Crowd Wisdom Better At Predictions Than Top CIA Analysts 136
First time accepted submitter tkalfigo (1448133) writes "The Good Judgment Project is an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community. What they aim to prove is that average, ordinary people in large groups and access just to Google search can predict far more accurately events of geopolitical importance than smart intelligence analysts with access to actual classified information. In fact there is a clearly identified top 1 percent of the 3000 predictors group, who have been identified as super-forecasters: people whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers."
Luck resets every time you guess. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why are you being modded down? For the font? And yes, they produce the results they are told to produce. That's how they play their game.
Re:Luck resets every time you guess. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the majority here use Slashdot's default font and never messed with it, but you did mess with yours, making your posts stand out as odd. Blaming everyone else, making them responsible to fix the 'bug' you created on their screen, isn't very helpful. It's a lot easier to just mod you down than to delve into browser font settings and possibly mess up how we view all other websites, just because you like your posts on Slashdot to look like they were typed on an old-timey typewriter. Why don't you just fix your own browser font settings and not put the burden on everyone else?
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YOU DON'T LIKE ALL CAPS? just instruct your browser to use a font where caps appear as lowercase letters.
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No. Courier New is a pretty nice font for some things. Just not the /. comment section.
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If you're using Firefox, you can download the Stylish plugin and make sure everybody conforms to your wishes by adding a rule for the "commentBody" class. Might also want to add one for the "tt" tag.
font-family: monospace;
font-size: 14px;
}
This makes everybody's posts appear to use code tags. I find it readable, you might not, but you do have a say in it.
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And if you don't want the plugin:
http://ffeathers.wordpress.com... [wordpress.com]
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It's called optimization. "Unreadable" means that the low-level - indeed, in most people subconscious - routine was unable to comprehend the text, and kicked it up to a higher-level one. The higher level subsystem is more flexible but, as a result, needs more resources which could be put to better use; and of course the process can occur again, escalating text comprehension all the way to the conscious mind. Thus, if you write unreadable - wh
Font problems? (Score:1)
Go tools-options-advanced (by fonts and colors.) Find 'allow sites to choose' and make sure that evil box is NOT checked. Then for each category of font make sure that the one selected is clean and easy to read. If not, change it. Hit ok, done.
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independent observers ,,, concerning foreign policy but whose content is determined by domestic political needs
Damn! That's a usage case I hadn't heard of before. In politics it was always someone else's fault when it didn't work out. Now it's going to be EVERYone else's fault.
Cloud-blaming! (tm)
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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.
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So true; diversity & better tools may help too (Score:3)
By someone else: http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff... [amazon.com]
By me on the need for better intelligence tools for the public: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d... [ideascale.com]
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... [phibetaiota.net]
By me on the security clearance process reduces cognitive diversity in three letter agencies: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... [phibetaiota.net]
"This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may [ironically] have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "co
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RAW sounds like he was quite a guy; thanks (Score:2)
Even to suggesting a "basic income": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.rawilson.com/home.h... [rawilson.com]
http://www.rawilson.com/though... [rawilson.com]
http://deoxy.org/raw.htm [deoxy.org]
Thanks for the pointer. I'd be curious where specifically (which book or other writing) wherein he says that, if you know off-hand.
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What aqbout the madness of crowds? (Score:2)
People speak of the wisdom of crowds but the madness of crowds create things such as financial crashes or stupid wars.
Shall we discuss and research this?
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CIA uses Dirty Tricks Project (Score:2, Interesting)
CIA cannot believe a wisdom based output, they have to believe that their actions will change the outcome.
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While I am sure there are occasional situations where it might be advantageous to be thought foolish and incompetent, in general this is likely a bad thing.
It's like being thought *weak* in military terms. There in tactical situations you'd like the enemy to underestimate your strength, strategically it's better to be thought stronger than you actually are. If a hostile country is considering violating some treaty they have with us, we'd want them to think our intelligence agencies will catch them red-ha
Re:Common Knowlege (Score:2)
I'm not particularly smart, but doesn't EVERYBODY already know those CIA fools are incompetent?
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If you compare it to the study, the CIA actually looks reasonably good.
Out of the 3k people in the study, 3% (10 people) were able to make 30% better predictions. This sounds to me like the analysts would come down far ahead of most of a normal curve.
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Well... (Score:2)
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with Google's prediction algorithm is that it consistently overshoots. The story was on /. about a month ago [slashdot.org], as far as I can tell they're not only not predicting cases correctly, they aren't even attempting to distinguish between strains (how could they, they're predicting from search activity - flu victims rarely know their strain).
Well yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why its better to have elections than let the CIA select the government. AFAIK, anyway.
Re:Well yeah (Score:4, Funny)
The CIA disagrees.
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So is there some reason that is on your mind at the moment? Or did I miss that this was a "Best of Slashdot" from November 1968?
