The Wisdom of Crowds
Friday, 15 February 2008
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology. The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton’s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).
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No. 1 — February 28th, 2008 at 08:33
Really interesting topic. While it can be an advantage in everyday decision making, it provides some evil connotations to phenomenons like mass-hysteria and “mob intelligence”, while at the other hand it can be seen as the engine for the automatic regulation of democratic societies. Am I talking about collective spirits? Are we borg?
For at least a few years to come we are not, but forwarned by the flip-side of technical progression. Personally I am searching for some evil spirits in databases for the moment, so I’ll switch to the ‘Learning MySQL-Postings’ instantly.