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Comment by gravity13 | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested to see the results of the first part of this. I've heard of those studies (perhaps they were just stories?) where groups of people collectively estimated things like number of jelly beans in a jar and were actually pretty accurate on average.

Obviously it's not going to be like that, because some of these things people can actually know - but I'm still curious.

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If you can find that, provide a link. I strongly doubt people are particularly good (without applying some sort of rigor) at estimating beans in jars.

This effect comes from the effect of regression to the mean. Some people will vastly overestimate, while some people will vatsly underestimate, thus cancelling out.

It holds as long as the people used are very diverse (not under the same cognitive bias) http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/regrmean.php

If you ask people to estimate the number of protons inside the sun, you might develop a peak around some sorts of numbers, but it's not likely to be a particularly good estimate.

Well, yeah, we all have a cognitive bias in that we've never had to comprehend a scale at 10^35-10^45 before (that's my belief graph btw).

the fascinating thing about those studies is the implication that many kinds of human knowledge are (normally?) distributed, and you can ask questions that's hard for an individual to get right but easy for a group (crowdsourcing). somewhat akin to how one brain cell doesn't contain knowledge, but a (large) collection of them do. it's like there's built-in fault tolerance. =)

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