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"This is why its better to have elections"
http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre... [ted.com]
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Not TEDx. Nice.
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The elections have nothing to do with informed decision making. Your news media has made sure of that.
Seems fishy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Seems fishy (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do you think it is purely luck? When you have these wild discussion parties - things like "is a bright blob of pixels on a Mars Rover image a cosmic ray, a high-voltage dust-devil, light contamination of a camera box, a gas geyser", you will have an incredible combination of experts - everyone from geologists, ranchers, hill-hikers, photographers, astronomers. Geologists will tell you want can and can't come from the ground, ranchers and hill-hikers will tell you things they have seen and never seen, photographers will tell you what visual artifacts can appear on a camera, and astronomers tell you what can fall from the sky and can't, and what those falling things look like.
It's like solving a giant logic problem where everyone can cross off or tick what what they know. Eventually the set of possible answers reduces down to one or two.
Re:Seems fishy (Score:4, Interesting)
Except this isn't how it works at all.
The wisdom of crowds works doesn't have anything to do with having experts. After all, the experts have no way of influencing the crowd. It is a well defined phenomenon that works when people's biases are pretty random, so mistakes cancel each other out. It's a lower quality estimation mechanism than a market, where people that are sure of their answer can be 'louder' than those that don't know said answer, and it lacks the feedback mechanisms of a market, but still, it is helpful to predict things based on widely available information. Ask the crowd information few of them have any idea about, and their result will suck.
So what does the average beating CIA personnel? That the CIA's biases are large enough to need quite a bit of quality control.
Now, having a 1% of the respondents be far better than the CIA experts probably means nothing. If I invite 3000 people over to guess how 10 coin flips will turn out, chances are one or two of them will guess all of them correctly, but that would not make them seers capable of seeing the future. how many people were worse than 30% worse than those same CIA experts?
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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.
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The wisdom of crowds works doesn't have anything to do with having experts.
You are right that the wisdom of crowds does not come from having experts. The wisdom of crowds comes from having a lot of people who all have a little bit of knowledge relevant to the subject. Some of that knowledge might be something that you would not necessarily think was relevant, but when applied as a filter on the other knowledge present produces a result much more accurate than an expert on the subject would ever produce.
The results of this study are not new. Back in the lat 70s, early 80s, there
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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 ro
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Expert forecasters also average their perceived probabilities from lots of different sources. There's nothing magic about a small town pharmacist doing it. The summary and a lot of Slashdotters seem to like to play up the anti-expert angle, but it's certainly not relevant to my OP, and I doubt the project has produced any evidence for your conclusion.
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*I am using "charisma" here to sum up all of the aspects of force of personality and authority over those evaluating the data.
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You're still making conclusions that aren't based on the data. There's nothing in their project that identifies why individuals, or the group, might be better than the experts, and my question is about whether the individuals they've identified ARE even better than the experts or if they've simply discovered the right side of a Bell curve (a la Niven).
There have been studies that have shown that crowds, under certain circumstances, can be somewhat resistant to bias. In other circumstances this is obviousl
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Maybe you missed the reference.
Teela Brown [wikipedia.org] is a character from Larry Niven's Ringworld series.
Her defining characteristic is that she's a 6th generation of Birthright Lottery winners and thus, uniquely lucky.
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Alas, no.
The Birthright Lotteries in question were a literal lottery held annually to allow someone to have a child.
Everyone in the world was authorized to have one child.
Then, special people were authorized more than one (geniuses, that sort of thing).
And rich people were allowed to buy extra birthrights (the theory being that getting rich was a skill - note that taxation in place pretty much prevented inherited wealth).
And finally, i
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"What is the chance that North Korea will launch a multi-stage missile before June 2015?" People enter a guessed % of probability. They get 3000 random people to respond. People's guesses are wildly all over the place. However. . .
When you average out all those responses, the resulting number is spooky accurate. So-called, "Wisdom of the crowd."
Luck has both nothing, and everything to do with it.
How can a probability be spooky accurate when it is in reference to a singular event that can't be repeated over and over again?
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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
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I wonder if they properly controlled for luck.
You obviously didn't RTFA.
But she signed up, got a little training in how to estimate probabilities from the people running the program, and then was given access to a website that listed dozens of carefully worded questions on events of interest to the intelligence community, along with a place for her to enter her numerical estimate of their likelihood.
"Usually I just do a Google search," she said.
In fact, she's so good she's been put on a special team with other superforecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.
It's not luck they've selected for, it's the ability to make educated guesses.
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I did read the article. Nothing in what you quoted is at all relevant. Perhaps you didn't understand my post?
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Or does it mean the experts were correct 55% of the time and the top guessers, I mean, super-predictors, were right 56.5% of the time? That would be the normal meaning of a percent difference.
