The Wisdom of Crowds

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

After looking under the hood, I’ll zoom out to consider the societal implications of the Hype Machine and the three trends it perpetuates—for example, its implications for what’s known as the “wisdom of crowds.” Our ability to harness the wisdom of crowds and collective intelligence rests on three basic pillars: independence, diversity, and equality. The problem is that the Hype Machine erodes all three of these pillars and turns wisdom into madness. I’ll discuss how we can recapture the wisdom of crowds in Chapter 10. Next, I’ll remind us why we invented the Hype Machine in the first place by describing its positive potential in creating an incredible tsunami of productivity, innovation, social welfare, democratization, equality, caring, positivity, unity, and social progress.

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These new suggestions resulted in more flu searches, leading GFT to think there was more flu than actually existed. It’s a dramatic example of how software code determines the Hype Machine’s impact. Small algorithm changes helped turn a leading example of the wisdom of crowds into madness by overturning one of the three pillars on which the wisdom of crowds rests—by injecting interdependence into what were previously independent opinions. Wise crowds, the theory goes, typically require three things: independence, diversity, and equality. The problem is that the Hype Machine undermines all of them. Independence Crowds predict accurately because they cancel out individuals’ errors.

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I, for one, would welcome the diversity. Equality The wisdom of crowds is, at its core, a mathematical concept about patterns of collective or aggregated opinion, in teams, communities, and societies. But the math has evolved since Francis Galton first worked out our collective intelligence about ox weights. The most significant advance in our thinking about crowd wisdom in the last decade has been to realize (and formally consider) how crowds are organized into collectives by the networks that connect them. When we extended the wisdom of crowds to networks, we discovered the supreme importance of equality to wisdom.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 6 Nov 2012

You now know where you are most likely to get the most viewing pleasure. What Jelly Beans Reveal About the Wisdom of the Crowd The Best Buy example, where a collection of partially informed nonexperts did better than experts, shows our second decision mistake: relying on experts instead of the wisdom of crowds. Understanding why collectives are often wise—and sometimes very unwise—requires us to look under the hood at how the wisdom of crowds works. But before proceeding, give the question some thought. How is it that a group of nonexperts can predict better than the resident expert? Scott Page, a social scientist who has studied problem solving by groups, offers a very useful approach for understanding collective decision making.

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• Chapter 3, “The Expert Squeeze: Why Netflix Knows More Than Clerks Do About Your Favorite Films,” highlights our uncritical reliance on experts. Experts tend to know about very narrow fields, justifying a skeptical view of the claims and predictions they make. Increasingly, people can more effectively solve problems by making models of decisions using computers or by accessing the wisdom of crowds than by relying on experts. • Chapter 4, “Situational Awareness: How Accordion Music Boosts Sales of Burgundy,” underscores the crucial role of context in decision making. As much as we like to think of ourselves as objective, the behavior of those around us exerts extraordinary influence on our decisions.

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The stakes are especially high for consumer electronics firms because they generate so much of their revenue during the gift-giving season and the value of their inventory depreciates rapidly. The pressure is really on the internal experts at consumer-electronics giant Best Buy, one of a multitude of retailers that rely on specialists. So you can imagine the reaction when James Surowiecki, author of the best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds, strolled into Best Buy’s headquarters and delivered a startling message: a relatively uninformed crowd could predict better than the firm’s best seers.1 Surowiecki’s message resonated with Jeff Severts, an executive then running Best Buy’s gift-card business. Severts wondered whether the idea would really work in a corporate setting, so he gave a few hundred people in the organization some basic background information and asked them to forecast February 2005 gift-card sales.

The Wisdom of Crowds
by James Surowiecki
Published 1 Jan 2004

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS WHY THE MANY ARE SMARTER THAN THE FEW AND HOW COLLECTIVE WISDOM SHAPES BUSINESS, ECONOMIES, SOCIETIES, AND NATIONS JAMES SUROWIECKI DOUBLEDAY New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland CONTENTS Cover Page Title Page Dedication Introduction PART I 1. The Wisdom of Crowds 2. The Difference Difference Makes: Waggle Dances, the Bay of Pigs, and the Value of Diversity 3. Monkey See, Monkey Do: Imitation, Information Cascades, and Independence 4. Putting the Pieces Together: The CIA, Linux, and the Art of Decentralization 5. Shall We Dance?: Coordination in a Complex World 6.

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Yet despite all these limitations, when our imperfect judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent. This intelligence, or what I’ll call “the wisdom of crowds,” is at work in the world in many different guises. It’s the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It’s the reason it’s so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have. The wisdom of crowds has something to tell us about why the stock market works (and about why, every so often, it stops working).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Surowiecki, James, 1967– The wisdom of crowds : why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations / James Surowiecki. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Consensus (Social sciences) 2. Common good. I. Title. JC328.2.S87 2003 303.3'8—dc22 2003070095 eISBN 0-307-27505-1 Copyright © 2004 by James Surowiecki All Rights Reserved www.anchorbooks.com v1.0 THE WISDOM OF CROWDS WHY THE MANY ARE SMARTER THAN THE FEW AND HOW COLLECTIVE WISDOM SHAPES BUSINESS, ECONOMIES, SOCIETIES, AND NATIONS JAMES SUROWIECKI DOUBLEDAY New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

How we choose to deploy these powerful technologies makes all the difference, in the financial world just as in nuclear physics. That’s why we need the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. We need a new narrative to make sense of the wisdom of crowds, the madness of mobs, and evolution at the speed of thought. Our search for this new narrative begins with a terrible catastrophe. If markets truly reflect the wisdom of crowds, the market reaction to this catastrophe will illustrate just how wise crowds can be. CHAPTER 1 Are We All Homo economicus Now? TRAGEDY AND THE WISDOM OF CROWDS At 11:39 a.m. on Tuesday, January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger took off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

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And it implies that changing business conditions and adaptive responses are often more important drivers of investor behavior and market dynamics than enlightened self-interest—the wisdom of crowds is sometimes overwhelmed by the madness of mobs. This isn’t to say that rational economics is of no value; on the contrary, financial economics is still among the most highly sought-after fields of expertise on Wall Street (especially if the starting salaries of finance Ph.D.s are any indication). The madness of mobs eventually subsides and is replaced by the wisdom of crowds—at least until the next shock disrupts the status quo. From the adaptive markets perspective, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis isn’t wrong—it’s just incomplete.

