Crowd intelligence: outsmarting the CIA.

• Author: Evans, Zenon
• Position: Citings - Good Judgment Project and amateur forecasters - Brief article

ELAINE RICH is a pharmacist in her 60s. She and a team of 3,000 other amateur forecasters in the Good Judgment Project (GJP) use Google to keep current on the news. The CIA employs more than 20,000 professionals, operates with a budget north of $14 billion, and has oodles of classified information. So which of these groups is better at predicting world affairs?

When it comes to "everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics," reports NPR, amateurs outperform the pros. Rich's "predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers."

There's "a lot of statistical random variation," Philip Tetlock, a GJP founder, told NPR. "But it's random variation around ... a true signal, and when you add all of the random variation on each side of the...