> The best investors aren't influenced much by the opinion of other investors. It would only dilute their own judgment to average it together with other people's.
I don't know anything about startup investing. But I do know about machine learning. And you can often improve an ensemble predictor by adding (many) weaker features and averaging them with an already strong predictor.
One shouldn't confuse the prediction of an average predictor with the average of a bunch of predictions that come from a pool of on the whole mediocre predictors. Averaging is really a strong operation for prediction. Of course, it does help if the individual predictors are themselves independent or uncorrelated with each other, which I guess tends to be very untrue in a herd.
I don't know anything about startup investing. But I do know about machine learning. And you can often improve an ensemble predictor by adding (many) weaker features and averaging them with an already strong predictor.
One shouldn't confuse the prediction of an average predictor with the average of a bunch of predictions that come from a pool of on the whole mediocre predictors. Averaging is really a strong operation for prediction. Of course, it does help if the individual predictors are themselves independent or uncorrelated with each other, which I guess tends to be very untrue in a herd.