aka “no amount of hot air balloons can save a bad idea”

A few days ago on the forum, after a newly-registered poster inquired how to get ahold of TEPCO so he could give them his idea for fixing the leak, I suggested that it was a bit naive to think that a layperson is going to suggest a viable solution that had not already occurred to the people working the problem. I got some static for that position. No matter — here’s someone who agrees.

Guardian readers ‘fix’ the Fukushima power plant

[T]here’s this odd, growing trend in the world today, fed by endless news vox-pops and the general ‘X-Factorization’ of television, that somehow everyone’s opinions are valuable and worth listening to.

Bollocks.

Crowdsourcing can work, but you have to have expertise from which to draw. That’s the idea behind a discussion forum: you have enough people together and odds are good that someone (if not several people) will know the answer to a question. But it all rests on a subset of the crowd having a level of expertise. You aren’t asking a random person for the answer, you’re asking (ideally, anyway) someone who knows what they are talking about. In other words, it’s not guesswork.