Is the Indian Public Smarter than the Experts?

The Answer is - They are as smart as the Experts - Collectively

When we started collecting predictions from the Crowd in December, even during the very short period, the crowd managed to beat legends like Surjit Bhalla and Yogendra Yadav. The performance was not brilliant but not bad either. The crowd beat Today's Chanakya as well

The Crowd beat Surjit Bhalla and Yogendra Yadav but still some way to go!

In case of the Karnataka election, the public had longer time and ended up being 5th most accurate. The Crowd beat Surjit Bhalla again and both Axis and Chanakya

Crowd ranks 5th in Karnataka

After having received some 9000 predictions, we decided to do an audit of completed predictions. The Crowd performed quite well except having struggled a bit in Sports predictions.

Crowd Got 61% of predictions correct

Recently, multiple opinion polls around Lok Sabha 2019 were out, the Crowd measured well against both leading opinion polls inspite of data having been collected before the opinion poll results were out

Crowd versus India Today and TimesNow

GDP results are going to be out today. The Crowd Polled at 7.55% (over the last one month), Reuters released its poll two days ago at 7.6%

Overall, it is clear that the Crowd is doing pretty decently and in many cases outperforming well known experts. Given the way the crowd operates, an accuracy rate of 60-70% with an error of 10% is not unreasonable. Which means, the crowd is likely to get about 65% of the predictions right and the error is likely to be less than 10% in those cases. Compare that with the exit polls where the best exit pollster operates at around 55%. No harm at all in trusting the crowd much more you would than the average expert.