Reminds me of the Policy Analysis Market (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, I think a PAM system would have given us (and I mean everyone not just US policy makers) insight into how the events of the Arab Spring revolutions would evolve even if it couldn't have predicted the original flash point.
Re:Reminds me of the Policy Analysis Market (Score:5, Interesting)
even if it couldn't have predicted the original flash point.
Funny you should say that, the diplomatic cable leaks showed [wikileaks.org] that high level western diplomats in Syria were concerned about a civil war erupting due to the severe "fertile crescent" drought fuelling internal migration from rural areas to the cities (10% of Syria's total population simply abandoned their farms due to lack of water). The drought caused food prices to rise sharply and food riots became a regular occurrence in cities across the middle east and North Africa.
"flash point" - Have a look at why that protester set fire to himself in the public square and why it resonated so strongly across the Arab world, it wasn't because they all logged on to FB and suddenly realised their governments were tyrannical. Predicting this sort of social unrest is like predicting an earthquake in LA, you can be pretty confident that your prediction will come to pass but have no idea when.
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Back in 2003, there was a similar system called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) that was close to being implemented. It got deep-sixed by some world-class idiots from Congress ...
Maybe they weren't idiots. Maybe the were protecting a lucrative after-Congress job [techdirt.com] market...
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New Zealand has iPredict, where you can make money off correct guesses about the future:
https://www.ipredict.co.nz/ [ipredict.co.nz]
Question of scale (Score:4, Insightful)
With enough people, there will be someone with insightful information, and probably a balance of opinions. Searching for bugs in open source works a little like that.
But in theory if a professional intelligence service had hard evidence that, for example, a politician is bluffing about something, then a policy can be adopted even if it goes against some conventional wisdom.
For example, the information that Saddam Hussein's WMD programme was a hoax prevented a rash invasion...., um, never mind.
Re:Question of scale (Score:5, Funny)
Both the British and Americans used the same government contact for their information, but they didn't tell each other who that contact was. In fact, they had different codenames for the person. When they cross-referenced each others information, they got two confirmations.
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Professional intelligent agents were not fooled. People who only heard what they wanted to hear do not count as professionals.
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In my experience, professional people fool themselves all the time, and refuse to listen to anyone who contradicts them, so why would professional intelligence agents be an exception?
CIA is "the Company"; like all others, it's run by pointy-haired bosses.
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Not the whole world. Plenty of people knew he was bluffing.
Old news (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
This has been known since the 60s. Only reason it keeps cropping up is the ego of the people involved in analysis, and the organizational inertia of the agencies involved.
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Not sure if you are trolling or not, but the articles make no mention of the comparison.
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My drunken pet vole makes better predictions... (Score:1)
Bell Curve (Score:2)
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I doubt there is any field where one percent of laymen aren't vastly superior to the majority of professionals. ... This is statistically normal.
Fine, but just like the quatrains of Nostradamus [nostradamu...ctions.org]: can you identify them correctly beforehand? Counting the perfect hits after the fact isn't fair. (But then again I guess it worked for Miss Cleo [weht.net] for a while [consumeraffairs.com])
BTW: 16th century Mr. N. is an idiot. But he's better than the current sales-people paying attention to him with 5 centuries more experience. Oh, and multiple Blood Moons [latimes.com] are soon arriving -- buy your Tarot cards and ticket to safety [imdb.com] now, before it's too late!
Re:Bell Curve (Score:4, Insightful)
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This thought just came to me now, so I do not think I can explain the reasoning as to why that might be so. I will try any way. It seems possible that the nece
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That doesn't make any sense for things where training is needed though. 1% of laymen being better than civil engineers at building extremely large bridges? 1% of laymen being better at fixing cars than a mechanic? How about 1% of laymen being better at basketball than NBA players? It makes absolutely no sense, because we are talking about things where the training time is extremely valuable, and guessing at random will not help you, because there are too many possible answers.
Even in yes/no questions, if 1%
Have they not read Bruner? (Score:1)
Can I Hear it for the.... â(TM) (Score:2)
That's where it's at the...
EYYYEEEEE ENNN TEEEE Pee... eeeeeees
Is it the group or its best? (Score:2)
I don't exactly get it. Is it the group as a whole that predicts accurately or its "best predictors"? Because clearly the first hypothesis favors direct democracy as a decision-making process. My intuitive guess is that when you pick a large enough group, some people within that group are clearly going to do better than specialists, because, in a certain way, they are themselves specialists.
Who are the Super Forecasters? (Score:1)
Or, alternatively, are they spiritual people? People who partaken in psychedelic experiences? What defines this group?
Psychohistory (Score:2)
Unfortunately, I've not nearly the technical skills or capability to jump into making a website that aggregates questions, votes, user statistics, graphs, profiles and so on. I went ahead
Try coin flips (Score:2)
Remember when the government attempted this (Score:2)
Liberals came out and called it the idea of a bunch of crazies.