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Volume 541 Number 7638 pp435-568
26 January 2017This Week
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The cover shows Jackson Pollocks painting One: Number 31, 1950 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The wisdom of the crowd approach has been widely adopted in recent years as a democratic way of determining a truth, fuelled in part by an enthusiasm for online voting procedures. But the crowd is not always correct and can actually be unwise, partly because specialized knowledge is often not widely shared. Here Draen Prelec and colleagues combine the virtues of a democratic algorithm, allowing anyone, irrespective of credentials, to register an opinion, with an elitist outcome that associates truth with the judgements of a few experts. The strategy is based on selecting the answer that is more popular than people would predict, rather than relying solely on most popular or most confident answers. Cover: Shutterstock.