Jury Theorems
Updated 2026-09-10
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Jury theorems are mathematical results about a group's capacity to make correct decisions. Several of them carry an optimistic message: under suitable conditions the crowd is wise, and judgments reached by many people through majority voting tend to be better than those of a few or of a single person. They form the technical core of epistemic arguments for democracy, beginning with Condorcet.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Judge group decisions: estimate individual accuracy and group size to decide whether majority voting beats an individual. - Audit independence: check whether members are influenced by a single information source, preventing false consensus. - Design institutions: weigh independence against individual competence when choosing between voting and expert decision.
Anchor fast decisions
If each voter judges independently with accuracy above one half, the probability that majority voting is correct approaches one as the number of voters grows, which is the core of Condorcet's theorem. The difficulty is that independence is hard to satisfy: shared evidence, public opinion, and institutional arrangements become common causes of votes, and strengthening independence often weakens individual competence.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
account_treeGenealogyexpand_more
menu_bookReferencesexpand_more
Source support: Explicit
- plato.stanford.eduhttps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jury-theorems/verified
PRIVATE NOTES · Only visible to you
SAVED Q&A
ENTRY Q&A · Private saving available
Ask with a clear boundary
thinkingmodels answers from published entry context only.
Your question is sent to thinkingmodels. The answer uses public entry context only.