On the Wisdom of Crowds: Collective Predictive Analytics
Published in
3 min readMay 2, 2017
“All great lies have a seed of truth” (James Cottrell, personal communication, 2004). In 1907, Sir Francis Galton (1855–1911) — a British statistician whose body of research focused on human intelligence and who also happened to be Charles Darwin’s cousin — observed that in a festival contest in Cornwall, where people attempted to guess the weight of an ox, the average of all guesses was consistently close to the ox’s actual weight (Galton, 1907; Ball, 2014; Gega, 2000). Author James Surowiecki resurrected this observation for his book, The Wisdom of Crowds…
