Methods for Aggregating Opinions: Comments

Abstract

The review presented by Hogarth under the title of “Methods for aggregating opinions” quite throroughly covers the subject area of how “opinion”, by which he means individual statements of beliefs concerning a given uncertain issue, are to be collected and aggregated. Apparently, such a task is created upon the need of collecting information from various sources in order to form as veridical an opinion as possible. Needless to say, this need is ubiquitous; no one can escape from it in making everyday decisions. So are scientists engaging in their trade. though they prefer “hard” types of information sources to the “soft” ones, such as people’s opinions. And then come big decision makers operating in social setups, who, being often deprived of any “hard” information sources, need to aggregate people’s opinions. They might, however, want to base their tasks upon some normative principles if possible because their responsibilities are heavy. In either case their activities share a common feature of the underlying need, which I may generically call information synthesis. It concerns the problem of how people should, or do, depending upon whether the problem is to be tackled normatively or descriptively, go about the task of aggregating and processing messages supposedly containing information on the given issue. The purpose of this brief discussion paper is to draw the reader’s attention to some of the basic aspects of information synthesis.