Friday, April 25, 2014

So You Think You're Smarter Than A CIA Agent

Spiegel, A. (Writer). ( 2014, April 2). So You Think You’re Smarter Than A CIA Agent. [Radio episode]. In Morning Edition.Washington, D.C.: NPR.
 
CO- Collaboration

          Summary:
 
An eye opening article which explains a three year Intelligence Community funded study.  The experiment consists of involving everyday citizens conducting Google searches to predict future world events. The Intelligence Community analyzes the data and predictions the citizens have discovered and determined for validation.  The project was the dream of three psychologists along with professionals in the Intelligence Community and is known as the Good Judgement Project.  For the basis of the study, the psychologists rely upon what has been known for years as “the wisdom of the crowds”.  This theory was discovered by Francis Galton in 1906.  Galton was a statistician who revealed when he surveyed  a crowd and then, averaged the results, the average was close to the actual number.  Philip Tetlock, one of the psychologists, best explains it as “when a random variation added to both sides of a true number actually arrive to the true signal/number”. (Spiegel, 2014) It hasn’t been proven to work in all situations but so far, more heads have been proven to be better than one.

Evaluation:
 
This article caught my attention because we are studying a similar concept, the “Big Think”. Through collaboration, we are experiencing how learning changes and improves. More heads are better than one.  We are learning the value of sharing different perspectives so the team arrives at a different outcome than one person would by doing all of the work independently. The process lends itself to a “richer” experience and results.  The project known as The Good Judgement Project developed by Philip Tetlock, Barbara Mellers and Don Moore in collaboration with the Intelligence Community might be worth some research, if one was willing to investigate it more thoroughly.
 
 



 
 
   
         
 
 


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