The core idea behind the “wisdom of crowds” is that by aggregating information from a large, diverse group of individuals you can obtain a better solution and make better decisions.
Today I was reading Statistics for Dummies by Deborah Rumsey and realized that the motivation for the wisdom of crowds is quite analogous to the motivation for having a large sample size in statistics, as can be seen in these snippets from the book:
Fewer participants in a study means less information overall, so studies with small numbers of participants in general are less accurate than similar studies with larger sample sizes … Most researchers try to include the largest sample size they can afford, and they balance the cost of the sample size with the need for accuracy … Check the sample size to be sure you have enough information on which to base your results.
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