Harnessing Nature's wisdom

Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds*

We empirically examine the impact of herding on the accuracy of consensus earnings forecasts from a crowd-based platform (Estimize.com). We monitor user information set by tracking user viewing activities and running experiments. We find that the more public information a user views, the less weight she puts on her private information. While this improves the accuracy of individual forecasts, i...

Harnessing the wisdom of the inner crowd.

Ever since Galton's classic demonstration of the wisdom of crowds in estimating the weight of a slaughtered ox, scholars of the mind and the public alike have been fascinated by the counterintuitive accuracy achieved by simply averaging a number of people's estimates. Surprisingly, individuals can, to some extent, harness the wisdom of crowds within the confines of their own mind by averaging s...

Harnessing Wisdom of Crowds in Semantic Models of Networks∗

Link mining, social network and semantic network construction are data fitting problems for which relevant information content is encoded in language and names. Norbert Wiener [7] noted that those features that distinguish human communication are “...(1) the delicacy and complexity of the code used, and (2) the high degree of arbitrariness of this code.” The semantic aspect of language is conce...

The Natures of Nonconfigurationality

Population, development, and human natures

At the dawn of this new millennium, the human enterprise is quickly becoming a globally unified one. Yet numerous obstacles and pitfalls remain in the path of a full and fair unification. A substantial fraction of the world’s population is well-off and increasingly connected through trade and communications systems. But an even larger fraction is struggling to make ends meet and is only sketchi...