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Moreover, the market was able to accomplish this without its buyers and sellers having any special technical expertise about aerospace disasters. A catastrophic explosion might suggest a failure in the fuel tanks, made by Morton Thiokol, which turned out to be the case. James Surowiecki, the business columnist for The New Yorker, called this an example of the wisdom of crowds.8 If the Efficient Markets Hypothesis is true—and the Challenger example certainly implies it is—the wisdom of crowds has enormously far-reaching consequences. A RANDOM WALK THROUGH HISTORY Markets are mysterious things to the layperson, and this is nothing new. People have been trying to understand the behavior of markets for hundreds if not thousands of years.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed
by Carl Honore
Published 29 Jan 2013

Chapter 9 – Crowdsource: The Wisdom of the Masses Wutbürger as German word of the year: Full list available from German Language Society at http://www.gfds.de/aktionen/wort-des-jahres/ Guessing the weight of an ox: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Random, 2005), pp. xii-xiii. Pinpointing vessel lost at sea: Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, pp. xx-xxi. Public identifies Mars craters: Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, p. 276. Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem: Based on my interview with Scott Page. John Harrison: For the whole story check out Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (London: Fourth Estate, 1998).

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Nearly half of financial services firms do not rescue floundering projects: From a 2011 report by the Economist Intelligence Unit entitled “Proactive response – How mature financial services firms deal with troubled projects.” Climbing corporate ladder by concealing bad news: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor, 2004), p. 205. Four of every five products perish in first year: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor, 2004), p. 218. Domino’s television commercials: Full details of the campaign available at http://www.pizzaturnaround.com/. Fedex apologizes: Blog post and video apology at http://blog.fedex.designcdt.com/absolutely-positively-unacceptable Soothing effect of apology: M.C.

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Chapter 11 – Devolve: Self-Help (in a Good Way) Starbucks’ Schultz accuses speculators: Debarati Roy, “Coffee Speculation Inflates Price, Hurts Demand, Starbucks Says,” Bloomberg, 18 March 2011. Demes solved local problems in Ancient Greece: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Random, 2005), p. 71. Subsidiarity and Catholicism: Don Fier, “The Principle of Subsidiarity and the ‘Welfare State’,” at CatholicCulture.org. Staff-owned companies more resilient and productive: From “Model Growth: Do Employee-Owned Businesses Deliver Sustainable Performance?” a 2010 report by Cass Business School for John Lewis Group. Research showing people work better when they feel ownership: Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, p. 210. Nurses at Georgetown University Hospital: V. Dion Haynes, “What Nurses Want,” Washington Post, 13 September 2008.

ucd-csi-2011-02
by Unknown
Published 1 Mar 2011

Perhaps the epicentre of this debate has been the Nature article favorably comparing the quality of Wikipedia entries to those in the Encyclopædia Britannica [5] and the robust response to this article from the Britannica owners 1 . The truth is that sometimes Wikipedia is effective at harnessing the wisdom of crowds to produce excellent authoritative articles and sometimes Wikipedia articles are quite poor – often because they are not the result of much collaboration. The best Wikipedia content as represented by Featured Articles2 and A and even GA class articles on the Wikipedia Quality Scale reach a very high standard 3 .

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In contrast to traditional encyclopedias, where authority derives from expert contributors, Wikipedia depends on collaboration and consensus to produce quality articles. There has been some controversial research that suggests that the quality of Wikipedia articles approaches that of established encyclopedias [5]. The famous quote from Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds is that ”under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent” [11]. The challenge when using Wikipedia is to determine whether the circumstances that produced the article in question were right or not. The first requirement for a Wikipedia article to be authoritative is the many eyes idea [8] – a significant group of contributors must have cooperated to produce the article.

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Practical graph isomorphism. Congressus Numerantium, 30(30):47–87, 1981. [10] R. Milo, S. Itzkovitz, N. Kashtan, R. Levitt, S. Shen-Orr, I. Ayzenshtat, M. Sheffer, and U. Alon. Superfamilies of evolved and designed networks. Science, 303(5663):1538, 2004. [11] J. Surowiecki, M.P. Silverman, et al. The wisdom of crowds. American Journal of Physics, 75:190, 2007. 6 

Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge
by William H. Inmon , Bonnie K. O'Neil and Lowell Fryman
Published 15 Feb 2008

It seems, however, that the socialization of knowledge is much broader than mini-collectives. 6.5 Socialization of Knowledge 6.5.1.1 97 Knowledge Socialization and the Wisdom of Crowds Don Tapscott, in Wikinomics, uses the term collective intelligence, which he defines as “the aggregate knowledge that emerges from the decentralized choices and judgments of groups of independent participants” (Tapscott, 2006, p. 41). Tapscott also discusses James Surowiecki’s provocative book, The Wisdom of Crowds, in which Surowiecki proposes that a crowd or a group is usually more accurate than an expert alone. The subtitle of his book is Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations.

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It touches upon many trends evident in the use of technology today, by businesspeople and technical people alike. Although we will discuss traditional metadata technology, we will also venture into technology subjects such as: ✦ Web 2.0 ✦ “The Semantic Web” ✦ Collaboration and Groupware ✦ “The Wisdom of Crowds” ✦ Data Management and Governance The proper exploitation of business metadata, by both technologists and businesspeople, can revolutionize the use of technology, making it the facilitator of enterprise knowledge that it was always meant to be. Technology can lend assistance to how business metadata can enable business to be conducted on many levels, from facilitating communication and fostering true understanding to providing background information so that appropriate decisions can be made.

