The Wisdom of Crowds - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The Hugo-winning 1968 science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner includes an elaborate planet-wide information futures and betting pool called "Delphi" based on the Delphi method.

Illusionist Derren Brown claimed to use the 'Wisdom of Crowds' concept to explain how he correctly predicted the UK National Lottery results in September 2009. His explanation was met with criticism on-line, by people who argued that the concept was misapplied. The Wisdom of Crowds concept by definition requires a known truth or absolute in order to work; the lottery has no such previously existent absolute outcome. The methodology employed was too, flawed; the sample of people, couldn’t have been totally objective and free in thought, because they were gathered multiple times and socialised with each other too much; a condition Surowiecki tells us is corrosive to pure independence and the diversity of mind required (Surowiecki 2004:38). Groups thus fall into groupthink where they increasingly make decisions based on influence of each other and are thus less accurate. However, other commentators have suggested that, given the entertainment nature of the show, Brown's misapplication of the theory may have been a deliberate smokescreen to conceal his true method.

This was also shown in the television series East of Eden where a social network of roughly 10,000 individuals came up with ideas to stop missiles in a very short span of time.