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november 02, 2006
Dagslänkar 2006-11-02
Lennar Sjöberg: Are all crowds equally wise? A comparison of political election forecasts by experts and the public (PDF):
In this study, 4 groups of people made prognostic judgments of the outcome of the Swedish Parliamentary election in the fall of 2006, about one week before the election. The groups consisted of members of the public (N=123), political scientists (N=53), journalists writing about domestic politics in Swedish daily newspapers (N=32), and journalists who were editing sections of readers’ letters in daily newspapers (N=10). They rated, for each of seven political parties, which percentage of the votes that they believed they would get in the election. They also marked which party they themselves preferred, and answered to a few questions about interest and competence. Data were then obtained on the outcome of the election, and on the two opinions polls closest in time to it. It was found that all four groups did reasonably well, when average prognostic judgments were compared to the outcome of the election, and better than the opinion polls. The two last polls overestimated the span between the incumbent government and the victorious opposition by a factor of 2. Wishful thinking was assessed by comparing prognostic judgments for each respondent’s preferred party with his or her judgments of other parties. All groups showed some wishful thinking; the political scientists least and the public most. There were large and consistent individual differences in prognostic ability. Men performed better than women, as did those who expressed more interest and knowledge in politics, but neither level of education nor confidence in making the judgments correlated significantly with performance.
Washington Post: The Top Pickers vs. the Pack - Sites Want Users to Buy Into the 'Genius' Factor, via Midas Oracle: What to think of all those Wisdom-Of-Crowds sites popping up like forest mushrooms after an October rain?
Cf: James Surowiecki "The Wisdom of Crowds" - kort beskrivning inför en eventuell bokbeställning
Posted by hakank at november 2, 2006 07:07 FM Posted to Diverse vetenskap