“More Nuanced Than I Expected” From a lot of the hype and reviews, I expected more of a polemic; this was a readable and nuanced view of collective behavior. Both when they get things right and when they go wrong. Three types of problems were addressed – cognitive/informational judgements, coordination problems, and cooperation problems. He also covered the requirements for collective judgement to work, the most important of which are independence (lack of which promotes bubbles and mobs) and a means of aggregating the independent judgements (the market is one example). He also covered the problems with it and when it cannot work, such as bubbles and traffic jams. It’s density of ideas makes it harder to read than it otherwise would be.
Product Description In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant–better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world. From the Trade Paperback edition. |
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Summary book of crowd behavior  I read this book because I wanted to stay up-to-date with trends in mass collaboration and how that is evolving with the internet. I found this book to be a good summary to be conversational with others when talking about the terms he defines such as coordination and cooperation problems. However, I found myself not doing much note taking or highlighting of passages that are relevant to my life as an IT professional. … Incoherent The error the author makes is being too inclusive. He wants to shoehorn everything into a single theory. But things don’t work that way. Different groups of people organized in different ways behave differently. The stock market is not the same as an open source project, just because a lot of people participate. wisdom of crowds In talking about the wisdom of crowds, Surowiecki recounts a 1958 study that demonstrates the collective wisdom of groups. Students were asked to meet someone in NYC. They didn’t know where to meet, and had no way to talk to the other person ahead of time. Yet the majority of students chose the very same meeting place: the information booth at Grand Central station. Not knowing what time they were supposed to meet, just about all of the students said they would show up at the stroke of noon. “In other words, if you dropped two law students at either end of the biggest city in the world and told them to find each other, there was a very good chance they’d end up having lunch together” (p. 91). All told, a fun read. … |
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1 Comment until now
There are not many books I have hated as much as I hated this one
This “book” doesn’t prove it’s premise. The weight of the ox, proves nothing. Why does he even bring it up? The candy jar, as soon as the crowd is given a bit of information, they get it completely wrong. So were they smart or not? And what does it matter? Could he not find relevant real life examples?
Historical and current examples of crowd madness are disregarded completely. The only readable and informative part of the book is the story of the NASA Space Shuttle, and how the complete failure of crowd thought lead to the very sad consequences. Actually Surowiecki gives in this book more examples of failure of group thought than positives even when desperately and selectively trying the opposite, and the positives are mostly laughable and irrelevant like the ox or controversial or possibly random chance from noise (tell us about all those cases when a boat/submarine was not found!).
He mostly repeats the assertion that he has clearly shown it to be so, or that we know it to be so that groups are oh so wise, but the data, the arguments they are not there.
It’s confirmation bias taken to the extreme, intellectual dishonesty, very thin in any actually relevant information.
Where would the world be without Socrates, Aristotle, Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and others? Tell me. The sort of people he tries to downplay.
Le Bon’s 1895 work on crowds (that Surowiecki tries to discredit) became a sort of prophecy of the 20th century. Mussolini is said to have read it every night. Hitler directly copied large parts of it into his Meinkampf. Le Bon tried to warn us about crowds, and he was proven to be right in a very concrete manner.
Surowiecki touches none of this, while being aware of it. This is dishonesty. You look at the societies on this planet. The more we value the individual achievement, individual freedom and the less there is group thougt, group pressure, you know those things that go together with crowds, the better off the society is generally.
In the end Surowiecki manages to put together the thought structure, that informed crowds, with specific expertise, diverse in opinion, giving individuals their say, co-operative, co-ordinated, listening to each other can produce “miracles”. And I agree. Finding the cause of Sars so quickly is an example. And something to keep in mind.
But that is something entirely different from “wisdom of crowds”. That is wisdom of co-operating highly skilled experts.
The fact that this book has been a sort of best seller, and has recieved so many 5 star reviews praising it’s non-existant content, makes me go back to Mackay, Shermer, Le Bon…
I have never burnt a book in my life, but Surowiecki is seriously tempting me. I utterly hated this book and what it represents. Strong words, but saying it as it is.
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