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You didn’t get a second opinion. You got the average.
A 1936 stock-market metaphor explains what happens when you check your judgment against AI.
Here’s a competition that ran in British newspapers between the wars. The paper prints a hundred photographs of young women. You pick out the six prettiest, mail in your card, and the best entry takes a cash prize.
You don’t need the photographs to play. Just notice what you’d be looking for: out of a hundred faces, the six you found most beautiful. There isn’t another way to read the instruction.
That’s the wrong answer. The prize wasn’t for having the best taste. It went to the entry whose six came closest to the average of everyone else’s six. Your own opinion was never being scored. It was a liability, and the winners knew it. They weren’t looking at the photographs the way you would. They were looking at a hundred faces and asking which six a hundred thousand strangers in Manchester and Leeds would probably circle.
John Maynard Keynes used that competition in 1936 to explain the stock market, and he was careful about the ladder it puts you on. The first rung is picking the faces which, in his words, “to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest.” The second is picking the ones “average opinion genuinely thinks…
