The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki
http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706
Introduction
The opening illustration of the wisdom
of crowds guessing the weight of cattle was a little bit of a let
down. Fortunately, the author even admitted to this not being great
evidence for the wisdom of crowds and also acknowledged that some
crowds can be bad (like during riots, etc...).
But some of his evidence was startling!
He recommend a book Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag &
Christopher Drew about a submarine location that sounded very
interesting.
Chapter 1
The 4 conditions of a wise crowd: (pg
10)
Diversity of Opinion
Independence
Decentralization
Aggregation of private decisions
to a collective decision
(I couldn't help but recognize the
parallels with open source)
I knew people would bet on anything,
but the author gave examples of people betting on things that I had
no idea about (from Hollywood movies and awards to Washington
elections) and how that was a better predictor than even inside
information in some instances.
Chapter 2
-Why are some products or technologies
(like Betamax) not chosen up front? There are many reasons the
author gives, but the one that stood out to me was the fail fast, or
sometimes the messiest approach is the wisest.
-Without a diversity, a homogeneous
group will actually close minds instead of open them. The group will
will pressure individuals to conform to the group as Solomon Asch
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Asch)
discovered.
I have experienced this in the
“echo chambers” of blogs, twitter or social networks where you
only follow people of interest to you and that begins to make you
feel that is representative of the population as a whole.
Chapter 3 – Interesting phenomenon of
ants going around in circle until they die - “circular mill”
(http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=261877).
Most crowd studies come from nature anyway.
One of the quickest ways to make
people's judgment systematically biased is to make them dependent on
each other for information.
Chapter 4 – Talks about CIA and
intelligence failures. The strengths of terrorism is the
decentralized cells and the weakness of intelligence may be its
centralization. An example of decentralization was the fedayeen
resistance but the reason it didn't work is that it wasn't aggregated
up. All tactical no strategy. Reminds me of the old Russian tanks
that only had one way radios.
Chapter 6 – If the UL was a careless
as the financial industry then we would all be hurting, literally.
Currently on Chapter 8 but it looks a
lot the same and I am loosing interest.