wisdom of the crowds

The wisdom of the crowds is the thesis that if you ask sufficient people a question then even if each is individually not ver knowledgable, the consensus view is remarkably accurate. This seems to work for certain kinds of problem where tno expert knowledge is required, but if, say, the question concerned qunatum string theory, it seems less lilely that a random crowd would be helpful unless it happend to be a crowd of quantum string theorists. However, a computatuonal variant of this princple does seem to work well in ensemble methods in AI.