Beating the Crowd | Hacker News Reader

Beating the Crowd

withentropy.com

57 pointsalpark311 comments

You have to be careful to include incentives in the analysis of crowd opinions. Markets make it easy; likely everyone else buying and selling in the market wants to at least preserve the value of their investment and most are hoping to make money. Few are willing to risk catastrophic loss.

When it's politics (voting or polls or horsetrading) or other choices that are more complexly connected to particular outcomes then market-like assumptions about the averages make less sense. E.g. pollsters have known for decades that they can't simply publish the mean average of polling results and expect them to be calibrated at predicting elections; there are many strange biases (including sampling) at play.

Dating relies on different metrics for attraction between individuals (there isn't actually a universal attractiveness 'currency' to price people with), preferences about children and lifestyle factor heavily, and monogamous dating has complexities from scarcity mindset (optimal stopping among others).

"To say anything else implies an opinion that the mean human would cognitively overestimate or underestimate the quantity, and this is equivalent to an opinion on human cognitive bias for this specific problem"

for a slightly more skeptical take:

https://mindmatters.ai/2020/11/the-wisdom-of-crowds-are-crow...

(It mentions a requirement to be unbiased and independent, which means it doesn't apply to most modern things)

I also struggle with that part. the author makes it seem like guessing correctly is the logical conclusion of not having an opinion and thus not over- or underestimating.

One assumption is that humans can estimate at all. The average could just as well be zero, 100 or a random value.

A monkey probably doesn't have an opinion about an ox, but I doubt a group of monkeys can estimate the weight of an ox.

Send like there are more conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for it to work

Following the monetary focus — the last exception has some parallel in contract law, the idea of specific performance and that some things can't be replaced by any monetary value because of their uniqueness.

So in the relationship example, it's not just "inertia", it's the value you have by virtue of your unique position in the situation, in terms of history etc. Similar arguments can be said of your parents or children: in some abstract sense you could imagine other children or parents you could evaluate the relative value of, but they are not actually your children or parents and so don't have that value.

It's an interesting issue because there's a point at which something leaves the realm of monetary (or more broadly, fungible value) considerations per se, and different rules start to apply.

I have trouble taking people that consider romance and intimacy a form of market gambling seriously.

Looking at their previous posts they also seem to not cook their own food, at least not a couple of years ago:

https://www.withentropy.com/blog/2023-10-24-its_impossible_t...

They also believed nature was "a well-defined system" that provided "rewards":

https://www.withentropy.com/blog/2025-04-13-a_banal_paradise...

But it seems that they have now started to open up to the idea that, at least, social realities might not be well-defined, which they approach through a series of contrived thought experiments.

While there sometimes might be wisdom to crowds, there commonly isn't. Concepts like 'groupthink', 'cult' and 'mass hysteria' hint at this. If you aren't part of any crowd you'll also be alone and quite vulnerable.

It's a weird example. I think a better example might be the trust factor in service relationships.

To my clients, my company is not ...

1. ... the cheapest. I think we're maybe upper middle ground in terms of cost/value, but arguably not the best bang for buck _in the world_.

2. ... the best. We might be _one_ of the best available to them, but most likely we're not. I think we're "pretty good".

But we do have something other companies do not: Their _trust_. Most of our business comes from recommendations, so we start on high trust. Then, as we work together, we build even more trust over time. They could probably find a service provider that's both cheaper and better if they looked hard enough, but they wouldn't be able to trust them as much. They could of course take that gamble, but the existing trust arguably gives us an edge.

Doesn't change the point of the article, which I think makes sense. Just a pretty odd example, as you pointed out.

Isn't this just optimal stopping theory?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping

Lol, always gets me thinking about when I should trust my gut or just go with the crowd - feels like Im second guessing myself more than anything else lately tbh

It’s well written, but I beg to differ.

You should never ever considerate other opinion to make your own choice.

We are the sum of our decisions, I don’t want to be the sum of the crowd decisions.

There is also the factor of pride. Either you’re confident enough in your judgement or you’re not, but taking a bold decision that goes against all odd and people’s opinion, and managing to make it work, is extremely satisfying.

If you start reviewing your opinion based on crowd opinion, all that’s going to happen is you will be more and more inclined to suppress your own opinion in favor of the majority, until you don’t trust your guts anymore and you become part of the crowd.

Bestie there is a saying « you learn from your own mistake ».

> You should never ever considerate other opinion to make your own choice

This makes no sense. You should absolutely consider other people's opinions for a lot of decisions, since other people's opinions affect the world.

> You should never ever

Wisdom is not memorizing and following hard rules, it's developing the judgment to know when diverging from the majority is correct and when it isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com