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Comment by Noumenon72 | Hacker News Reader

The capital is not Philadelphia, it's Harrisburg. So the idea must be that most people think they are right and others will agree with them, but there are people who get it right and know that others get it wrong, and they are responsible for the difference in scores.

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There are four groups of people:

A - "Philadelphia is the capital, and others will agree."

B - "Philadelphia is the capital, but most others won't know that".

C - "Harrisburg is the capital, and others will agree."

D - "Harrisburg is the capital, but most others won't know that."

This technique eliminates groups A and C from consideration, and measures the difference in size between groups B and D.

Both groups B and D think they know something other people don't, but B is wrong and D is right.

In cases where people feel like they have "inside" knowledge, generally speaking it's because they are correct and knowledgeable (group D), not because they are misled (group B).

You often arrive in group D by virtue of having been in group A and then learning the actual truth of the matter.

You can arrive in group B by falling prey to a conspiracy theory, which makes this technique perhaps invalid in such cases? I wouldn't be surprised if the question "Do vaccines cause autism?" had a surprisingly popular answer of "Yes".

This is a great summary / reduction of the article. I appreciated how you broke it down into groups and made the example more concrete.

It's not a summary/reduction, it's a a better article with more information.

Wow, thank you!! :)

Thanks :)

You should consider adding this breakdown to the wikipedia article

>conspiracy theories

I can't say what such a poll would say, but I feel fairly confident that using any sort of "surprising popularity" measure is no guarantee of Truth, but only an excuse after the fact to explain a result.

As you say, for some question the "surprisingly popular" answer could just as easily be dead wrong.

if you don't post this to Wikipedia, may someone else post it on your behalf (i.e. do you accept Wikipedia's license on your words above?)

I posted it. Thanks :)

Really great explanation. This is more a way of finding an opinionated (smug?) minority who believe they know better than the crowd.

Sometimes experts could be right, but other times wrong. Vaccines/climate change/current politics could all have a strong effect here and still be wrong.

This comment thread is confusing because HN users have edited the article several times today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:History/Surprisingly...

That is indeed exactly the underpinning of the technique, not that you can tell from the wiki article.

It's hinted at, but you have really latch on to this statement at the beginning.

>is a wisdom of the crowd technique that taps into the expert minority opinion within a crowd.

For what it's worth I found the Wikipedia article clearer.

The article should state clearer that the answer is no, as it made no sense to me before reading your comment. (Edit, it's fixed now)

Thanks, I read the article multiple times and couldn't really understand why someone would give the wrong answer and then assume that most people would give the right answer (I didn't know Pennsylvania wasn't the capital of Philadelphia).

> I didn't know Pennsylvania wasn't the capital of Philadelphia

Yes you did. :)

You know what I meant :(

What about people who aren't sure?

If you give an answer but its a guess, you'd be less likely to say people agree with you.

assuming a binary question (very important) if you aren't sure, if you thought most people thought differently from you, why would you hold on to your belief that lacks both primary and secondary support?

"My best guess is X but I believe most people would contradict me" suggests that you consider yourself an expert who knows better than most people.

On the other hand, how would you communicate uncertainty in the context of a binary question?

The problem with this technique is that is useless

We live in cultural bubbles, tending to cluster close to people like we (People that speak the same language, with similar points of view, economic levels, cultural answers engraved for solving the same problem, eating the same food, cooked in the same way, exposed to the same publicity, popular songs, sport teams and ideological propaganda). People make most of their friends in the same school whereas being teached the same things by the same teacher.

Therefore, we are notoriously bad guessing what other people think... out of our cultural bubble.

If you ask people questions like "Will your neighbors enjoy doing pig meat barbeques?", "Are this mushrooms poisonous" or "Is ok to put soap directly in your bath water?" they can provide a reliable answer, but the results can't be extrapolated out of the cluster. Are useles to find the truth. All cultures choose to ignore big chunks of human knowledge or do some things plain wrong. A poisonous mushroom can be made edible after cooking by an obscure technique culturally spread. Many jews will dislike pig meat. Many japanese will not find ok to put soap in the bath. The majority of people in the planet don't know and will not care about what is the capital of Guangdong, Entre Ríos, or Philadelphia.

If your starting variables are unconstrained (the people answering the question is anonymous and from an unknown pool) the technique is a sociological dice that will return different results each time (AKA pseudoscience)

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