Wisdom of crowds: Detection of COVID-19 severity one month ahead
In Chapter 22, the concept of “wisdom of the crowd” is discussed. It refers to an interesting scenario that the aggregate behavior of a large number of people, each with partial information, can generate accurate thinking. It is closely connected to problem-solving and decision-making in real life, in activities such as creating Wikipedia, economic forecasting, and public policy design.
Amid the pandemic, a research paper from Turiel et al. found that the wisdom of crowds detects COVID-19 severity ahead of officially available data. By measuring the Tweet Intensity and the cumulative number of death from Italian, Spanish, and United States regions, they found that the intensity of tweet attention to the pandemic is significantly related (p < 0.001) to the extent of the affection of the pandemic in those regions one month later.
The finding is very significant, and closely connected modern social media to the pandemic outbreak. However, there may also be a limitation on independence in this scenario. As mentioned in the textbook, “it’s important that the opinions are independent”. However, in social media platforms, due to the fast sharing and network effect, it’s easy to learn from others’ posts and further change our thinking and decision. In that way, the accuracy of the wisdom of the crowd may be largely influenced by the accuracy of the influencers’ posts. We might expect and hope that these influencers have more accurate beliefs because they have more social influence on others’ opinions. If this happens, as discussed in the text, “more accurate beliefs will have more weight placed on them”, and the posts and wisdom of the crowd will be a better predictor.
This interesting finding indicates the accuracy and power of the wisdom of the crowd. If we learn from the finding and the wisdom of the crowd, we can have a better understanding and a better plan for COVID, which gives more time and insight in policy-making and adjustment to the pandemic.
References
Turiel, J., Fernandez-Reyes, D. & Aste, T. Wisdom of crowds detects COVID-19 severity ahead of officially available data. Sci Rep 11, 13678 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-93042-w