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The existence of many abandoned searches could be an indicator that the taxonomy is hindering, not helping, the search process. 4.5.2.8 Self-Organizing Tags What if you let everyone create their own tags for documents (both their own and everyone else’s) and share them? Would this make searches easier for everyone? This self-organizing tagging structure is called a folksonomy, made popular by a Web site called del.icio.us. It follows the “Wisdom of Crowds” philosophy (made popular by the book of the same name) that a crowd is smarter than one person alone. This subject is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, Business Metadata Capture. 4.6 Summary Bad communications have dire consequences, ranging from major disasters that cause loss of life or billions of dollars to bad business decisions.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

By cleverly motivating everyone to not only look for balloons but also recruit others to the cause, this approach rapidly recruited a vast army of searchers. Together this group’s brute-force searching solved the problem far faster than almost anyone expected. I can’t imagine that this method would have been possible without the fast, cheap communication enabled by modern information technologies. THE WISDOM-OF-CROWDS EFFECT In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki popularized another reason why large groups can be smarter than small ones.9 He tells the story of the English statistician Sir Francis Galton, who, at a county fair in England in 1906, analyzed the results of a contest to guess the weight of an ox. It turned out that the average of all the guesses (1,197 pounds) was a remarkably accurate estimate of the actual weight (1,198 pounds).

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The basic principle behind why this works is that when many people with no particular bias guess the answer, they should be equally likely to make errors on the high side and on the low side of the correct answer. When you average their answers, the errors should cancel each other out, leaving an accurate estimate. Usually, the larger the crowd, the more accurate the estimate.10 Limitations of the Wisdom of Crowds Even though many people know about the wisdom-of-crowds effect, it turns out that this effect is more complicated than many readers of Surowiecki’s book realize. First, the average is probably not the right statistic to use. I’ve been doing a version of this experiment in my MIT classes for years, asking students to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar.

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Even though Surowiecki implied otherwise, Galton himself used the median, not the average, and a number of other researchers have similarly found that the median is a better way of combining a group’s guesses than the average.11 As Surowiecki notes, another very important condition for the success of the wisdom-of-crowds effect is that the guesses need to be independent of each other. If people are influenced by one another’s guesses, this introduces biases that make the whole process less effective. For instance, in one compelling experiment, when group members saw information about one another’s guesses, their guesses moved closer together, and they became more confident that their guesses were right… but their guesses actually became less accurate.12 In other words, when members of the group shared information, they became less diverse and less effective at predicting the correct answer.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 23 Aug 2006

See Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a LargeScale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” Computer Networks & ISDN System 30 (1998): 107–10, available at http://dbpubs .stanford.edu:8090/pub/1998–8. 6. Lorge et al., “A Survey of Studies Contrasting the Quality of Group Performance and Individual Performance, 1920–1957,” 344. 7. See Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, 5 (discussing jar experiment). Notes to Pages 17–24 / 233 8. Richard S. Bruce, “Group Judgments in the Field of Lifted Weights and Visual Discrimination,” Journal of Psychology 1 (1936): 117–21. 9. Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, xi–xiii. 10. Some affirmative evidence can be found in J. Scott Armstrong, “Combining Forecasts,” in Principles of Forecasting, ed. J. Scott Armstrong (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 419–20, 427, 433–35. 11.

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Is a flu pandemic going to strike Europe? Will an endangered species recover? A great deal of evidence suggests that under certain conditions, a promising way to answer such questions is this: Ask a large number of people and take the average answer. As emphasized by James Surowiecki in his engaging and illuminating The Wisdom of Crowds, large groups can, in a sense, be wiser than experts.1 When the relevant conditions are met, the average answer, which we might describe as the group’s “statistical answer,” is often accurate, where accuracy is measured by reference to objectively demonstrable facts. Here’s one example: In 2004, members of the Society for American Baseball Research were asked to predict the winners of the baseball playoffs.2 Remarkably, strong majorities of the 413 respondents correctly predicted all of the first-round winners: New York, Boston, Houston, and / 21 St.

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Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1: Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 13. 21. See Russell Hardin, “The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism,” in Political Rationality and Extremism, ed. Albert Breton et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3, 16. Chapter 1 / 1. See James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 2. John Zajc, “This Week in SABR” (Society for American Baseball Research, Cleveland, Ohio), Oct. 9, 2004 (Results of playoff prediction survey), available at http://www.sabr.org/ sabr.cfm?

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

PART II: THE FUNCTIONS OF FINANCE 5 Capital allocation Physical assets Housing Property and infrastructure Large companies Financing small and medium-size enterprises 6 The deposit channel Household wealth The payment system The activities of the deposit channel 7 The investment channel Stewardship A bias to action The role of the asset manager PART III: POLICY 8 Regulation The origins of financial regulation The Basel agreements Securities regulation The regulation industry What went wrong 9 Economic policy Maestro Financial markets and economic policy Pensions and inter-generational equity Consumer protection The British dilemma 10 Reform Principles of reform Robust systems and complex structures Other people’s money The reform of structure Personal responsibility 11 The future of finance Epilogue; The emperor’s guard’s new clothes Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index PROLOGUE The parable of the ox1 In 1906 the great statistician Francis Galton observed a competition to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair. Eight hundred people entered. Galton, being the kind of man he was, ran statistical tests on the numbers. He discovered that the average guess was extremely close to the weight of the ox. This story was told by James Surowiecki, in his entertaining book The Wisdom of Crowds.2 Not many people know the events that followed. A few years later, the scales seemed to become less and less reliable. Repairs would be expensive, but the fair organiser had a brilliant idea. Since attendees were so good at guessing the weight of an ox, it was unnecessary to repair the scales.

