The Crowd Knows

Crowds are more often right than the individual. “The simplest demonstration of this is the jellybean experiment. Ask a group of 50 people how many jellybeans are in a jar, and the group’s average answer will be uncannily accurate — within 2% of the right number — and it will be better than the answers of nearly everyone in the group. And though the jellybean experiment is artificial, the truth is that groups demonstrate the exact same intelligence in the face of far more complicated problems.”