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The Wisdom And/or Madness of Crowds (ncase.me)
90 points by BerislavLopac on July 30, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


Crowds can't have "wisdom" by nature of the averaging that must occur for binary choices/responses from a crowd.

"Knowledge of the Crowd" is the correct phrase as the storage capacity + experience is greater the larger the crowd.

In other words, you can use a crowd to ask questions that the whole does not need to answer: "Has anyone every done X before?" but you cannot use them to ask questions they all should reply to: "Do you all want to do X?"


Brilliant UI.

What about contrarian nodes though? I insist on meditating and not drinking even though my connections around me do the opposite. It feels almost like a challenge and I wonder if they all joined me if I'd feel less attached to those ideas.


Very well done. I'd like to see some puzzles with good and bad contagions at the same time, though. Because as it is, if you're optimizing for wisdom, you're also optimizing for binge drinking.


This is super cool to play around with and really illustrative.

One thing I noticed about the game is that I was able to "solve" some puzzles by accident when I went to erase a set of edges at once. I guess at some step during removing edges the puzzle was solved, but the game both registered the puzzle was complete AND applied the rest of the erasures afterwards. This lead to me moving to the next screen when the network didn't satisfy the requirement, so I didn't get to see the actual solution.

I would recommend changing the game so that it either waits for the user to let go of the mouse button (ie all the edits are applied before checking for correctness), or ignoring edits for a set period of time after the solution is found.


Very interesting and helpful. It would be nice to have an "answer page" since I was at times struggling with how to get the answer. But really good! thanks!


This is a fantastic interactive introduction to networks that anyone can understand.

It deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.




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