Beating the Crowd
7 comments
·April 27, 2025aucisson_masque
It’s well written, but I beg to differ.
You should never ever considerate other opinion to make your own choice.
We are the sum of our decisions, I don’t want to be the sum of the crowd decisions.
There is also the factor of pride. Either you’re confident enough in your judgement or you’re not, but taking a bold decision that goes against all odd and people’s opinion, and managing to make it work, is extremely satisfying.
If you start reviewing your opinion based on crowd opinion, all that’s going to happen is you will be more and more inclined to suppress your own opinion in favor of the majority, until you don’t trust your guts anymore and you become part of the crowd.
Bestie there is a saying « you learn from your own mistake ».
cortesoft
> You should never ever considerate other opinion to make your own choice
This makes no sense. You should absolutely consider other people's opinions for a lot of decisions, since other people's opinions affect the world.
add-sub-mul-div
> You should never ever
Wisdom is not memorizing and following hard rules, it's developing the judgment to know when diverging from the majority is correct and when it isn't.
1970-01-01
Isn't this just optimal stopping theory?
readthenotes1
"To say anything else implies an opinion that the mean human would cognitively overestimate or underestimate the quantity, and this is equivalent to an opinion on human cognitive bias for this specific problem"
for a slightly more skeptical take:
https://mindmatters.ai/2020/11/the-wisdom-of-crowds-are-crow...
(It mentions a requirement to be unbiased and independent, which means it doesn't apply to most modern things)
pentamassiv
I also struggle with that part. the author makes it seem like guessing correctly is the logical conclusion of not having an opinion and thus not over- or underestimating.
One assumption is that humans can estimate at all. The average could just as well be zero, 100 or a random value.
A monkey probably doesn't have an opinion about an ox, but I doubt a group of monkeys can estimate the weight of an ox.
Send like there are more conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for it to work
Following the monetary focus — the last exception has some parallel in contract law, the idea of specific performance and that some things can't be replaced by any monetary value because of their uniqueness.
So in the relationship example, it's not just "inertia", it's the value you have by virtue of your unique position in the situation, in terms of history etc. Similar arguments can be said of your parents or children: in some abstract sense you could imagine other children or parents you could evaluate the relative value of, but they are not actually your children or parents and so don't have that value.
It's an interesting issue because there's a point at which something leaves the realm of monetary (or more broadly, fungible value) considerations per se, and different rules start to apply.