The Wisdom of Crowds
May 27th, 2008 by Dave
This book, by New Yorker writer James Surowiecki counters popular notions of “the madness of crowds” with convincing arguments for why groups often come with more accurate predictions than experts. The basic theory is that the biases of individuals, if they act independently, cancel themselves out. When individuals in a group don’t act independently, that is they are unduly influenced by a few, the decisionmaking process is dysfunctional and Surowiecki offers up great insights what happens when the process is subverted - how the decisionmaking in a group of experts can result in very bad decisions (the Columbia disaster is a case in point).
