Vox Populi, Vox Dei is Latin for “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” This subject is interesting because it is related to the foundation of democracy and the much deeper human psyche including intuition.
Although the words existed in the political arena since CE798 when scholar Alcuin of England sent a letter to Charlemagne of France, its context since then has changed somewhat. Alcuin’s letter of advice to Emperor Charlemagne was originally written in the following way.
“And do not listen to those who keep saying, ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’ because the tumult of the crowd is always close to madness.”
Sir Francis Galton’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”
First published in Nature (1907), Galton investigated the trustworthiness and peculiarities of popular judgments.
Sir Francis Galton was, amongst his many other accreditations, an accomplished statistician during the Victorian era. His main methodology for gathering and parsing data was through the use of surveys and the resultant regression to the mean.
As an example, a weight-judging competition was carried on at the annual show of the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition at Plymouth. A fat ox having been selected, the crowd was asked to estimate the weight of the ox. Those who guessed closest to the actual weight would receive prizes.
About 8oo tickets were issued. The judgments were unbiased and uninfluenced. The competitors included butchers and farmers. While some were deemed to be expert in judging the weight of cattle, most were not at all.
After weeding thirteen cards out of the collection, as being defective or illegible, 787 remained for discussion. Galton arranged them in order of the magnitudes of the estimates, and converted into lbs.
According to the democratic principle of “one vote one value,” the middlemost estimate expresses the vox populi. Now the middlemost estimate was 1207 lb., and the weight of the ox proved to be 1198 lb.; so the vox populi was in this case 9 lb., or 0.8 per cent of the whole weight too high.
Judging from the data in Mr. Galton’s article, the mean would seem to be approximately 1197 lb., which is -1 lb., or -0.1% of the real weight (1198 lb.).
The mean value (1197) was extraordinary close to the real weight of the ox (1198), far better than middle point (median) value of 1207. One out of 787 was closest to the truth, but “one vote, one value” system itself is not far away from the truth when extremely high and extremely low values were not excluded in the calculation process.
Humans including myself make a lot of errors. As long as we are trying to do the best we can with good intentions, when we integrate all people’s errors and mistakes in search of a better society, we can do better as a whole. Are we courageous enough to execute what we learned today? Galton’s Mean gives us an interesting perspective to our intuitive life. I am not perfect but we are.