For the past three years, Rich and 3,000 other average people have been quietly making probability estimates about everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics as part of the Good Judgment Project, an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community.

In fact, she’s so good she’s been put on a special team with other superforecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.

Rich and her teammates are that good even though all the information they use to make their predictions is available to anyone with access to the Internet.

When I asked if she goes to obscure Internet sources, she shook her head no.

“Usually I just do a Google search,” she said.

It turned out that most of the guesses were really bad — way too high or way too low.

But when Galton averaged them together, he was shocked:The dead ox weighed 1,198 pounds. The crowd’s average: 1,197.

via So You Think You're Smarter Than A CIA Agent : Parallels : NPR.