Category: Life

Wisdom of the crowd exercise

According to Wikipedia, the wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.

We’ll take the results of a YouTube video as an example, to test the wisdom of the crowd. I used Majk’s Show as a dataset. It’s a young local guy that interviews random people on the streets, asking them random questions.

We will agree that any hits above 50% will validate the wisdom of the crowd. Follows a table with results:

Question Answer Correct answers (%) Valid?
How do you pronounce “schedule” sheh·jool or skeh·jool 13/34 = 38.23% No
Who’s the man on the picture Albert Einstein 14/32 = 43.75% No
8/2(2+2)=? 16 11/25 = 44% No
What’s closer, America or the Moon? America 9/22 = 40.9% No
Who was the first president of Macedonia? Kiro Gligorov 22/50 = 44% No
What is larger: -4 or -10? -4 20/36 = 55.55% Yes

We can further categorize the questions and see where the wisdom of the crowd fails specifically. For example, English seems to be below 40% while everything else is above 40%.

In any case, I think I might have set a bit high grading point for the citizens of my country 🙂 But at least they seem to know how to compare two numbers!

Idea: news diversity

As with most of my mornings, they start with a coffee and reading the news on time.mk – news portals' aggregator.

At the time of writing this post, there are about 115 sources on the sources list on time.mk. As readers, we are mostly interested in unique content. Out of those 115 sources, a lot of them will generate noise. It may look something like this:

Even if you don’t understand Cyrillic, you can tell it’s definitely the same text.

So, how do we find the most unique sources and only stick to them, instead of wasting our time on copy-paste news portals that do not produce original content?

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A8c team meetup Athens, 2019

During the first week of October, we had our team meetup in Athens, Greece.

We had a lot of projects going on, and one of them (which I was involved in) was working on the architecture of WooCommerce Services. It has wp-calypso as a dependency, and we wanted to move out of that and just rely on @wordpress/components. We have a PoC PR and wrote an internal P2 post about it.

Fun stuff, right? Now for the actual fun stuff. We did a lot of escape rooms. And I mean a lot.

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Metapost: Tuply singleton – Freedom of creativity

I like puzzles. If it’s a non-trivial one, in order to come up with a solution I usually spend a few days (on and off) thinking about it. But it also has to be interesting to get my attention.

As an example, consider one of my earlier blog posts series: Tuply singleton, Tuply singleton v2, Tuply singleton v3. This is what I do in general, and blog posts are usually just the result of my thinking. Blogging (or pen & paper) is one of the best tools we have as humans – given the reliability of our memory.

But then another thought came. What if someone had asked me that same question on a job interview? Most job interviews usually have a time constraint, so there’s a high chance I would come up with the first (erroneous) version.

To me, this is freedom of creativity – to keep thinking about something that seems interesting and come up with a solution, without being pressured or constrained by time.