Human Guesswork - May 9 2023

 

Human Guesswork

May 9 2023

A circus sideshow,

betting

on who comes closest.

Or white-coated scientists

pouring over clipboards.

It's uncanny, this wisdom of crowds.

Enough people

guessing how many

jelly beans in a jar,

and the average converges

on exactly that.

So, is this evidence

of the hive mind,

something like Jung's collective subconscious?

Does the universe

contain a certain symmetry

we don't fully discern?

Or is it as simple as a bell curve

of human guesswork,

all our differences

and eccentricities

perfectly cancelling out?

And why jelly beans

the Hydrox of candies?

That is, the substandard Oreo

no one wants

yet still gets made?

Why care how many,

why such a fuss?

The collective wisdom, wasted,

and the jar

full of stale jelly beans

still there

untouched.

All it took was something as simple as my eye being caught by the word “crowd” to set me off on this poem.

I wonder about the effectiveness of its inconsistent tone, which is both serious and irreverent. I like to see it as the latter: a fun little trifle.

If you're not familiar with the concept, here's an excerpt I found on the website “All-About-Psychology.com”:

It was in 1906 that [Sir Francis] Galton made his discovery of what is known as the wisdom of crowds. He attended a farmers' fair in Plymouth where he was intrigued by a weight guessing contest. The goal was to guess the weight of an ox when it was butchered and dressed. Around 800 people entered the contest and wrote their guesses on tickets. The person who guessed closest to the butchered weight of the ox won a prize.

After the contest Galton took the tickets and ran a statistical analysis on them. He discovered that the average guess of all the entrants was remarkably close to the actual weight of the butchered ox. In fact it was under by only 1lb for an ox that weighed 1,198 lbs. This collective guess was not only better than the actual winner of the contest but also better than the guesses made by cattle experts at the fair. It seemed that democracy of thought could produce amazing results.

However, to benefit from the wisdom of crowds several conditions must be in place. First each individual member of the crowd must have their own independent source of information. Second they must make individual decisions and not be swayed by the decisions of those around them. And third, there must be a mechanism in place that can collate these diverse opinions.