Wisdom of Crowds: WE WANT YOUR COMMENTS

So, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote this article trying to explain the modern economic idea of the wisdom of crowds. I don't know how well I did, but in brief, here's what I was getting at:

A large group of people is consistently smarter than any of its individual members. This phenomenon occurs because everyone has information, some public and some private, some good and some bad. When you get a large enough group of people (and one that's fairly diverse - this is extremely important), everyone's bad information begins to cancel out, and you are left with only the good information. Think of it like this. I am a teacher having a jelly-bean counting contest. The people who under-guess and the people who over-guess even each other out, so if I add up everyone's guesses and take an average, it will be closer than the guess of any individual, including the kid who knows the volume of the can and the size of each jelly bean and builds a spatial model. This may seem intuitive, it may not; either way, it works consistently in the real world. Check it out if you don't believe me.

Anyway, I write that trying to encourage you to comment, especially now that we are trying to make a good set of positional rankings. Why? As smart as Zach and I are (we're the nerds measuring the volume of the jelly-bean jar), we only know so much. You, dear readers, have information that can help us. More importantly, it will help every other reader of this blog, who will in turn help you. Brandon Funston's Big Board is fun, but it's only one man's opinion. We're trying to make a board that takes every man's thoughts, because we believe such a board will give a better indication of who will do what for the rest of the season. If you'd like (let us know by commenting), we will figure out a way to track our performances against Funston's, to test the theory that many men are smarter than one.

Also, I mentioned that diversity was very important. I want to close by saying that, in my jelly bean example, the only reason a group of people gets an accurate guess is because some people under-guess while others over-guess. It is because of differing opinions that we get an accurate result. So if you disagree - if you're the one person who expects Justin Verlander to strike out 120 batters the rest of the year - say it! Tell us why! As much as we love people telling us we're right, it won't change our rankings at all. So tell us when we're wrong, have a little back-and-forth (we may have some information you didn't think about, as we saw with Pedro Martinez), or you may have a thought we didn't. Just remember, it's you that makes our rankings better for everyone by sharing your opinion with us. Keep the comments rolling and good luck as we start the second half.