"How many jellybeans in the jar?" (Each was wrong, but all were right)

[BrendaH]

I found a video about this on youtube and it's about a guy who had reached 10,000 suscribers so to celebrate it he had the idea of making this experiment with his suscribers. He also used jellybeans in a jar.
This link is about the experiment and he presents this idea to his suscribers, also he shows the jar.
https://youtu.be/HBJUQKabBkc

This one http://singingbanana.tumblr.com/post/6461125173/an-experiment-in-wisdom-of-the-crowds-how-many#_=_ is a picture of the jar.

And this one https://youtu.be/n98BhnwWmsc have the correct answer.

And it occurred to me that we could try this and see what happens.

If anyone is interesting in doing this if you are going to click the first link before knowing the answer or having said what you think is the number of jellybeans in the jar, I recomend you not to read the coments of the video because there is spoiler.

Can we do this?? Please???

 

[JGeropoulas]

I found a video about this on youtube and it's about a guy who had reached 10,000 suscribers so to celebrate it he had the idea of making this experiment with his suscribers. He also used jellybeans in a jar.
This link is about the experiment and he presents this idea to his suscribers, also he shows the jar.
https://youtu.be/HBJUQKabBkc

This one http://singingbanana.tumblr.com/post/6461125173/an-experiment-in-wisdom-of-the-crowds-how-many#_=_ is a picture of the jar.

And this one https://youtu.be/n98BhnwWmsc have the correct answer.

And it occurred to me that we could try this and see what happens.

If anyone is interesting in doing this if you are going to click the first link before knowing the answer or having said what you think is the number of jellybeans in the jar, I recomend you not to read the coments of the video because there is spoiler.

Can we do this?? Please???

The trick on here would be to avoid seeing other forum members' guesses

 

[BrendaH]

I found a video about this on youtube and it's about a guy who had reached 10,000 suscribers so to celebrate it he had the idea of making this experiment with his suscribers. He also used jellybeans in a jar.

This link is about the experiment and he presents this idea to his suscribers, also he shows the jar.
https://youtu.be/HBJUQKabBkc

This one http://singingbanana.tumblr.com/post/6461125173/an-experiment-in-wisdom-of-the-crowds-how-many#_=_ is a picture of the jar.

And this one https://youtu.be/n98BhnwWmsc have the correct answer.

And it occurred to me that we could try this and see what happens.

If anyone is interesting in doing this if you are going to click the first link before knowing the answer or having said what you think is the number of jellybeans in the jar, I recomend you not to read the coments of the video because there is spoiler.

Can we do this?? Please???

The trick on here would be to avoid seeing other forum members' guesses

Yes, but I don't think it will change things much. At least this guy made people to comment below the video and he could finish the experiment well. Anyway, he explains this in the third link. He have in count that in his case people could see comments from others so he explains what he did to make it work from the minute 2:30.

 

[Phill4]

It reminds me of the savant people who have the abilities to pick on this kind of infromation, their mind is wired in such way they associate things differently than a regular brain.
We pick this kind of information at some level to which we have no access to in consious awareness

You can have access. What you call "consious awareness" (i.e. rationnal thinking -> linear thinking) only "obliterate" it, because the "rationnal thinking" is noisy and don't "understand" the "logic" of the so-called "unconscious" part... To train yourself, and see how your "rationnal thinking" is dominating, you can train yourself by creating totally non-sens sentences but grammatically correct, the fast as possible (i.e. without rationalizing). It's like poetry, something between poetry and Exquisite corpse. The more it is quick and absurde, the better it is... if the sentence have a sens, or come not quickly, this is not good: this mean you rationalized. All that is related to creativity...

Yeah access is possible, the problem is as i have found in some experimental attempts and after reading some accounts of the Ra material and what G. Explains as well as the savant accounts themselves is that there is a ridk with trying to reach the subconscious in the (linear thinking) because of what you mentioned, the logic is different, from the point of view of the centers, the thinking (rational portion of our awareness) cannot manage creative logic or the full flow of information entering the senses at any given point.

The risk being ending up neurotic, and loosing cognitive faculties and damage other areas of the self, that can be the reason why G. Spend some time stressing on the need of conscious work on the self so as to have a slow, controlled melting of the personality and have awareness of all the steps of developement and personality workings(the way the personality is structured and functions), savants themselves sometimes cannot carry out what we can easily do, yet the have all these incredible faculites.
The reason i say this is because our personality itself is both necessary for survival but at the same time a barrier to access higher awareness or more practically make use of all the possibilities the brain has.
It looks as though, the personality can even be a "step" on the stairway in the human developement.

