{"id":8379,"date":"2011-04-08T03:00:54","date_gmt":"2011-04-08T08:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=8379"},"modified":"2011-04-08T03:00:54","modified_gmt":"2011-04-08T08:00:54","slug":"the-limits-of-crowdsourcing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/8379","title":{"rendered":"The Limits of Crowdsourcing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>aka &#8220;no amount of hot air balloons can save a bad idea&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2014 here&#8217;s someone who agrees.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/science\/the-lay-scientist\/2011\/apr\/06\/1\">Guardian readers &#8216;fix&#8217; the Fukushima power plant<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[T]here&#8217;s this odd, growing trend in the world today, fed by endless news vox-pops and the general &#8216;X-Factorization&#8217; of television, that somehow everyone&#8217;s opinions are valuable and worth listening to.<\/p>\n<p>Bollocks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Crowdsourcing can work, but you have to have expertise from which to draw.  That&#8217;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&#8217;t asking a random person for the answer, you&#8217;re asking (ideally, anyway) someone who knows what they are talking about.   In other words, it&#8217;s <em>not guesswork<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>aka &#8220;no amount of hot air balloons can save a bad idea&#8221; 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 &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/8379\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-general","category-science-y-observation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}