I’m guilty of this. If I can’t convince someone, i’ll try and solicit the opinions of others to reinforce the feeling I am correct. In fact, I often feel IMHO board is the “crowdsourcing” section of the SDMB.
Do you crowdsource? How prone are you in trying to engage others in your opinion? I notice some people almost never do this, and utterly disregard the outside opinions brought into a debate, while others will do it the moment someone disagrees with them.
What do you mean by “crowdsourcing”? To me the term means using services like the Amazon Mechanical Turk to get humans to do small tasks that computers find difficult. Some of my colleagues have done this to source lexical semantic data, which we then use to run experiments in natural language processing and computational linguistics. It didn’t occur to me that you could “crowdsource” opinions; isn’t that just called “polling”? People have been conducting opinion polls for about two hundred years now; I don’t see why you need to invent a new term for it just because the technology has advanced a bit.