Product Title:
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few & How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies & Nations
Description:
“Nobody in this world, as far as I know has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great mass of ordinary people.”-H. H. L. Mencken L. Mencken was wrong. fascinating in this book, researched New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki a deceptively simple idea that profound consequences has large groups of people who are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant-better at solving problems, fostering innovation, wise decisions into come, even predicting the future. This seemingly counterintuitive notion has endless & major implications for businesses, or how, as knowledge advanced, how economies are (or should) be organized & how we live our daily lives. With seemingly boundless erudition & in a wonderfully clear prose, Surowiecki span areas as diverse as popular culture, psychology, biology, ant, show economic behaviorism, artificial intelligence, military history & political theory, how this principle operates in the real world. Despite the complexity of his arguments, Surowiecki presents them in a wonderfully entertaining manner. The examples he uses are all down-to-earth, surprising & funny into think about. Why is the line that stands in her always the longest? Why is it that you buy a screw anywhere in the world & it is bought a bolt fit ten thousand miles away? Why is network television so awful? Did you meet someone in Paris on a given day, but had no way of contacting them, when & where you would take? Why are there traffic jams? What is the best way into win money on a game show? Why, if you go into a supermarket buy clock at 2:00 on a liter of orange juice, it is there waiting for you? What do Hollywood mafia movies have into teach us why companies exist? The Wisdom of Crowds is a brilliant but accessible biography of an idea, one with important lessons on how we live our lives, cause you choose our leaders, our business, & think about our world.
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations by James Surowiecki is essentially a thoroughly accessible and readable tome on Applied Behavioral Economics and Game Theory.
I know that does not sound too exciting, but this is really a fascinating book, which is something like a page turner, if you will have even the most rudimentary interest in the topic.
The premise is not new, those who are residents of Wall Street and know Robert Prechter’s oft-cited work with Elliott Wave Theory will know something of the underlying premises of the book. However, this term Surowiecki and moves far beyond the limited world when inventing (though he covers that as well) on the principles that he outlined to apply life in general-behavior in traffic, tracking and response to disease, navigating the Internet and so on.
The strength of the recovery capability Surowiecki, the foundations of his theoretical paradigm in easily understandable terms and examples to do. In addition, the book offers an excellent opening, a wonderful foundation as regards Applied Behavioral Economics and Game Theory offers in general.
On the other hand, Surowiecki tends to both sides of the street to play. He uses his “expert” position on the subject to configure his arguments and analysis that the weight to tip the evidence behind his theory in many cases. In other words, his familiarity with where he wants this to affect his decisions are examples. He also relies on too few examples in too many cases. For example, the world of Wall Street should be a wealth of examples that have made available as to the validity and the error inherent in his theory. His decisions seem to be made by hand, to offer maximum support while eliminating any element of contraindication at all.
So in the end, despite the fact that Surowiecki has written a wonderfully readable book, and some fascinating theoretical axioms, the book feels a bit too weird to put to honest with the subject in an applied arena. Surowiecki gives us much food for thought but also leaves us with reasons some doubt as to his objectivity and intellectual honesty. This fact reduces frm the value of the book, and this is a disgrace.
Rating: 5.3
known in 1906, Francis Galton, for his work on statistics and heredity, is a weight came on Competition in the assessment of the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. This encounter was the basis for his lifetime study challenge.
An ox was on display and six pence fair visitors were a stamped and numbered ticket, fill in their names and their guesses of the animal’s weight after it had been slaughtered and cut to buy. The best guess received a prize.
Eight hundred people tried their luck. They were diverse. Many had no knowledge of cattle, others were butchers and farmers. In this spirit, Galton was a perfect analogy for democracy. He wanted to prove to the average voter could only slightly. But to his surprise, when he averaged the guesses of the total came to 1197 pounds. After the ox had been slaughtered, it weighted 1198th James Surowiecki takes Galton
’s counterintuitive notion and explores its ramification for business, government, science and business. It is a book about the world as it is. It is also a book about the world as it could be. The majority of us believe that valuable nuggets of knowledge are concentrated in a few heads. We believe the solution to our complex problems is the right person. If all we have to do, Surowiecki demonstrates over and over, is ask the gathered crowd.
well-written book is divided into two parts. The first deals with the theory, the second offers case studies. Believe it or not, I found it to be a page-Turner. The author has that precious ability to the complex in simple, understandable and interesting to make prose.
