer crowd of size two.
• 90% of outer crowd error can be removed by going from one to ten people; going from ten to infinity people only removes an additional 10%.
• Last month, we found that wisdom of crowds works in forecasting: the aggregate of 500 forecasters scored better than 84% of individuals; the aggregate of superforecasters scored better than individual superforecasters.
Published February 6, 2023
Visit Astral Codex Ten to read Scott Alexander’s original post Crowds Are Wise (And One’s A Crowd)