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Once weight-guessing competitions became the rage, some participants tried to cheat. They even tried to get privileged information from the farmer who had bred the ox. But there was fear that, if some people had an edge, others would be reluctant to enter the weight-guessing competition. With few entrants, you could not rely on the wisdom of crowds. The process of weight discovery would be damaged. So strict regulatory rules were introduced. The farmer was asked to prepare three-monthly bulletins on the development of his ox. These bulletins were posted on the door of the market for everyone to read. If the farmer gave his friends any other information about the beast, that information was also to be posted on the market door.

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We do not fly an aeroplane by consensus of the views of the passengers: instead we put our trust in a highly trained, skilled and well-informed pilot. The failure of the mortgage market is only the most conspicuous example of the consequences of replacing knowledgeable intermediation in favour of the supposed ‘wisdom of crowds’.6 The aggregation of inconsequential information across large numbers of people amounts not to the ‘wisdom of crowds’ but to not very much at all: the more so since the opinions that are aggregated are not independently formed. The crowds that clamoured for the crucifixion of Jesus, watched the tumbrels roll to the guillotine and stood to attention at Nuremberg rallies were not wise, but baying mobs reinforcing the ignorant opinions of their neighbours.

The Knowledge Illusion
by Steven Sloman
Published 10 Feb 2017

De Langhe, P. M. Fernbach, and D. R. Lichtenstein (2015). “Navigating by the Stars: Investigating the Actual and Perceived Validity of Online User Ratings.” Journal of Consumer Research 42: 817–830. The Wisdom of Crowds: F. Galton (1907). Vox Populi (the Wisdom of Crowds). First published in Nature 75(1949): 450–451. The topic is discussed in detail in J. Surowiecki (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Doubleday Anchor. within 1 percent of the ox’s true weight of 1,198 pounds: Despite frequent reports saying otherwise, he did not find that the mean weight was within 1 pound of the ox’s true weight.

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Their ratings do not correlate very well with the evaluations of true experts and are too high for beloved brands and high-priced items. Many consumers just do not have the expertise to accurately assess the quality of technical products like digital cameras and kitchen appliances. But crowdsourcing can be effective. This was first revealed by Francis Galton in 1907 in a paper entitled Vox Populi (The Wisdom of Crowds). He reports on a contest held at a farmers’ fair in Plymouth, England, to guess the weight of a fat ox. The contest was open to everyone willing to pay a small fee with the hope of making a guess close enough to the ox’s true weight to win a prize. Guesses came from experts like butchers and farmers as well as the general public.

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There are a lot of reasons to be critical of ballot measures voted on directly by citizenry. Our main concern is that such measures neglect the knowledge illusion. Individual citizens rarely know enough to make an informed decision about complex social policy even if they think they do. Giving a vote to every citizen can swamp the contribution of expertise to good judgment that the wisdom of crowds relies on. Reducing taxes sounds good in the abstract, but consider California’s Proposition 13. This ballot measure, passed by a direct vote of the people of California in 1978, was designed to limit taxes on residential, business, and agricultural property, reducing them from an average of 3 percent to a cap of 1 percent of a property’s sale value.

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
by Michael Nielsen
Published 2 Oct 2011

Furthermore, we don’t yet have a good understanding of how the human brain works, so the metaphor is in any case of limited use at best. If we’re going to understand how to amplify collective intelligence, we need to look beyond the metaphor of the collective brain. Many books and magazine articles have been written about collective intelligence. Perhaps the best-known example of this work is James Surowiecki’s 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, which explains how large groups of people can sometimes perform surprisingly well at problem solving. Surowiecki opens his book with a striking story about the scientist Francis Galton. In 1906, Galton was attending an English country fair, and among the fair’s attractions was a weight-judging contest, where people competed to guess the weight of an ox.

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Galton expected that most of the competitors would be far off in their estimates, and was surprised to learn that the average of all the competitors’ guesses (1,197 pounds) was just one pound short of the correct weight of 1,198 pounds. In other words, collectively, if one averaged the guesses, the crowd at the fair guessed the weight almost perfectly. Surowiecki’s book goes on to discuss many other ways we can combine our collective wisdom to surprisingly good effect. This book goes beyond The Wisdom of Crowds and similar works in two ways. First, our goal is to understand how online tools can actively amplify collective intelligence. That is, we’re not just interested in collective intelligence, per se, but in how to design tools that dramatically increase collective intelligence. Second, we’re not just discussing everyday problems like estimating the weight of an ox.

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The projects we’ve discussed have overcome these and similar problems: some have succeeded with flying colors (the Polymath Project), while others just barely succeeded (World Team deliberations sometimes teetered on the edge of breakdown because of lack of civility). Similar problems also afflict offline groups, and much has been written about the problems and how to overcome them—including books such as James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, Cass Sunstein’s Infotopia, and many other books about business and organizational behavior. While these practical problems are important, they can often be solved with good process. But no matter how good the process, there remains a fundamental dividing line: whether a shared praxis is available.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

The predictive capacity of the mass mood expressed by bloggers at large to foresee stock market behavior, as covered in Chapter 3 (in fact, related work comes from MIT’s aptly named Center for Collective Intelligence). Human minds aren’t the only things that can be effectively merged together. It turns out the aggregate effect emerging from a group extends also to nonhuman crowds—of predictive models. The Wisdom of Crowds . . . of Models The “wisdom of crowds” concept motivates ensembles because it illustrates a key principle of ensembling: Predictions can be improved by averaging the predictions of many. —Dean Abbott, Abbott Analytics Like a crowd of people, an ensemble of predictive models benefits from the same “collective intelligence” effect.5 Each model has its strengths and weaknesses.