The experiment mentioned is interesting since it places the awareness in a lets say "ackward" possition, to process informtation in a more elemental way or less mechanically, instead of leting the information pass through the structure of the programs we are bind to perceive the world and to have an awareness of the self.
I tried a similar experiment with sound rather than words to find the way the brain connects impressions, however the problem i found as i stated above and elsewhere, that the main reason it can become problematical is because the personality ATTENTION is structured in a way to survive intinctively through the personality, and during the experiment the attention shifted and dwindled in one instance, from one "socially practical" necessity to a completely neutral event, with any number of problems consequently as you can imagine, and the second is that some other programs are still running in the background , the so called biases of the mind.

But as i said, there seems a level at which this kind of informtaion is processed in the mind, dream even or symbolic dreams giving mesaages or showing visual images "seemingly" unrelated to what we think. Many time we don't control what we dream, like for example why would i want to have nightmare?? But they still happen, the brain doing its thing.
It is an interesting subject indeed..

 

[sedenion]

Yeah access is possible, the problem is as i have found in some experimental attempts and after reading some accounts of the Ra material and what G. Explains as well as the savant accounts themselves is that there is a ridk with trying to reach the subconscious in the (linear thinking) because of what you mentioned, the logic is different, from the point of view of the centers, the thinking (rational portion of our awareness) cannot manage creative logic or the full flow of information entering the senses at any given point.

The risk being ending up neurotic, and loosing cognitive faculties and damage other areas of the self, that can be the reason why G. Spend some time stressing on the need of conscious work on the self so as to have a slow, controlled melting of the personality and have awareness of all the steps of developement and personality workings(the way the personality is structured and functions), savants themselves sometimes cannot carry out what we can easily do, yet the have all these incredible faculites.
The reason i say this is because our personality itself is both necessary for survival but at the same time a barrier to access higher awareness or more practically make use of all the possibilities the brain has.
It looks as though, the personality can even be a "step" on the stairway in the human developement.

I don't speak about some extraordinary high level of perception that lead you in some chamanic world. You won't going crazy (or becom Rain Man) by using your "brain right hemisphere"... your "brain left hemisphere" will still here to keep you in its straight way... you already use your "brain right hemisphere", it is here, it is functionning, it is only about some mind gymnastic. Maybe you can compare that by riding a bicycle without hands... if you already have a good mastering of riding a bicycle with hands (rationnal thinking), you can begin to release control (without hands) few seconds, with practice, you learn how to keep balancing without hands, and how to get a better control with hands (better rationnal thinking mastering)... So, what is "releasing control" ? Something like being creative, extracting yourself from your "rationnal thinking" dictatorship ("rationnal thinking" is a dictatorship)... nothing more, nothing less.

The experiment mentioned is interesting since it places the awareness in a lets say "ackward" possition, to process informtation in a more elemental way or less mechanically, instead of leting the information pass through the structure of the programs we are bind to perceive the world and to have an awareness of the self.

Less mechanically == creativity... Think about "The Matrix" movie, what is the difference between Neo and the agents ? Neo is creative, he can improvise, while agents can only follow some pre-built programs. This is the difference between being like a train on rails, and being a airplane... https://youtu.be/Qwmq9no22K8?t=16s
Don't think about some kind of extraordinary "high level" consciousness or whatever, stay... simple...

I tried a similar experiment with sound rather than words to find the way the brain connects impressions, however the problem i found as i stated above and elsewhere, that the main reason it can become problematical is because the personality ATTENTION is structured in a way to survive intinctively through the personality, and during the experiment the attention shifted and dwindled in one instance, from one "socially practical" necessity to a completely neutral event, with any number of problems consequently as you can imagine, and the second is that some other programs are still running in the background , the so called biases of the mind.

I don't really understand what you experienced. I have my own "mental map" with my own concepts, and you use your owns. So i don't know what you call "personnality", what you specifically identify as "programs" and so on. To understands you, i would have to speak with you, understand your "mental map" and doing some translation, i don't know you enough at this time. However, it seem you are trying to "shut down" your rational thinking while you use it to analyse how "it works", obviously, you will have some problems (inner conflicts and so on, think about a dog trying to catch its tail). but that is an experience like another.

