From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Thu Dec 06 2007 - 09:48:07 EST
It depends on sample size not population size, and is related to the
poisson distribution of noise in information processing, the standard
deviation of noise grows as the square root of the sample, the signal to
noise ratio thus improves as the half power of the sample size.
This is why the greeks chose large juries for court cases - of the order
of 100 not of the order of 10.
From: OPE-L [mailto:OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU] On Behalf Of GERALD LEVY
Sent: 06 December 2007 14:30
To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
Subject: Re: [OPE-L] the wisdom of crowds
> The democratic approach relies on having a sufficiently large
number of ordinary people in the deliberative body for their collective
wisdom to exceed that of one man or woman.
Hi Paul C:
What is a "sufficiently large number of ordinary people"?
Couldn't this be anticipated to work better the larger the
number of people from whom the deliberative body is
randomly selected? One can't assume that what might
work in a large society will work for a small group and
vice versa.
In solidarity, Jerry
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