You Know More Than You Think
This Scientific American article makes interesting reading, suggesting that the wisdom of crowds can be harnessed even when you're all on your lonesome.
A group of people with relevant information to a particular topic, but with differing perspectives and opinions will usually come up with better averaged estimate related to that topic than any one individual. This is "the wisdom of crowds" (from the book of the same name by James Surowiecki). Now in a paper in Psychological Science Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig have shown that even one person can benefit from the technique they call "dialectical bootstrapping".
It doesn't work just to make two guesses and take the average, however. From the SciAm article: "... participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: “First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?... Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.” When the participants used the more involved method, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate. The “crowd within” achieved about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person."
Something to remember the next time I'm guesstimating. Instead of pulling a number out of my arse I'll ask myself twice.
(XP DW->LJ)
A group of people with relevant information to a particular topic, but with differing perspectives and opinions will usually come up with better averaged estimate related to that topic than any one individual. This is "the wisdom of crowds" (from the book of the same name by James Surowiecki). Now in a paper in Psychological Science Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig have shown that even one person can benefit from the technique they call "dialectical bootstrapping".
It doesn't work just to make two guesses and take the average, however. From the SciAm article: "... participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: “First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?... Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.” When the participants used the more involved method, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate. The “crowd within” achieved about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person."
Something to remember the next time I'm guesstimating. Instead of pulling a number out of my arse I'll ask myself twice.
(XP DW->LJ)