The Wisdom of Crowds | 
| Author: James Surowiecki
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  154 reviews
Sales Rank: 4160
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0385721706
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.38
EAN: 9780385721707
ASIN: 0385721706
Publication Date: August 16, 2005
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| • | Hardcover - The Wisdom of Crowds | | • | Paperback - The Wisdom of Crowds | | • | Paperback - Wisdom of Crowds | | • | Hardcover - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (Random House Large Print (Paper)) | | • | Hardcover - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations | | • | CD-ROM - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations | | • | Audio Cassette - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations | | • | Audio CD - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations | | • | Audio Download - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few (Unabridged) | | • | Audio Download - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few | | • | Kindle Edition - The Wisdom of Crowds |
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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.
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The Wisdom of Crowds
I
If, years hence, people remember anything about the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, they will probably remember the contestants' panicked phone calls to friends and relatives. Or they may have a faint memory of that short-lived moment when Regis Philbin became a fashion icon for his willingness to wear a dark blue tie with a dark blue shirt. What people probably won't remember is that every week Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? pitted group intelligence against individual intelligence, and that every week, group intelligence won.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was a simple show in terms of structure: a contestant was asked multiple-choice questions, which got successively more difficult, and if she answered fifteen questions in a row correctly, she walked away with $1 million. The show's gimmick was that if a contestant got stumped by a question, she could pursue three avenues of assistance. First, she could have two of the four multiple-choice answers removed (so she'd have at least a fifty-fifty shot at the right response). Second, she could place a call to a friend or relative, a person whom, before the show, she had singled out as one of the smartest people she knew, and ask him or her for the answer. And third, she could poll the studio audience, which would immediately cast its votes by computer. Everything we think we know about intelligence suggests that the smart individual would offer the most help. And, in fact, the "experts" did okay, offering the right answer--under pressure--almost 65 percent of the time. But they paled in comparison to the audiences. Those random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio picked the right answer 91 percent of the time.
Now, the results of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? would never stand up to scientific scrutiny. We don't know how smart the experts were, so we don't know how impressive outperforming them was. And since the experts and the audiences didn't always answer the same questions, it's possible, though not likely, that the audiences were asked easier questions. Even so, it's hard to resist the thought that the success of the Millionaire audience was a modern example of the same phenomenon that Francis Galton caught a glimpse of a century ago.
As it happens, the possibilities of group intelligence, at least when it came to judging questions of fact, were demonstrated by a host of experiments conducted by American sociologists and psychologists between 1920 and the mid-1950s, the heyday of research into group dynamics. Although in general, as we'll see, the bigger the crowd the better, the groups in most of these early
experiments--which for some reason remained relatively unknown outside of academia--were relatively small. Yet they nonetheless performed very well. The Columbia sociologist Hazel Knight kicked things off with a series of studies in the early 1920s, the first of which had the virtue of simplicity. In that study Knight asked the students in her class to estimate the room's temperature, and then took a simple average of the estimates. The group guessed 72.4 degrees, while the actual temperature was 72 degrees. This was not, to be sure, the most auspicious beginning, since classroom temperatures are so stable that it's hard to imagine a class's estimate being too far off base. But in the years that followed, far more convincing evidence emerged, as students and soldiers across America were subjected to a barrage of puzzles, intelligence tests, and word games. The sociologist Kate H. Gordon asked two hundred students to rank items by weight, and found that the group's "estimate" was 94 percent accurate, which was better than all but five of the individual guesses. In another experiment students were asked to look at ten piles of buckshot--each a slightly different size than the
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| Customer Reviews: Read 149 more reviews...
 Groups of People are Smart! August 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This author has done an outstanding job of proving his thesis that groups of people are smarter than the smartest person in the group. The book touches on markets, juries, and economics, and many more topics, furthering his main point. This book will persuade the reader that experts and loners do not make the best decisions, but groups of informed people do.
The Wisdom of The Wisdom of Crowds August 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This fascinating book it based on a simple, but counterintuitive premise--that a crowd of diverse people will almost always be smarter than any single expert. That is, take a group of people, some who may be educated, some who may be experts, and some who may be completely misinformed, and let them each independently solve a problem. Then, if you can take the average solution, it will be close to correct. Moreover, it will be closer than almost everyone else in the group. It's basically a bell-curve of knowledge, in which the exact center point would be the best guess.
Surowieki gives numerous examples, from betting markets, stock markets, psychological experiments, game theory, nature, artificial intelligence, economics and business. Two of the cases that really stand out to me are the search for a missing submarine, the Scorpion, in 1968, and the stock market's reaction to the Challenger disaster in 1986. In the case of the Scorpion, an enterprising naval officer named John Craven assembled a diverse team of men with a wide range of knowledge and had each guess, without consulting with one another, where the sub was. He then averaged their guesses. The sub was found 220 feet from that location. Similarly, after the Challenger crash, the stocks of most companies involved in the space program predictably took a quick nosedive. Most also quickly recovered, with the exception of Thiokol, the company that produced the O-rings on the rocket boosters. The stock market seemed to say that Thiokol was responsible, though all news at that point was that the cause was unknown. It wasn't until six months later, when the Presidential Commission released a report that the stock market was proven correct. It had been the O-rings.
Surowieki discusses different types of group decisions and how the theory applies to each. He also covers the many dangers that often befall groups making decisions leading to things like groupthink and stock market bubbles.
The Wisdom of Crowds is a radical theory, one that runs counter to much of what we believe in a democratic society and an economy based on the hierarchical org chart--namely in the power of the individual, the knowledge of our experts, and the wisdom of our leaders. Its implications for the way we manage our companies and our government is enormous. But after reading this book, it's hard to doubt its wisdom.
An Entry Level Review July 7, 2008
Afterthoughts: The title could have been "The Wisdom of One Man" because author James Surowiecki impressively exemplifies his theory - that large groups of people are collectively smarter than the smartest individuals themselves - through countless examples from past and present world affairs. Diverse and thought-provoking, Surowiecki's selection takes us from ocean floor to outer space, from a New Mexico bar to a field goal post, Detroit's first car to Zara's latest shipment, gangster films, traffic jams - the list goes on and on. This actually creates a conflict - you're learning so much from each paragraph that it's hard to remember what you read on the page prior. The reading experience is best described as "fleeting factual fun."
Takeaway: The knowledge must sink into the subconscious somehow because it can be applied instantaneously. For instance, barely into chapter three, I found myself jogging around Washington DC. Normally, I cross streets wherever and whenever I want. Citing the pedestrian's right of way, I basically run amuck with everyone else. But I quickly noticed that on these streets, no one else's feet were as arrogant as mine. Everyone was standing at the crosswalks waiting for the little white man to light up for permission to go. Were they just an obedient bunch of tourists OR were police officers in DC more likely to ticket jaywalkers? I opted to wait and walk with the wisdom of this crowd. I'll never know what could have happened had I chose to walk my way but I definitely felt like I had championed my inner intellect in knowing why I acted like I did. At the very least, it balanced out the feeling of inadequacy that resulted when I tried to pronounce the author's last name...
Kristen Zatina
[...]
 No charts, no data, small font June 27, 2008
This book has no data and no charts. Maybe for a lot of folks that is fine. But those of you like me-- who would expect a book with a title that sounds like a mathematical theory to at least have some statistical references-- should at least take this into your decision about whether you really want this book.
More Nuanced Than I Expected May 17, 2008
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.
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