It also appear to me that your "mental map" (how you understand things) is very linear: One thing after the other... like "imperative programming" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_programming )... Try to figure that things can be processed in a parallel way. You have your "rationnal thinkg" and your "non-rationnal thinking", both computing their thing in paralelle. So, it is not about how "non-rationnal thinking" computs something, THEN pass it to the "rationnal thinking", but how both are communicating together and works in paralell. What is computed by your "rationnal thinking" is what appear to you the most "visible", because it is what your "ego" identify with (you speak with yourself: "hello me ! are you me ? yes i am me ! great, we are me !"). But your "non-rationnal thinking" is mute, he don't know speaking, and, it don't work in "linear way"... but it is here, and well working.

Hope this will help you.

 

[fabric]

This is quite interesting. I think there’s difference between crowds (individuals unknown to each other, do not share data) vs a network so a lot of this wouldn’t necessarily apply to the group at large.

It would be nice to see more experiments done in this regard, however it appears there are certain parameters that need to be fulfilled according to James Surowiecki . Something simple like estimating how many jelly beans there are in a jar is easier to get a good answer from vs something more complex like “how much is the value of coins in this jar?" (Turns out the crowd was totally off).

The Wisdom of Crowds

Not all crowds (groups) are wise. Consider, for example, mobs or crazed investors in a stock market bubble. According to Surowiecki, these key criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:

Criteria Diversity of opinion Independence Decentralization Aggregation

Description Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts. People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them. People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge. Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

Based on Surowiecki’s book, Oinas-Kukkonen[4] captures the wisdom of crowds approach with the following eight conjectures:

1. It is possible to describe how people in a group think as a whole.
2. In some cases, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.
3. The three conditions for a group to be intelligent are diversity, independence, and decentralization.
4. The best decisions are a product of disagreement and contest.
5. Too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent.
6. Information aggregation functionality is needed.
7. The right information needs to be delivered to the right people in the right place, at the right time, and in the right way.
8. There is no need to chase the expert.

However, I wouldn’t put too much stock into the ‘wisdom of crowds’ thing.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Failures of crowd intelligence

Surowiecki studies situations (such as rational bubbles) in which the crowd produces very bad judgment, and argues that in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed because (in one way or another) the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently. Although he gives experimental details of crowds collectively swayed by a persuasive speaker, he says that the main reason that groups of people intellectually conform is that the system for making decisions has a systematic flaw.

Surowiecki asserts that what happens when the decision making environment is not set up to accept the crowd, is that the benefits of individual judgments and private information are lost and that the crowd can only do as well as its smartest member, rather than perform better (as he shows is otherwise possible).[5] Detailed case histories of such failures include:

Extreme Homogeneity Centralization Division Imitation Emotionality

Description Surowiecki stresses the need for diversity within a crowd to ensure enough variance in approach, thought process, and private information. The 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, which he blames on a hierarchical NASA management bureaucracy that was totally closed to the wisdom of low-level engineers. The United States Intelligence Community, the 9/11 Commission Report claims, failed to prevent the 11 September 2001 attacks partly because information held by one subdivision was not accessible by another. Surowiecki's argument is that crowds (of intelligence analysts in this case) work best when they choose for themselves what to work on and what information they need. (He cites the SARS-virus isolation as an example in which the free flow of data enabled laboratories around the world to coordinate research without a central point of control.) The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA have created a Wikipedia-style information sharing network called Intellipedia that will help the free flow of information to prevent such failures again. Where choices are visible and made in sequence, an "information cascade"[6] can form in which only the first few decision makers gain anything by contemplating the choices available: once past decisions have become sufficiently informative, it pays for later decision makers to simply copy those around them. This can lead to fragile social outcomes. Emotional factors, such as a feeling of belonging, can lead to peer pressure, herd instinct, and in extreme cases collective hysteria.

More often the case is that crowds tend to fall into some (if not all) the above criteria. Then when you factor in biases, it’s becomes even more off the mark. So, if one is able to get a group that is diversified, independent and knowledgeable, maybe you’ll get good results but most of the time it will be skewed and lead you away from the real answer rather than closer to it, osit. Especially when it comes to things that one can't intuitively guess, they don't do so well.

http://www.clearerthinking.org/single-post/2016/04/07/How-the-wisdom-of-the-crowds-works-and-why-it-can-fail

The wisdom of the crowd works by canceling out the individual biases of the participating crowd members. If a large group of people are guessing how many jelly beans are in a large jar, for instance, it's very likely that some proportion of them will overestimate the total and a some proportion will underestimate the total. However, these two groups will balance each other when you look at the mean or median guess of the whole crowd. This process can produce surprisingly accurate results for questions that individuals would stand little chance of nailing. In one famous 1906 incident, a large group of English fairgoers guessed the weight of a dressed ox; their median response was accurate to within 1% of its actual weight, despite the fact that most of the individual guesses fell far from the truth. This bias-canceling process is an important feature of why prediction markets work too, and is also common to crowdsourced information resources like Wikipedia and Quora.

