How much does this cow weigh? (Classic)
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 29.8K Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2024
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About one hundred years ago, a scientist and statistician named Francis Galston came upon an opportunity to test how well regular people were at answering a question. He was at a fair where lots of people were guessing the weight of an ox, so he decided to take the average of all their guesses and compare it to the correct answer.
What he found shocked him. The average of their guesses was almost exactly accurate. The crowd was off by just one pound.
This eerie phenomenon—this idea that the crowd is right—drives everything from the stock market to the price of orange juice.
So, we decided to test it for ourselves. We asked Planet Money listeners to guess the weight of a cow.
Spoiler: You can see the results here.
This episode was hosted by David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein. It was produced by Nadia Wilson and edited by Bryant Urstadt. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Organic Valley, the farmer-owned cooperative dedicated to providing ethically sourced food from small organic family farms. |
| 0:10.0 | Discover how you can support local organic farmers at oV. coop slash ethically sourced. |
| 0:17.0 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:20.0 | Hey everyone, it's Erica Beres. |
| 0:24.8 | The show you're going to hear today originally aired in 2015. |
| 0:28.2 | Here's Jacob Goldstein and David Kestonbaum. |
| 0:31.3 | Francis Galton was the kind of person who believed in experts. |
| 0:34.0 | You know, people who had studied things, people who knew stuff. |
| 0:37.0 | He figured they knew things that ordinary people just did not. |
| 0:40.0 | I mean, of course they did, right? |
| 0:42.0 | Obviously. One day Galton goes to a country fair this is about a hundred years ago in England and there's this contest going on at the fair |
| 0:50.1 | guess the weight of the ox. Goulton's a scientist and a statistician, |
| 0:55.0 | and he figures, hey, I can do an experiment here, right? |
| 0:58.0 | He figures, I'm going to take everyone's guesses, |
| 1:00.0 | take the average, and compare that to the actual weight of the ox. |
| 1:04.8 | We heard this story from James Sir Wiki. |
| 1:06.7 | He's an economics journalist. |
| 1:08.4 | So he thought what you were going to end up with was a really flawed guess because in his mind what you were doing was you were |
| 1:15.3 | taking guesses of a few smart people a few mediocre people and then a lot of |
| 1:19.0 | morons because he basically thought everyone was dumb. So he figured the group's guess was going to be way, |
| 1:25.2 | way off the mark. |
| 1:26.6 | The contest organizers gave Galton the little slips of paper |
... |
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