
Maybe you’ve got a hunch Kim Jong Il’s regime in North Korea has seen its final days, or that the Ebola virus will re-emerge somewhere in the world in the next year.
Your educated guess may be just as good as an expert’s opinion. Statistics have long shown that large crowds of average people frequently make better predictions about unknown events, when their disparate guesses are averaged out, than any individual scholar—a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds.
Now the nation’s intelligence community, with the help of university researchers and regular folks around the country, is studying ways to harness and improve the wisdom of crowds. The research could one day arm policy makers with information gathered by some of the same methods that power Wikipedia and social media.…Read More