RS76 - Crowdsourcing and the Wisdom of Crowds
Release date: December 16, 2012
What do Linux, Netflix, and the Oxford English Dictionary have in common? They've all benefited from the power of crowdsourcing, in which a task is outsourced to a group of hundreds or thousands of disparate people. In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Julia and Massimo discuss the phenomena of crowdsourcing, and ask: What makes it work? Is it ever unethical? And what are the limits to the wisdom of crowds?
Julia's pick: "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't"
Massimo's pick: The Phi2Phi App.
References:
"Longitude"
Reader Comments (8)
There's a study on wisdom of the crowds going on now, called Forecasting ACE. They found that information sharing improves forecasts over independent forecasts. Perhaps because, as you said, it gets people to consider counterarguments.
From the study:
An interesting podcast.
I want to mention the most obvious reason why people contribute to Wikipedia and such projects that you didn't mention in the podcast. People are simply passionate about a topic and decide to share their knowledge. They need not to be professional experts but they can be very knowledgeable about it. Also, there are now several initiatives in the academia to promote high quality writings in Wikipedia. In psychology for example, there are professors who as part of the class, assign students to certain subjects. Instead of writing a boring research paper that no one is going to read, students can actually contribute valuable information to the public.
Can you guys do an episode on the beauocracy of academia?
Can you guys do an episode on the beauocracy of academia?
Debian, Ubuntu, etc. are distributions of Linux. :)
I don't believe there is much need to say what a great contribution Massimo and Julia make to the conversation about rationality. So many have done that before. However (in the great parenthetical tradition of Massimo's wrting: you knew there was a "however" coming), I have become hung up on a recent habit of Julia's and it's making listening to the podcasts harder and harder for someone with a light case of OCD. I refer to her constant over-use and often misuse of the work "like". On this podcast I counted well over 50 "like"s (I was riding my MTB and lost count while dodging rocks). In my humble opinion it greatly diminishes the accomplishments of what is obviously a wonderful, well-read, and thoughtful mind. Please, please try to limit this one, minor bad habit, and you will have as close to a perfect podcast as anyone could want. Of course, Julia can take heart that she is in great company: just listen to Ira Glass speak extemporaneously or any broadcast by Teri Gross. All my love, a faithful listener.
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