Nor is it whether a crowd can be arranged in such a way that it makes better decisions than the average person in the crowd. (THEY CAN.)

It is whether you can arrange the decision making process among a crowd to consistently make wise decisions, even if no individual member of the crowd is consistently wise.

Since, in any sufficiently large crowd, somebody is going to come up with a wise answer to any particular question, the key problem is getting members of the crowd to agree on which of two answers is the wiser. One solution is to get the members who don't have a clue to delegate that decision to others who they think are, in general, good at picking winners. With a sufficient track record, you have an objective basis to decide who is or is not good at recognition, provided there is some correlation between past and future problems, or at least some way to categorise which sort of expertise is relevant to each problem.

Abstract

Fluid intelligence (Gf) refers to the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge. Gf is critical for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, and it is considered one of the most important factors in learning. Moreover, Gf is closely related to professional and educational success, especially in complex and demanding environments. Although performance on tests of Gf can be improved through direct practice on the tests themselves, there is no evidence that training on any other regimen yields increased Gf in adults. Furthermore, there is a long history of research into cognitive training showing that, although performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of this learning to other tasks remains poor. Here, we present evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf. This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of gain in intelligence critically depends on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in Gf. That is, the training effect is dosage-dependent. Thus, in contrast to many previous studies, we conclude that it is possible to improve Gf without practicing the testing tasks themselves, opening a wide range of applications.

A card version of the memory task used in their research is available at: http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?DouglasReay/SnapBackGameRules