Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds
Joaquin Navajas, Tamara Niella, Gerry Garbulsky, Bahador Bahrami, Mariano Sigman, arXiv, 2018/12/21
This paper (27 page PDF) looks at alternative methods of obtaining a consensus from a group of people (aka 'the wisdom of crowds'). While it's true that a crowd can outperform an individual, the authors suggest that dividing the crowd into small groups of five, and having the five come to a consensus, can when averaged produce better results than average produced by the large crowd. More...