Metaknowledge – Crowds aren’t as smart as we thought, since some people know more than others. A simple trick can find the ones you want by George Musser

“Dražen Prelec, a behavioural economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is working on a way to smarten up the hive mind. One reason that crowds mess up, he notes, is the hegemony of common knowledge. Even when people make independent judgments, they might be working off the same information. When you average everyone’s judgments, information that is known to all gets counted repeatedly, once for each person, which gives it more significance than it deserves and drowns out diverse sources of knowledge. In the end, the lowest common denominator dominates…Good metaknowledge is precious. It requires not only that you know a subject but also that you know yourself. And self-knowledge is the most difficult knowledge of all.”

• An algorithm that finds truth even if most people are wrong, Drazen Prelec, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School.