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The Big Bad Wolf The End of the Rainbow Prediction Juice Far Out, Bizarre, and Surprising Insights Correlation Does Not Imply Causation The Cause and Effect of Emotions A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Diamonds Validating Feelings and Feeling Validated Serendipity and Innovation Investment Advice from the Blogosphere Money Makes the World Go ‘Round Putting It All Together Chapter 4: The Machine That Learns (modeling) Boy Meets Bank Bank Faces Risk Prediction Battles Risk Risky Business The Learning Machine Building the Learning Machine Learning from Bad Experiences How Machine Learning Works Decision Trees Grow on You Computer, Program Thyself Learn Baby Learn Bigger Is Better Overlearning: Assuming Too Much The Conundrum of Induction The Art and Science of Machine Learning Feeling Validated: Test Data Carving Out a Work of Art Putting Decision Trees to Work for Chase Money Grows on Trees The Recession—Why Microscopes Can’t Detect Asteroid Collisions After Math Chapter 5: The Ensemble Effect (ensembles) Casual Rocket Scientists Dark Horses Mindsourced: Wealth in Diversity Crowdsourcing Gone Wild Your Adversary Is Your Amigo United Nations Meta-Learning A Big Fish at the Big Finish Collective Intelligence The Wisdom of Crowds . . . of Models A Bag of Models Ensemble Models in Action The Generalization Paradox: More Is Less The Sky’s the Limit Chapter 6: Watson and the Jeopardy! Challenge (question answering) Text Analytics Our Mother Tongue’s Trials and Tribulations Once You Understand the Question, Answer It The Ultimate Knowledge Source Artificial Impossibility Learning to Answer Questions Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man A Better Mousetrap The Answering Machine Moneyballing Jeopardy!

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The winning team received the cash and the other team received nothing. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings reflected, “That 20 minutes was worth a million dollars.” Collective Intelligence With most things, the average is mediocrity. With decision making, it’s often excellence. — James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds Even competitions much simpler than a data mining contest can tap the wisdom held by a crowd. The magic of collective intelligence was lightheartedly demonstrated in 2012 at the Predictive Analytics World (PAW) conference. Charged with drawing attention to his analytics company on the event’s exposition floor, Gary Panchoo held a money-guessing contest.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 15 Nov 2016

However, betting markets run by Ladbrokes and Betfair showed a 70 percent probability that Remain would win. A certain type of foreign exchange market participant, the young London City banker who makes markets for his firm and clients, considered betting odds a distillation of the “wisdom of crowds” and priced sterling to reflect that ostensible wisdom. The wisdom of crowds concept was popularized in a 2004 book by that title written by James Surowiecki. The book included an overview of published behavioral research on the subject. The classic example involved guessing the number of jellybeans in a large jar. In a typical experiment, an average of mere guesses by a large number of everyday observers proved more accurate than the estimate of a single expert who might try to calculate the jar’s volume divided by the estimated volume of one jellybean with allowance for the irregular space between beans.

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One prominent foreign exchange market participant: Peter Spence, “Swiss Franc Surges After Scrapping Euro Ceiling,” The Telegraph, January 15, 2015, accessed August 9, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/currency/11347218/Swiss-franc-surges-after-scrapping-euro-peg.html. The wisdom of crowds concept: See James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations (New York: Anchor Books, 2005). This move was followed by an IMF study: “Staff Note for the G20: The Role of the SDR—Initial Considerations,” International Monetary Fund, July 15, 2016, accessed August 9, 2016, www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2016/072416.pdf.

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In a typical experiment, an average of mere guesses by a large number of everyday observers proved more accurate than the estimate of a single expert who might try to calculate the jar’s volume divided by the estimated volume of one jellybean with allowance for the irregular space between beans. In the crowd’s estimate, extreme guesses (“one” or “a million”) cancel out and the average of the remaining guesses is quite close to the actual number. Hence, the wisdom of crowds. Based on a naïve understanding of this science, the City bankers decided the everyman nature of betting markets produces a better forecast than the “expert” pollsters. Flaws in the London bankers’ logic are legion. Accuracy of betting odds in predicting an election is only as good as the correlation of views between the betting pool and the voting pool.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

The top salary of $450,000 was paid equally to the other members of the executive committee, who in most cases received bonues equal to 150 percent of their salary. Most employees are invited to share the riches. Google projected that stock option grants to employees in 2008 would total $1.1 billion. These grants confer millionaire status on many Googlers. Google’s approach to users is also egalitarian, from its reliance on “the wisdom of crowds” approach to search results to its demonstrated faith in “open source” systems. It is a close-knit culture. Google is not egalitarian about sharing information with outsiders. Ask just about any Googler basic questions—How many searches does Google perform each day? How many of its employees are non-Americans?

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Larry Page brilliantly conceived search, and Sergey Brin’s math skills were vital to its success. But Google also succeeded because it forged teams of engineers who were not territorial, who formed a network, communicating and sharing ideas, constantly trying them out in beta tests among users, relying on “the wisdom of crowds” to improve them. Building communities of engineers and hackers and users was the ethos they shared. They believed it was virtuous to share, for it embraced the construct framed by Eric Steven Raymond in a paper originally presented at a conference of Linux developers in 1997, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”

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More than a few newspapers tried to make the same deal and were rebuffed, said a senior executive at Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street journal’s Digital Network. “If they’re really about the user, they should want to say, ‘Some sources are better than others.’ We’ve had many conversations with Google. The bottom line from their perspective is that they are not interested. They are about algorithms and links and ‘the wisdom of crowds.’ But is that really best for the user?” And since the journal charges for its online edition and is behind a firewall, Google cannot offer full links to journal stories as they do with other newspapers. Amid declining sales, the anxiety of newspapers was inflamed. It was not difficult to incite newspaper owners.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley Phd
Published 20 Oct 2008

Family upbringing, religion, political persuasion, educational background, work experience—all help create the different framing lenses people use.6 Practiced expertise with a musical instrument, for example, can change the structure of the musician's primary motor cortex; London's experienced taxi drivers develop enlarged back ends of their hippocampi as a result of the intricate mental map of the city that they develop and store.7 James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds drives home his counterintuitive thesis that multiple viewpoints from individuals with a wide range of backgrounds, rather than the restricted viewpoints of experts or specialists, are crucial in reaching informed decisions on complex topics. Such successful problem solving almost certainly reflects the value of using a wide variety of framing lenses.

