The Wisdom of the Lazy One.

Wisdom of Crowds

The topic for the day was an interesting one, Wisdom of Crowd. It created quite a “hoohaa” in our class as everyone was amazed by such a theory that is proven.

For the Wisdom of a Crowd, the interesting fact is the crowd’s answer has a high percentage of 91% getting the correct answer. Surprised right? I guess this is the reason why in “Who wants to be a millionaire?” there is the audience option. Because they have 91% chance of getting the correct answer.

What is the Wisdom of Crowd? Well, Wisdom of the Crowd is the answers of many individual, by getting the average of all the answers, you will find the crowds’ answer to be closer to the right answer as compared to having an individuals’ answer. Hence, the theory of this is you will be able to learn a lot by gaining small piece of information from everyone.

I find the theory realistic as there is this saying “two heads are better than one”, which is the reason why we rely on each other for information. Right?

In fact, do you know that Wikipedia use Wisdom of Crowd? As Wikipedia is a website that people can edit information, hence everyone is contributing to the pool of information. This is the reason why Wikipedia a powerful source of information.

Do you know that actually an individual has only 64% of getting the correct answer. With the Wisdom of Crowds, it makes us seem smarter as our knowledge is pooled together. Don’t you agree?

Is Google making us STUPID? No, LAZY is more like it.

My class had a discussion whether Search Engine, Google was making us STUPID as we are reliant on Google for easy access to information.

I have come to realise that Google does not make us stupid, but lazy instead. As you know when you search for information, you want the information to come out as quick as possible. Hence when you go into a website, you will start scanning through the website right? But you won’t really read the details, because we think that Google would help us pick the website that has the information that we want and need.

If you do not believe this, you can try it out by yourself by reading a long paragraph.  See if you really read all the information. Personally, I don’t. ^^