Started by Pete Lindgren (@petelindgren) ·
800 people guessed an ox's weight and the median was within 1%
1906, a livestock fair in Plymouth. Galton collected the tickets from a weight-guessing contest, supposedly expecting to show how bad ordinary people were at judging. The median guess was 1,207 lb. The ox was 1,198. It only works if people guess independently though; once they can see each other's answers it falls apart.
5 sources · 22 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- Why is the average of a crowd's guesses so good?
- Ended at
- Herd behavior
The Trail
- “galton ox weight guessing crowd” (google.com)
- Wisdom of the crowd (en.wikipedia.org)
- Francis Galton (en.wikipedia.org)
- The Wisdom of Crowds (en.wikipedia.org)
Surowiecki's 2004 book opens with this exact story
- Herd behavior (en.wikipedia.org)
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