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But if we socialize only with members of our own particular religious persuasion; if we work in an environment with only one-sided political input; if we read only Web sites or other news sources by writers who echo our views, then we strongly reinforce the emotional, rather than logical, basis for our beliefs. After all—if “everyone” we know believes what we believe, we find an emotional reinforcement that helps close off consideration of other perspectives. (So much for the wisdom of crowds.) Aren't there times when we as citizens should respond with healthy emotions, to fight for what we believe in, especially when we feel policies are causing people actual harm? Of course. But simply looking at the research results, one must conclude that people's first emotional responses about what's wrong, who is to blame, or how to proceed, particularly in relation to complex issues, must always—always—be considered suspect.20 There is no simple algorithm for teasing rationality from emotion.

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By looking at Mao's own thoughts as he described them in his commentaries, it's clear that Mao—that most Machiavellian of men—would have answered the question “One should take action only when sure it is morally right,” for example, with the seemingly low-Mach “strongly agree.”90 Mao's commentaries clearly stated his feeling that his own moral codes were the most valuable. Given his profound narcissism, we can reasonably assume Mao felt morally justified in doing whatever he wanted. Remember the “wisdom of crowds” and the value of using different framing lenses to come to the optimal solution to complex problems? By stifling dissent and ensuring all eyes were turned only to him for all decisions, Mao effectively made a hundred-million-fold cut in the effectiveness of planning and governing in revolutionary China.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World
by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg
Published 15 Nov 2010

More generally, how much influence a bettor’s beliefs have on the state price depends on how much of the aggregate wealth is controlled by that bettor. 22.3. AGGREGATE BELIEFS AND THE “WISDOM OF CROWDS” 713 So it really does make sense to think of the state prices as the market’s averaging of individual beliefs — or, in the more typical phrasing, they can be interpreted as the market’s beliefs. For our horse-race market (with the logarithmic utility function) this market probability is the weighted average of the investors’ beliefs, with each investor’s weight determined by his share of the wealth.3 The Relationship to the “Wisdom of Crowds.” What does this analysis say about the intuition popularized by recent books such as James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds [377]?

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 10.6 Advanced Material: A Proof of the Matching Theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 10.7 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310 11 Network Models of Markets with Intermediaries 319 11.1 Price-Setting in Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 11.2 A Model of Trade on Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 11.3 Equilibria in Trading Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 11.4 Further Equilibrium Phenomena: Auctions and Ripple Effects . . . . . . . . 334 11.5 Social Welfare in Trading Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338 11.6 Trader Profits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 11.7 Reflections on Trade with Intermediaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 11.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 12 Bargaining and Power in Networks 347 12.1 Power in Social Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 12.2 Experimental Studies of Power and Exchange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350 12.3 Results of Network Exchange Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 12.4 A Connection to Buyer-Seller Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356 12.5 Modeling Two-Person Interaction: The Nash Bargaining Solution . . . . . . 357 12.6 Modeling Two-Person Interaction: The Ultimatum Game . . . . . . . . . . . 360 12.7 Modeling Network Exchange: Stable Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362 12.8 Modeling Network Exchange: Balanced Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366 12.9 Advanced Material: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Bargaining . . . . . . . 369 12.10Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376 IV Information Networks and the World Wide Web 381 13 The Structure of the Web 383 13.1 The World Wide Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384 13.2 Information Networks, Hypertext, and Associative Memory . . . . . . . . . . 386 13.3 The Web as a Directed Graph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394 13.4 The Bow-Tie Structure of the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 13.5 The Emergence of Web 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400 13.6 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403 6 CONTENTS 14 Link Analysis and Web Search 405 14.1 Searching the Web: The Problem of Ranking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 14.2 Link Analysis using Hubs and Authorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 14.3 PageRank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414 14.4 Applying Link Analysis in Modern Web Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420 14.5 Applications beyond the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423 14.6 Advanced Material: Spectral Analysis, Random Walks, and Web Search . . . 425 14.7 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437 15 Sponsored Search Markets 445 15.1 Advertising Tied to Search Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445 15.2 Advertising as a Matching Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 448 15.3 Encouraging Truthful Bidding in Matching Markets: The VCG Principle . . 452 15.4 Analyzing the VCG Procedure: Truth-Telling as a Dominant Strategy . . . . 457 15.5 The Generalized Second Price Auction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 460 15.6 Equilibria of the Generalized Second Price Auction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 464 15.7 Ad Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467 15.8 Complex Queries and Interactions Among Keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469 15.9 Advanced Material: VCG Prices and the Market-Clearing Property . . . . . 470 15.10Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486 V Network Dynamics: Population Models 489 16 Information Cascades 491 16.1 Following the Crowd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491 16.2 A Simple Herding Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493 16.3 Bayes’ Rule: A Model of Decision-Making Under Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . 497 16.4 Bayes’ Rule in the Herding Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 502 16.5 A Simple, General Cascade Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 504 16.6 Sequential Decision-Making and Cascades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508 16.7 Lessons from Cascades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511 16.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513 17 Network Effects 517 17.1 The Economy Without Network Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518 17.2 The Economy with Network Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522 17.3 Stability, Instability, and Tipping Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525 17.4 A Dynamic View of the Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527 17.5 Industries with Network Goods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 534 17.6 Mixing Individual Effects with Population-Level Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . 536 17.7 Advanced Material: Negative Externalities and The El Farol Bar Problem . 541 17.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 549 CONTENTS 7 18 Power Laws and Rich-Get-Richer Phenomena 553 18.1 Popularity as a Network Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553 18.2 Power Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555 18.3 Rich-Get-Richer Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 557 18.4 The Unpredictability of Rich-Get-Richer Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 559 18.5 The Long Tail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561 18.6 The Effect of Search Tools and Recommendation Systems . . . . . . . . . . . 564 18.7 Advanced Material: Analysis of Rich-Get-Richer Processes . . . . . . . . . . 565 18.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 VI Network Dynamics: Structural Models 571 19 Cascading Behavior in Networks 573 19.1 Diffusion in Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573 19.2 Modeling Diffusion through a Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 19.3 Cascades and Clusters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583 19.4 Diffusion, Thresholds, and the Role of Weak Ties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 588 19.5 Extensions of the Basic Cascade Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 590 19.6 Knowledge, Thresholds, and Collective Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593 19.7 Advanced Material: The Cascade Capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597 19.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613 20 The Small-World Phenomenon 621 20.1 Six Degrees of Separation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 621 20.2 Structure and Randomness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 622 20.3 Decentralized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 626 20.4 Modeling the Process of Decentralized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629 20.5 Empirical Analysis and Generalized Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 632 20.6 Core-Periphery Structures and Difficulties in Decentralized Search . . . . . . 638 20.7 Advanced Material: Analysis of Decentralized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . 640 20.8 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 652 21 Epidemics 655 21.1 Diseases and the Networks that Transmit Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 655 21.2 Branching Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 657 21.3 The SIR Epidemic Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 660 21.4 The SIS Epidemic Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 666 21.5 Synchronization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 669 21.6 Transient Contacts and the Dangers of Concurrency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 672 21.7 Genealogy, Genetic Inheritance, and Mitochondrial Eve . . . . . . . . . . . . 676 21.8 Advanced Material: Analysis of Branching and Coalescent Processes . . . . . 682 21.9 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 695 8 CONTENTS VII Institutions and Aggregate Behavior 699 22 Markets and Information 701 22.1 Markets with Exogenous Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 702 22.2 Horse Races, Betting, and Beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 704 22.3 Aggregate Beliefs and the “Wisdom of Crowds” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 710 22.4 Prediction Markets and Stock Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 714 22.5 Markets with Endogenous Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 717 22.6 The Market for Lemons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 719 22.7 Asymmetric Information in Other Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 724 22.8 Signaling Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 728 22.9 Quality Uncertainty On-Line: Reputation Systems and Other Mechanisms . 729 22.10Advanced Material: Wealth Dynamics in Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 732 22.11Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 740 23 Voting 745 23.1 Voting for Group Decision-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 745 23.2 Individual Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 747 23.3 Voting Systems: Majority Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 750 23.4 Voting Systems: Positional Voting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 23.5 Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 758 23.6 Single-Peaked Preferences and the Median Voter Theorem . . . . . . . . . . 760 23.7 Voting as a Form of Information Aggregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 766 23.8 Insincere Voting for Information Aggregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 768 23.9 Jury Decisions and the Unanimity Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 771 23.10Sequential Voting and the Relation to Information Cascades . . . . . . . . . 776 23.11Advanced Material: A Proof of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem . . . . . . . . 777 23.12Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 782 24 Property Rights 785 24.1 Externalities and the Coase Theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 785 24.2 The Tragedy of the Commons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 790 24.3 Intellectual Property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 793 24.4 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 796 Chapter 1 Overview Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex “connectedness” of modern society.

