Wednesday, March 21, 2007

The corrolary to William Goldman's famous "Nobody knows anything" remark is the notion that large masses of people collectively tend to know a great deal more than they ought to about a lot of things. While no one can count on getting the number of jelly beans in the jar right, the average guess is often surprisingly close. As James Surowiecki writes in The Wisdom of Crowds, large numbers of people are often right about things that experts get wrong, like how long it will take to find a cure for AIDS. (I seem to remember this coming up in John Brunner's prescient sf novel The Shockwave Rider.)

Anyroad, a company called Intrade allows you to trade futures in events, like whether Alberto Gonzales will take a fall, or whether the US will bomb Iran. If you have property in Tehran, you can use it as a hedge. If you don't, you can just check out the odds that various futures are getting. They may be closer to the real odds than what you read in the paper. (At Intrade, for example, Gonzales is two to one to stay in office, at least till the end of the month; which is not what the papers would have you believe.)

Labels: apropos of nothing at all, technology

12:03 PM

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