A perspective

  The now famous term ‘wisdom of the crowds’ has been intellectually thought upon by many thinkers over the centuries and also demonstrated practically many times in order to validate or nullify its credentials, in times gone by it was known by different names.Aristotle is generally credited with having first taken seriously the idea that ‘many heads are better than one.’ But it was English polymath Francis Galton; a cousin of Charles Darwin, whose curiosity led to a little experiment that made the term famous. In 1906 Galton visited a country fair in which about 800 people took part in a contest to guess the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Galton collected the guesses and calculated their average, which turned out to be 1208 pounds, to Galton’s surprise; the actual weight of the ox was within 1% of the true weight, i.e. 1198 pounds. The craze for the concept rose once again in recent years with a number of books....