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A core principle of Web 2.0 is that on-line Web sites and services can become more appealing to users — and in fact, often genuinely more valuable to them — as their audiences grow larger. When and how this process takes place forms a central focus in chapters from the next two parts of the book, particularly Chapters 16, 17, and 19. • “The wisdom of crowds.” The collaborative authoring of an encyclopedia by millions on Wikipedia, the elevation of news content by group evaluation on digg, the fact that photos of breaking news now often appear on Flickr before they do in the mainstream news, and many similar developments highlighted the ways in which the audience of a Web 2.0 site — each contributing specific expertise and sometimes misinformation —can produce a collective artifact of significant value.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Knowing when the market is being brilliantly rational and when it is being ludicrously irrational is learned from experience and an extensive study of financial history. The wisdom of crowds aggregation process in the market generates an “accurate” answer by transferring (partial) domain-specific knowledge from individuals to the collective. A popular example of the wisdom of crowds phenomenon is the analysis of a 1906 ox-weighing contest, written by Sir Francis Galton, titled “Vox Populi.”22 Three key tenets of market efficiency pertain to information, and the wisdom of crowds implements those tenets under six conditions. For each of the following, only a sufficient or threshold number of investors, not all, is required for the condition to hold. 1.

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As Graham said, “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”20 Ironically, to generate alpha, investors need the markets to be efficient—eventually. The market needs to realize that it has made an error and then to correct it. Otherwise, mispricings would persist forever, and in such a market, no one could reliably outperform. Market Efficiency and the Wisdom of Crowds Information is not a single big thing that’s locked in a safe. It exists in bits and pieces scattered around the world. Everybody has a little piece of the total information available. If information is widely scattered and diffuse, then no single individual is going to have much information relative to the total.

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If information is widely scattered and diffuse, then no single individual is going to have much information relative to the total. In fact, regardless of how smart or informed a person is, any given individual has only a fraction of the information available to the entire market at any point in time. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it, and incorporate it into prices. Through the wisdom of crowds and the power of efficient markets, the current price of a security swiftly reflects the market’s collective assessment of the likelihood of possible, plausible, and probable future events. (To understand and appreciate the incredible information-gathering capability of the stock market, study Michael Maloney and J.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Just as James Surowiecki says, there is a type of expertise that can come from people who are in the same place without being any further organized. The Wisdom of Crowds opens with what is now the canonical example. At a county fair in the eighteenth century it was noticed that if you wanted to know how much a particular ox weighs, the average of the total guesses of fair-goers was likely to be closer than the estimate of any particular expert. Surowiecki’s book is careful to lay out the precise conditions under which crowds do better than experts—it depends on there being a diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and a way to derive a collective decision—but almost as soon as he published it, “the wisdom of crowds” was used to refer to everything from choosing presidents, to the making of best-selling fashions, to voting for your favorite on American Idol.

