the wisdom of crowds

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the phenomenon whereby the collective judgement of a large group of independent individuals is often more accurate than that of any single expert within the group, provided that the group is sufficiently diverse and individuals make their assessments independently; popularised by James Surowiecki's 2004 book of the same name, which drew on Francis Galton's 1907 observation that the average of a crowd's guesses about an ox's weight was almost exactly correct; underlies prediction markets, ensemble forecasting in meteorology, and democratic voting as aggregation mechanisms