I'll give you one very specific example from data that I crunched myself.
A friend of mine has run an Oscar contest for about 25 years.
Everybody picks their choices in the usual manner. In addition, he has a score for "consensus"--which is a virtual contestant which predicts each category winner based on the most popular pick. For example, if 30 people picked Birdman and 20 picked Boyhood, consensus would pick Birdman.
Here's the thing. A few people usually beat consensus in a given year. However, over the course of 25 years, no single person has a better average score than consensus and, in fact, not even a small panel of those who (retrospectively) were the best pickers do.
As others have said, in contests like how many jellybeans are in a jar, the median or mean tends to do better than the vast majority of individuals as well.
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I'll give you one very specific example from data that I crunched myself.
A friend of mine has run an Oscar contest for about 25 years.
Everybody picks their choices in the usual manner. In addition, he has a score for "consensus"--which is a virtual contestant which predicts each category winner based on the most popular pick. For example, if 30 people picked Birdman and 20 picked Boyhood, consensus would pick Birdman.
Here's the thing. A few people usually beat consensus in a given year. However, over the course of 25 years, no single person has a better average score than consensus and, in fact, not even a small panel of those who (retrospectively) were the best pickers do.
As others have said, in contests like how many jellybeans are in a jar, the median or mean tends to do better than the vast majority of individuals as well.