“THE parable of the Ox”, written by John Kay, refers to a story about a statistician who in 1906, noticed that at a county fair game where people guessed the weight of an ox, the average of all their guesses ended up being very close to the animal’s exact weight, as revealed by a pair of scales.
The story continues to build – very quickly, people leave aside a reality which came from knowing as much about the ox to something disconnected – using ever fancier models and methods to predict the result, some betting on the bets of others, and even filling the gaps by using predictive models that create even more guesses in an attempt to ‘improve’ their accuracy. The story reaches its zenith, when the masses, driven by popular folly, ignore everything including the farmers, and the ox dies.
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