The metaethical dilemma of epistemic democracy

Epistemic democracy aims to show, often by appeal to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, that democracy has a high chance of reaching correct decisions. It has been argued that epistemic democracy is compatible with various metaethical accounts, such as moral realism, conventionalism and majoritarianism. This paper casts doubt on that thesis and reveals the following metaethical dilemma: if we adopt moral realism, it is doubtful that voters are, on average, more than 0.5 likely to track moral facts and identify the correct alternative. By contrast, if we adopt conventionalism or majoritarianism, we cannot expect that voters are both competent and sincere. Either way, the conditions for the application of Condorcet’s theorem are not met.

The Condorcet Jury Theorem with Information Acquisition

We analyze a committee decision in which individuals with common preferences are uncertain which of two alternatives is better for them. Members can acquire costly information. Private signals and information choice are both continuous. As is consistent with Down’s rational ignorance hypothesis, each member acquires less information in a larger committee and tends to acquire zero information when the committee size goes to infinity. However, with more members, a larger committee can gather more aggregate information in equilibrium. The aggregate information is infinite with the size going to infinity if and only if marginal cost at “zero information acquisition” is zero. When the marginal cost at “zero information acquisition” is positive, the probability of making an appropriate decision tends to be less than one.

Information Use and the Condorcet Jury Theorem

Using a simple model of a coordination game, this paper explores how the information use of individuals affects an optimal committee size. Although enlarging the committee promotes information aggregation, it also stimulates the members’ coordination motive and distorts their voting behavior through higher-order beliefs. On the determination of a finite optimal committee size, the direction and degree of strategic interactions matter. When the strategic complementarity among members is strong, a finite optimal committee size exists. In contrast, it does not exist under strategic substitution. This mechanism is applied to the design of monetary policy committees in a New Keynesian model in which a committee conducts monetary policy under imperfect information.

Pre-screening workers to overcome bias amplification in online labour markets

Groups have access to more diverse information and typically outperform individuals on problem solving tasks. Crowdsolving utilises this principle to generate novel and/or superior solutions to intellective tasks by pooling the inputs from a distributed online crowd. However, it is unclear whether this particular instance of “wisdom of the crowd” can overcome the influence of potent cognitive biases that habitually lead individuals to commit reasoning errors. We empirically test the prevalence of cognitive bias on a popular crowdsourcing platform, examining susceptibility to bias of online panels at the individual and aggregate levels. We then investigate the use of the Cognitive Reflection Test, notable for its predictive validity for both susceptibility to cognitive biases in test settings and real-life reasoning, as a screening tool to improve collective performance. We find that systematic biases in crowdsourced answers are not as prevalent as anticipated, but when they occur, biases are amplified with increasing group size, as predicted by the Condorcet Jury Theorem. The results further suggest that pre-screening individuals with the Cognitive Reflection Test can substantially enhance collective judgement and improve crowdsolving performance.

Collective Intelligence

The chapter provides an introduction to the social science of ‘collective intelligence’, the aggregation of individual judgments for purposes of collective decision making. It starts from the basic logic of the Condorcet jury theorem and summarises the main determinants of the accuracy of collective cognition. The recent research has focused on developing and refining formal aggregation methods beyond majority voting. The chapter presents the main findings on the two general approaches, surveying and prediction markets. It then contrasts these techniques with informal deliberation as a basic and prevalent aggregation mechanism. One conclusion is that while deliberation is prone to herding and can distort collective judgment, it is also more versatile and robust than formal mechanisms.

Development of a System for Measuring the Intellectual Power of Actors

The problem of determining an accurate assessment of the actor’s ability to solve a problem of a certain degree of difficulty is considered in this work. The assessment is determined by a group of actors in the process of solving local problems, while the tasks are included in the competence of this group. Actors can be carriers of both natural and artificial intelligence. Condorcet Jury Theorem, Georg Rasсh Model, method of the evolutionary decision reconciliation (EDR) are used in the process of solving the problem posed. Related Experiences Assessment Scale is given. The measure of academic success is better predicted not by those experiences that are manifested during study activities, but those that arise along on the way to university. There is a slight effect of the influence of time on the measure of effort.

An Interpretation of Weights in Linear Opinion Pooling

This paper explores the fact that linear opinion pooling can be represented as a Bayesian update on the opinions of others. It uses this fact to propose a new interpretation of the pooling weights. Relative to certain modelling assumptions the weights can be equated with the so-called truth-conduciveness known from the context of Condorcet's jury theorem. This suggests a novel way to elicit the weights.