"Wisdom of Crowds" Works For Individuals Too

ideonexus writes "Take a crowd of people and have them guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, and the average of their answers will be remarkably accurate. Now researchers have found the same goes for asking one person to guess about the same thing several times. Accuracy improved when the individual was given longer periods of time between guesses." The anonymous author of the Economist piece, not quoting the researchers, says the finding bolsters the "generate and test" model of creative thinking.

Re:So how long is the emperor of China's nose?

[will_die]

HUH????
Most polls said people expected that we would find WMD and WMDs were found.

Re:In related news...

[bunratty]

I think you need another class in statistics. It doesn't matter whether the guesses are normally or uniformly distributed. If the guesses are distributed around the correct value, the average over many guesses will converge to the correct value. All this shows is that when someone makes an estimate, they are usually close, and they overestimate about as much as they underestimate. The average of those guesses will then be more accurate than any one guess selected at random. The guesses probably are normally distributed, but that the fact that the average of the guesses converges to the correct result in itself does not prove that they are.

Re:So how long is the emperor of China's nose?

[rsborg]

HUH???? Most polls said people expected that we would find WMD and WMDs were found.

How is this informative? This is wrong. Read the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]. Money quote:

"No one was more surprised than I that we didn't find (WMDs)." General Tommy Franks December 2, 2005.[67]