Crowd wisdom Weighing the ox

Francis Galton first discovered the wisdom of crowds in the 19th century. The brilliant statistical thinker noticed that asking a professional cattle merchant to guess of the weight of an ox in a county fair contest didn’t normally prove the best strategy. Rather, it was better to take the average of all the guesses submitted by everyone at the fair. Individual entries weren’t especially accurate, but the errors tended to be symmetrical - as many were too high as too low. James Surowiecki, a fi...