A new book - Wisdom of the Crowd Website

I have written a PDF book entitled "Wisdom of the Crowd Website". Click here to view and download a FREE copy.
http://www.tankinlian.com/PDF.aspx?id=44&otp=735206

Introduction
About ten years ago, a friend told me about a popular bestselling book titled “Wisdom of the Crowd” by James Suroweicki.

It has many case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument in several fields in economics and human behavior.

The first anecdote is about how a crowd at a country fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox. Their individual guesses were not accurate, but when the average of their guesses was calculated, it was quite close to the actual weight of the ox.

This is the outcome of independent decisions made by many persons and is not the same as crowd psychology (where all the members of the crowd adopt the same response).

I have not read the actual book. However, I found this concept to be fascinating.

I have a statistical background and I like to test if “the wisdom of the crowd” can produce better public policies. 

Some countries, such as Switzerland, carry out regular referendums to seek the votes of their citizens on public issues. They must have figured out that the collective wisdom of their citizens is better than the decision of their politicians. It also helped to avoid corrupt decisions made by politicians.

There is a general lack of debate and discussion on public issues in the Parliament or the mainstream media in Singapore for the past five decades.

I decided to develop an online platform to allow the public to vote on economic and social issues in Singapore. I hope that this platform will contribute in a small way to get more people to be interested in these issues.

Mr. Tan Kin Lian
March 2017