Huh? Am I supposed to recognise this quote?

Dealing with Malta connotes dealing with an enigma!

The crowds of the title are undifferentiated and non-specialist.

“Germany/’Deepest Bavaria’, extremely rustic”. Ich habe verstanden, I have understood. One of my ex-trainees was from Kelheim and is now a leading consultant in the Schwabinger Hospital in Munich. His wife is from Ansbach and both have their roots in Bauernfamilien. I personally am strongly geprägt through the region around Stuttgart and now educate myself on this blog and on other fora dealing with Malta.

Far be it from me to be raising your dander. I think we’d best leave it at that.

And what do you mean, “Exactly”? You disagree with everything I wrote. And for pete’s sake, don’t go an about verification in the Bible. Did the Ancient Greeks (as in B.C., before you reply) read the Bible?

Which other “facts” are you having doubts about? Perhaps I could clear them up for you.

Exactly. Before Galileo there was no experiment to disprove the fact. But a fact it was, nevertheless. Verification was to be found in the Bible. There was absolute certainty about this – no “probably”. No one doubted it till our friend came along with his weird new theory. And even then it was by no means readily accepted as a fact. I believe there are still some nutters who deny it.

It was a fact, for ages,(backed up by documentary proof) that G.M.de Redin erected 14 coastal watch towers around Malta and Gozo. The fact is (as we know today) he built 13. It was a fact for two millenia that microbes and maggots and the like spontaneously generated out of filth and dung and other unmentionable deposits, and not from previously existing microbes etc. And then Pasteur and that lot came along.

Today’s fact is only as good as today’s methods of verification. A “verifiable” statement of fact may not always be what it seems.

1) The word wisdom in the title is unqualified. The book is not called ‘The Great Wisdom of Crowds’.

2) The wisdom of a crowd varies according to its context and its constituents. A question on farming is better put to a crowd of agricultural scientists, whereas an answer to a mechanical problem would be easier to obtain from a crowd of engineers.

3) The word ‘crowd’ is used to give a sense of novelty to an idea that is really very old. A crowd is a group of people, and groups of people, rather than individuals, have long been trusted for their wisdom. Cities had guilds, and governments have committees of experts.

The point is, a question about civil engineering should be put to a crowd of civil engineers. By adding everyone else to the crowd, you are diluting its wisdom.

In Galileo’s time, no one could check whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Or to put it in a nerdier way, there was no experiment which could disprove the observations. The epicylic theory was unwieldy perhaps, but it fitted the data very well. Telescopes had just been invented, for heaven’s sake (a pun! I scintillate today!), and accurate timekeeping too.

But why am I discussing this with you? You’ve gone off at a tangent. If you can’t distinguish between “probably” and “certainly” and if you take The Sun to be the Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, then this discussion could get very confusing.

However, I’ll give you a recent example of twisted fact and crowd “mean answer”. Look up news reports on the collision between HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant. Crowd wisdom: We have narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster of epic proportions (CND spokesman – who else?)*

*Footnote: I expect Graffitti/AD/MLP to call for a nuclear-free Mediterranean bla bla bla
Fact: Complete bollocks.