However, when crowds are faced with less intuitive questions, they can fail as dramatically as any individual. ClearerThinking founder Spencer Greenberg recently conducted a brief study that illustrates how and why crowds can turn "dumb."

Participants in the study were ask to answer the following question without the aid of a calculator:

"Sally invested $60 in the stock market 30 years ago. It has increased by about 10% per year (annualized return). How many dollars is it today?"

If you'd like, take a moment to come up with your own guess before you read on.

...

This question is essentially about exponential growth, which many people find difficult to mentally calculate (and for good reason!). As a result, their intuitions tend to be less reliable and less well-balanced when asked to make estimates about exponential growth. As a result, the crowd wisdom for this question whiffed on the truth, as you can see here:

The vast majority of participants underestimated how much Sally's money would grow. As a result, their median answer was way too low — just $360, when the true answer was $1,047. (Sally's $30 would grow to around $360 in about 19 years, rather than 30.) And while a small number of individuals were wise enough to suspect that the true answer would be rather higher than that, their instincts led them to dramatically overshoot the mark. A handful of them guessed so high that they fell outside the distribution in the chart entirely, pulling the group mean (as opposed to median) up to $1,900.

[...]

[...]

I forget what it's called, but there is also a phenomenon through which knowing what others estimate, can make one get it even worse than if they were guessing without any previous knowledge. If they know, for example, that the two previous people guessed 40,000 and 50,000, they might say "30,000" even though originally, they would have guessed 1,000. So, it may be better in experiments like this NOT to know what others guessed.

[...]

It sounds like you're talking about group think or consensus biasing the results:

http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2013/04/13861-crowdfunding-crowd-wisdom-mob-mentality/

However, some of the uglier aspects of the crowd often come into play as well. In fact, the two often happen in concert. As more individuals become aware of crowdfunding and get involved in the process it will be interesting to see how the two sides of the crowd manifest themselves. Three examples follow.

Groupthink

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome. -Wikipedia

A clear example of this would be the rush to judgement in declaring Susan Wilson a millionaire based on some loosely-understood facts about her background and employment situation. She has since admitted to being well-off enough to pay the $850 she requested in her Kickstarter campaign, but she has also denied being “a millionaire.”

Bandwagoning

Bandwagoning is a more specific version of groupthink. In short, the probability of any one person adopting a belief increases as other members of the crowd also adopt said belief. This constitutes a problem

Consider the misreporting during the Boston Marathon investigation by large journalistic entities like CNN, FOX News and the New York Post. Once one of these outlets reports a falsity as fact, that falsehood tends to spread. The same thing plays out in the crowd as well.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140708-when-crowd-wisdom-goes-wrong

[...]

Flawed thinking

Still, Surowiecki also pointed out that the crowd is far from infallible. He explained that one requirement for a good crowd judgement is that people’s decisions are independent of one another. If everyone let themselves be influenced by each other’s guesses, there’s more chance that the guesses will drift towards a misplaced bias. This undermining effect of social influence was demonstrated in 2011 by a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. They asked groups of participants to estimate certain quantities in geography or crime, about which none of them could be expected to have perfect knowledge but all could hazard a guess – the length of the Swiss-Italian border, for example, or the annual number of murders in Switzerland. The participants were offered modest financial rewards for good group guesses, to make sure they took the challenge seriously.

The researchers found that, as the amount of information participants were given about each others guesses increased, the range of their guesses got narrower, and the centre of this range could drift further from the true value. In other words, the groups were tending towards a consensus, to the detriment of accuracy.

This finding challenges a common view in management and politics that it is best to seek consensus in group decision making. What you can end up with instead is herding towards a relatively arbitrary position. Just how arbitrary depends on what kind of pool of opinions you start off with, according to subsequent work by one of the ETH team, Frank Schweitzer, and his colleagues. They say that if the group generally has good initial judgement, social influence can refine rather than degrade their collective decision.

[...]

[...]
Yes, but I don't think it will change things much. At least this guy made people to comment below the video and he could finish the experiment well. Anyway, he explains this in the third link. He have in count that in his case people could see comments from others so he explains what he did to make it work from the minute 2:30.

I did see that he took the geometric mean instead of the median or mean. Those results were more off than the geometric mean. So I guess that it would have helped counteract any biasing effect. I still wonder though if all his numbers would have been improved had none of the participants seen any of the other answers.