The Man Who Measured Everything: The Wisdom of the Crowd

Francis Galton:

I was bored at a country fair. This happens to be when I do my best work.

Subhadra Das:

The Wisdom of the Crowds was a paper that Galton wrote called Vox Populi. He was at a country fair — as you have at these things, there was a guess-the-weight-of-the-prize-steer competition. And what Galton realized was — because he's the kind of person he was, I imagine he was there and relatively bored. I don't think he was necessarily interested in agriculture. He took all of the entries for that competition, the little slips of paper that people had written their guesses on, took them all home, tabulated them, and realized that even though the individual guesses were not accurate to guess the weight of the steer, the average of those individual guesses was only off by something like 20 ounces or something like that. So what he propounded was that there is wisdom in crowds, because even though no individual person was able to guess the correct weight, altogether they were very close to what the correct weight was.

Francis Galton:

The crowd was wiser than any individual in it, including me.

DISCLOSURES:

This video is for educational and informational purposes only. It uses the Galton Board as a conceptual statistical illustration of how random outcomes can cluster around a mean. It is not intended to depict actual or hypothetical investment performance, the behavior of any index, or the results of any investment strategy.

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