I don’t mean to hijack this thread but I’ll offer a couple of ideas about majoritarianism. It is no doubt true that if everyone were a majoritarian, majoritarians would have to do things a little differently (perhaps asking people to publish their estimates of what they would believe if they weren’t following the advice of the crowd). But at present I don’t think this is a major problem, so majoritarianism still has promise as a strategy to improve one’s accuracy, as demanded by the tsuyoku naritai philosophy.
As far as being unable to beat the average, again this is true but keep in mind that for many kinds of problems, the average is really very good. For example in “guess how many beans in the jar” type problems, it is customary for the mean guess to be far better than the median, often in the top few percentiles. Few strategies can offer such high degrees of accuracy. Although not all problems can be quantified in this way, the point is that the majoritarian “average” does not have to mean median.
I don’t mean to hijack this thread but I’ll offer a couple of ideas about majoritarianism. It is no doubt true that if everyone were a majoritarian, majoritarians would have to do things a little differently (perhaps asking people to publish their estimates of what they would believe if they weren’t following the advice of the crowd). But at present I don’t think this is a major problem, so majoritarianism still has promise as a strategy to improve one’s accuracy, as demanded by the tsuyoku naritai philosophy.
As far as being unable to beat the average, again this is true but keep in mind that for many kinds of problems, the average is really very good. For example in “guess how many beans in the jar” type problems, it is customary for the mean guess to be far better than the median, often in the top few percentiles. Few strategies can offer such high degrees of accuracy. Although not all problems can be quantified in this way, the point is that the majoritarian “average” does not have to mean median.