Actually, my choice set was less limited than yours'. As I said, the application to wikipedia is only an imperfect analogy, but I wrote my take on it two posts ago (in the part you did not quote).Djaser wrote:So you're saying that you collective knowledge only works when you give people a limited amount of choices...how do you apply this on wikipedia?
Hard to believe (and a google search didn't turn up anything) but as I pointed out, even if this was true, the treatment of the survey is flawed. Even if a person was only partially sure of the knowledge (say, only 60%), he would have been forced to answer yes or no. Although the total effect of this flaw is unknown, it is not hard to believe that far fewer people are certain of a "yes" answer than would be certain of a "no" answer.I believe there was an investigation with this outcome. I couldn't give you a source and my word on this is worthless but it's my firm believe that the majority of the people are stupid.
That is the case with your (flawed) survey, but might not be with the probabilistic survey I was talking about. If, hypothetically, rural people knew the answer was no, and are more certain that the answer was no than urban people, then their answers would be weighted more.True, true. But given how much people live in cities I doubt that the outcome of rural areas would make much difference to end result.
There is a big difference between probabilistic truth and absolute truth. The survival rate of a drug being 84% is not really the same as if it were 100%.Right but if you ask people to guess the weight of a cow the end result comes only close to reality, it will never be exact. So we can easily apply this on this religion based question. 84% is closer to 100% than 0%. Conclusion: god exists, your theory proved it.