Crowdsourcing Objective Answers to Subjective Questions – Nerd Nite Los Angeles

April 9th, 2013 by Ravi Iyer

A lot of the questions on Ranker are subjective, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot use data to bring some objectivity to this analysis.  In the same way that Yelp crowdsources answers to subjective questions about restaurants and TripAdvisor crowdsources answers to subjective questions about hotels, Ranker crowdsources answers to a broader assortment of relatively subjective questions such as the Tastiest Pizza Toppings, the Best Cruise Destination, and the Worst Way to Die.

A few weeks ago, I did an informal talk on the Wisdom of Crowds approach that Ranker takes to crowdsource such answers at a Los Angeles bar as part of “Nerd Nite”.  The gist of it is that one can crowdsource objective answers to subjective questions by asking diverse groups of people questions in diverse ways.  Greater diversity, when aggregated effectively, enables the error inherent in answering any subjective question to be minimized.  For example, we know intuitively that relying on only the young or only the elderly or only people in cities or only people who live in rural areas gives us biased answers to subjective questions.  But when all of these diverse groups agree on a subjective question, there is reason to believe that there is an objective truth that they are responding to.  Below is the video of that talk.

If you want to see a more formal version of this talk, I’ll be speaking at greater length on Ranker’s methodologies at the Big Data Innovation Summit in San Francisco this Friday.

– Ravi Iyer

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