Well, just for kicks, I went out and did my own experiment to see if could replicate his results. When I went out for a night on the town last Friday (8/08/08), I asked the people I talked to how much they thought I weighed. Here's what I looked like, so you can make a guess and tell how far off you would have been:
To help them make their best guess, I allowed them to see me without the blazer and from different angles, and to, ahem, touch me. To adhere to the protocols necessary to find wisdom in crowds, I made sure they didn't discuss guesses with each other until they submitted them, and that they made the guesses anonymously (by writing it town and putting it in a plastic bag out of my view). I excluded non-numerical entries such as "Fuck U".
The results? After collecting 16 entries at two venues, here is what I got (and this will be expressed in terms that conceal my weight and their guesses, which will be revealed in a later post):
The average (mean) of their guesses was off by 3.6%.
The average error (mean error) of all the guesses was 10.3%.
The median guess was off by 6.3%
This is pretty much consistent with the Wisdom of Crowds phenomenon: the average of the guesses was much more accurate than most of the individual guesses, and the median guess. It probably would have been even better if I had collected a bigger sample.
Pretty neat, huh?
