When Confused, Respond in Pictures
The Treasure Trove message board, Tweleve.org, has hit a serious brick wall. Despite having almost 5,000 users and over 10,000 articles — all within less than two months! — nobody has posted a real breakthrough since late January. Still, that hasn’t stopped some would-be treasure hunters, myself included, from bombarding the board with their crackpot theories and ADD ramblings. The serious treasure hunters once flamed these people, back when they wanted to keep the conversations on topic, but now it seems they’re at a loss for words — and ideas. In a thread containing a mildly plausible but completely unverified “sub-poem” even the moderators’ responses have devolved into pictorial WTFs, like the one below. Behold what the good folks at Wired have termed “the collective brainpower of thousands”!
Technorati Tags: A Treasure’s Trove, Wired
March 10th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
Apparently those at WNYC really, really hate me. Fresh Air has been taken out of its 7pm slot and replaced with Radio Lab.
Habitually I turned on the radio at 7pm last night and while I was busy being devastated and longing for Terry’s voice, I heard a pretty interesting segment about the reasoning ability of “the mob.” Apparently some old dead English guy (whose name I can’t remember) wrote many papers about how crowds/mobs/the mass, whatever you wish to call it, were nothing more that a collection of idiots who added nothing to society. He also, by the way was the inventor of Eugenics. ‘Nuff said.
Anyway, in an effort to prove his theory, that the mob was no more than a mass of morons, he held a simple experiment at a town fair. He set up a cow beside him and asked, “How much does this cow weigh?”. Much to his surprise, the mean answer was only several pounds away from the real weight of the cow!
Hmmm, guess the mob ain’t so dumb after all. The same experiment can be done with anything, (”how many jellybeans in the jar?”) and the mean answer of the crowd will always be amazingly close.
So, even though you Treasure Trovers have apparently hit a wall, you’re much closer to finding the answer together than as individuals. Though I’m not sure a bunch of Dan’s friends aimlessly wandering around Central Park constitutes a mob…..though maybe.