The Wisdom of Crowds
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.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. "Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge. Surowiecki's style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Surowiecki first developed his ideas for Wisdom of Crowds in his “Financial Page” column of The New Yorker. Many critics found his premise to be an interesting twist on the long held notion that Americans generally question the masses and eschew groupthink. “A socialist might draw some optimistic conclusions from all of this,” wrote The New York Times. “But Surowiecki’s framework is decidedly capitalist.” Some reviewers felt that the academic language and business speak decreased the impact of the argument. Still, it’s a thought-provoking, timely book: the TV studio audience of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire guesses correctly 91 percent of the time, compared to “experts” who guess only 65 percent correctly. Keep up the good work, comrades.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Review
Multitudes are generally smarter than their smartest members, declares New Yorker writer Surowiecki. With his theory of the inherent sagacity of large groups, Surowiecki seems to differ with Scottish journalist Charles Mackay's 1841 classic, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which dealt with such stupidities as the South Sea Bubble, tulip-mania, odd styles of whiskers, and dueling. Our 21st-century author admits that there are impediments and constraints to the intelligence of large groups, usually problems of cognition, coordination, and cooperation. A group must have knowledge, Surowiecki states: not extensive knowledge, but rudimentary comprehension of basic fact with harmonized behavior by individual members. Finally, individuals must go beyond self-interest for the good of all. That's how capital markets and Google's algorithm work, and how science isolated the SARS virus. Lack of the basics leads to traffic jams, the dot-com crash, and the Columbia shuttle mission disaster. If crowds are inherently clever, a reader may be prompted to ask, just how smart is a flock of turkeys? Not very smart, certainly, but smarter, Surowiecki would assert, than the smartest turkey individual. A school of herring is going to be more intelligent than any single fish in it. All this may be less than encouraging to hot-stock analysts, high-profile CEOs, and others who sell their personal expertise for a high salary, but the author argues persuasively that collective wisdom works better than the intelligent fiat of any individual. His wide-ranging study links psychology and game theory, economics and management theory, social science and public policy. And it advances Mackay's report from times when, as the Scot put it, "knavery gathered a rich harvest from cupidity." Valuable insights regarding information cascades, crowd herding, cognitive collaboration, and group polarization. There is some individual, independent wisdom to be found here. (Kirkus Reviews)
Customer Reviews
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.
Useful everyday
"The Wisdom of Crowds" is a well written blend of useful empirical evidence and memorable anecdotes. Throughout the book, I found myself realizing that Surowiecki has "proven" what before was felt to be intuition or instinctive behavior on everyone's part at some time, even daily.
Being in software development, and looking for ways to adopt Web 2.0 capabilities into products, I can tell you this book is highly regarded in my work ecosystem. Much of the science in this social engineering domain is still developing, I believe, and this book is a key early milestone in understanding how we behave and think in a connected world.
Inspired me to go to grad school
I read this book between my freshman and sophomore years as an undergrad at Carleton College. Now, years later, I'm a PhD student studying Information, which is an interdisciplinary field created in part to examine the phenomena Surowiecki so brilliantly describes: disparate pieces of information held by ordinary people aggregating into miraculously accurate predictions. This idea is also at the core of modern economics, in which prices are understood as conveying critical information more efficiently than any central authority ever could.
This is not an academic book. It's an exciting, anecdote-rich treatise, as good as anything Surowiecki's fellow New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell has ever put out. I would recommend this book to anyone.
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