I have long been an admirer of HL Mencken who once wrote: “No one is this world, as far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great mass of ordinary people.”
When I finished this book, I believed Mencken was wrong.
Rating: 5.5
This is one of the most entertaining and intellectually Engaging Books I have to get over a long time. Surowiecki has a gift for complex ideas accessible, and he has a wonderful eye for the telling anecdote. His dissertation on the intelligence of different groups from making, independent decision-makers at first seems counterintuitive, but at the end of the book it seems almost obvious, accumulates because of all the evidence Surowiecki in his name.
The book does cover a lot of ground in not very much space, and the pace of the argument is sometimes too fast. But through the line of argument is almost always clear, and the stories told Surowiecki are often unforgettable. The chapter on NASA’s mismanagement of the Columbia mission and the story of how a man named John Craven quoted collective wisdom to find a lost U-boat are particularly striking.
This is one of those books that I expect people will still talk about it and for years or even decades from now. There is also a book that I hope that a concrete impact on the way that people have to make decisions because the impact of Surowiecki argument are radical in the best way.
Rating: 5.5
After hearing about a book on “The Wisdom of Crowds”, I expected it to answer three Asked Questions =: Are crowds wise?, When they are clever? And why are they wise? Unfortunately, this book answers none of them.
Masses are wise? Surowiecki fills his pages with unconvincing anecdotes. He has only a handful of real studies and he buries them randomly about the book. Worse, sometimes Surowiecki describes a study that would lead to easy, but instead it simply, he tells us what the results would he expected. And although the book’s constant advocacy of dissent, Surowiecki offers no evidence that his argument against cuts. Instead, every failure of a crowd simply helps prove his thesis, since it fails because it violates one of its vaugely rules specified requirements.
When are crowds wise? Surowiecki offers only untested speculation. He claims they need “diversity, independence and a particular kind of decentralization” (oddly, by decentralization Surowiecki seems aggregation means). Surowiecki defines each of these never particularly clear, but there are many examples. This makes them useless as predictors of intelligence that makes a lot of the basic Surowiecki probably no attempt to test them.
Why are masses wise? Surowiecki does not even bother to answer that, although the first half of the books of the subtitle. He considers the question briefly on page 10, just some empty sayings (crowds are “information minus error stop”) and wonder in amazement (“who. .. Did Together we can make so much sense”) before they finally conclusion “You could say it’s as if we have programmed to collectively smart.” receives notice
Perhaps these weaknesses, Surowiecki all this out of the way in the first 40% of the book. The remainder is dedicated to larger collections of anecdotes Surowiecki compares to case studies. But even they disappoint. While Surowiecki has many stories, some are particularly enlightening or even memorable. Surowiecki does little analysis of the stories and not pull out larger lessons. He assumes he is right and only stops to look down on those who disagree.
I am particularly disappointed because I expected the book to be good. I love Surowiecki’s weekly column in the _New Yorker_ and I suspect he’s right about a lot. But instead of a convincing argument, Surowiecki only stirs together anecdotes from his columns. The result is not surprising, mental confusion.
One of the book teaches (though not unique) is the wisdom of _dissent_. You can smart by collecting dissent, a large group and hold from the members to talk with each other (since people are usually, but afraid to guarantee against the grain) by some members of the group is not vocally agree (as they to force the other, better justify their positions), or by forcing them to try because of all sides (to keep them from prejudging the issue to justify). All
makes it ironic that Surowiecki book not because of a lack of dissent. Nothing goes against the grain, he does not justify his positions, and he has clearly prejudged the question. It seems he needs a lot of way to him.
Rating: 5.1
Fascinated by the relative frequency of mention of this book in the new “Web-second 0-universe, I was disappointed that only a series of factoids to social experiments and found little in the way of analysis. From the beginning of the book invited the reader to agree with is the central thesis (that a lot of independent individuals are not better than a smaller elite group), and it feels like a lot of evidence carefully selected to reinforce the author’s argument. The book would have been twice as thin, without much of its substance have. I would read it as an easy business to qualify entertaining, but not quite convincing, if you are not part of the choir.
Rating: 5.2