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The Wisdom of the Crowds, Political Junkie Edition

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Our friends at Politics and Technology ran a "punditology challenge" asking readers to pick the winners of all the January presidential primaries, Republican and Democratic alike.

The winners are here, (gosh, an A-list political blogger wins ... but it wasn't all favorites this weekend).

So, here's the bullet point for that wisdom-of-the-crowds slide you need to update with fresh data:

Our collective picks scored 117 points - and were better than 96.2% of the individual punditologists.

Out of 563 entrants, "collective picks" would have tied for 20th. We saw much the same thing (in a smaller sample) for last year's Oscar pool. (Dear readers, should we reprise this?)

Back to the punditology for a topical footnote: the reader is left to his or her own conclusions from the following:

Every single subgroup (bloggers, professors, journalists, activists, electeds, etc.) did worse [than the consensus] -- except one: As a group, political consultants scored 123 points - and were better than 98.9% of us (and, by the way, better than all but two individual political consultants.)

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