You should read the article. There's a little section about "wisdom of crowds" and then the balance of it is about particular people they've selected as being super accurate, such as the pharmacist they use as an example. If you take enough people and ask them to guess randomly, some of their guesses will line up very nicely with the answers to any questions. Purely by luck. If you cherry pick these randomly lucky guessers and don't properly allow for your cherry picking in your calculation of expected performance, you will be misled badly.

A different version of the same phenomenon confuses people who try to write classifiers. I have a friend who was trying to classify patients who did or did not have a disease. He put a bunch of measurements into the classifier, trained it, and look, it was 100% accurate! He was suspicious, so he put in a bunch of randomly generated numbers, trained it, and look, it was 100% accurate! Of course, neither version did any better than chance on data it hadn't been trained on.

In statistics it's called an unbiased estimator. Most people know it as an average. It doesn't have any particular link to crowds and the behaviour is very well defined. It does, however, require that the individual estimates be wrong in a random way.

You managed to pick exactly the same example I did.

Yes, that's what the article says. In a scientific paper that would be in the discussion, possibly in the conclusions. Experienced scientists know that the discussion, and depressingly frequently the conclusions, are BS the authors made up that's not really supported by the data, one way or the other.

I did read the article. Nothing in what you quoted is at all relevant. Perhaps you didn't understand my post?

Because that's not what's going on here. The example in the article is a pharmacist who somehow manages to be better than everyone else at predicting geopolitical events. Not a party with a bunch of experts in various fields hashing things out, just a pharmacist in her kitchen in her spare time.

Flip a coin ten times and there's only a tenth of one percent of a chance of it coming up heads every time. Flip a thousand coins ten times and there's only a small chance one won't come up heads ten times in a row. If you were doing this study and one of your subjects made ten correct calls such as "Russia will invade the Crimea before June" in a row, might you get a little bit excited?

I wonder if they properly controlled for luck. Take three thousand people and get them to make predictions and some of them are going to appear unusually accurate than others even if all of them are just making completely random guesses. You'd be surprised how many people don't correctly account for that. Every paper proposing clinical diagnostic criteria I've ever read, for example.

Ten minutes? Oh, C#. Never mind.

It doesn't even compare to the annual cost of securing face paint.

...habits have you found effective for system administration?

I like to shut all the ports in the firewall. The sense of calm that descends on the servers is downright pleasant. Of course, then the phone begins to ring...

...is that something with the brain the size of a fruit fly can discriminate between a predator and a non-predator, and react defensively.

We really need to figure out how brains work, lol.

The point is specious. The LHC does not preclude inexpensive work, no matter how you look at it. It's just one tool.

all forms of Unix and Unix-like systems have built-in mechanisms that can be used for secure IPC (where the less-trusted component can be verified securely).

Huh. I was looking for a fast IPC mechanism under linux, also OSX, and all I found was TCP/UDP sockets. Secure IPC not required for my application. What did I miss?

Under AmigaDOS, a program would open a named port and that was the basis for some awesome very high speed IPC magic, typically facilitated by intermediate Rexx scripts. I sure miss that capability. Applescript is a raging horror of limitations.

also, aliens. And the illuminati. cuz, PANIC!

Corporate Oligarchy.

Good news: Just because it is depressingly true that the left side of the gaussian watches reality TV and believes the tripe fox news presents, that is in no way an indicator that scientists do so.