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Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2004). An excerpt of the chapter titled “The New York City Draft Riots of 1863” can be found at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html. 11 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Basic Books, 2003). 12 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (Random House, 2004). 13 Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired 14, no. 6 (June 2006), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html. See also Howe’s Crowdsourcing (Crown Business, 2008). 14 “Darpa Network Challenge: We Have a Winner,” https://network-challenge.darpa.mil/Default.aspx. 15 “How It Works” (MIT), 2009, http://balloon.mit.edu/mit/payoff/. 16 Darren Murph, “MIT-Based Team Wins DARPA’s Red Balloon Challenge, Demonstrates Power of Social Networks (and Cold Hard Cash),” December 6, 2009, http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/06/mit-based-team-wins-darpas-red-balloon-challenge-demonstrates/. 17 See Jonathan Zittrain’s “Minds for Sale” video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?

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See also Books and book publishing Paper-based tools Parenting experts Patent Office, US PatientsLikeMe.com Pavement performance Peer-review journals Perception, facts and Permission-free knowledge Philosophy defining and quantifying knowledge information overload reality unresolved knowledge Pinker, Steven Planetary Skin initiative Plato PLoS One online journal Pogue, David Polio vaccine Politics Politifact.com Popper, Karl Population growth, Malthusian theory of Pornography Postmodernism Pragmatism PressThink.org Primary Insight Principles of Geology (Lyell) Prize4Life Protein folding ProteomeCommons.org Pseudo-science Public Library of Science (PLoS) Punchcard data Pyramid, knowledge Pyramid of organizational efficiency Quora Racial/ethnic identity Ramanujan, Srinivasa RAND Corporation Random Hacks of Kindness Rauscher, Francis Raymond, Eric Reagan, Ronald Reality Reason as the path to truth and knowledge critical debate on unresolved knowledge Reliability Repositories, open access Republic of Letters Republican Party Republic.com (Sunstein) Revolution in the Middle East Rheingold, Howard Richards, Ellen Swallow Riesman, David Robustness “The Rock” (Eliot) Rogers, William Rorty, Richard Rosen, Jay Roskam, Peter Rushkoff, Douglas Russia: Dogger Bank Incident Salk, Jonas Sanger, Larry Schmidt, Michael School shootings Science amateurs in crowdsourcing expertise failures in goals of hyperlinked inflation of scientific studies interdisciplinary approaches media relations Net-based inquiry open filtering journal articles open-notebook overgeneration of scientific facts philosophical and professional differences among scientists public and private realms scientific journals transformation of scientific knowledge Science at Creative Commons Science journal Scientific journals Scientific management Scientific method Self-interest: fact-based knowledge Semantic Web Seneca Sensory overload Sexual behavior The Shallows (Carr) Shapiro, Jesse Shared experiences Shilts, Randy Shirky, Clay Shoemaker, Carolyn Simplicity in scientific thought Simulation of physical interactions Slashdot.com Sloan Digital Sky Survey Smart mobs “Smarter planet” initiative Smith, Arfon Smith, Richard Soccer Social conformity Social networks crowdsourcing expertise Middle East revolutions pooling expertise scaling social filtering Social policy: social role of facts Social reform Dickens’s antipathy to fact-based knowledge global statistical support for Bentham’s ideas Social tools: information overload Society of Professional Journalists Socrates Software defaults Software development, contests for Sotomayor, Sonia Source transparency Space Shuttle disaster Spiro, Mary Sports Sprinkle, Annie Standpoint transparency Statistics emergence of Hunch.com Stopping points for knowledge The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) Stupidity, Net increasing Sub-networks Suel, Gurol Sunlight Foundation Sunstein, Cass Surowiecki, James Systems biology Tag cloud Tagging Tatalias, Jean Taylor, Frederick Wilson TechCamps Technodeterminism Technology easing information overload Technorati.com Television, homophily and Temptation of hyperlinks Think tanks Thoreau, Henry David The Tipping Point (Gladwell) Todd, Mac Toffler, Alvin TopCopder Topic-based expertise Torvalds, Linus Traditional knowledge Tranche Transparency hyperlinks contributing to objectivity and of the Net Open Government Initiative Transparency and Open Government project Triangular knowledge Trillin, Calvin Trust: reliability of information Trust-through-authority system Truth elements of knowledge reason as the path to value of networked knowledge Twitter Tyme, Mae Unnailing facts Updike, John USAID UsefulChem notebook Vaccinations Verizon Vietnam Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Wales, Jimmy Wallace, Alfred Russel Walter, Skip Washington Post Watson, James Welch, Jack Welfare The WELL (The Whole Earth’Lectronic Link) Whole Earth Catalog Wikipedia editorial policy LA Times wikitorial experiment policymaking Virginia Tech shootings Wikswo, John Wilbanks, John Wired magazine The Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki) Wise crowds Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wolfram, Stephen WolframAlpha.com World Bank World Cup World War I Wurman, Richard Saul Wycliffe, John York, Jillian YourEncore Zappa, Frank Zeleny, Milan Zettabyte Zittrain, Jonathan Zuckerman, Ethan a I’m leaving this as an unsupported idea because it’s not the point of this book.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

When you sign up, you become part of a hub that gives you access to the knowledge of millions of other users. The notion that the collective intelligence of thousands, even millions, of people can produce the results and knowledge that smaller groups and individuals can’t has been much discussed, probably best in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds. But what’s new is applying collective intelligence to make product service systems more attractive than individual ownership. The in-depth knowledge accumulated through repeated consumer interactions presents a significant opportunity for businesses to form deeper relationships with customers and manage inventory more efficiently.

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Meeting to decide these things would defeat the purpose of making life easier. And they didn’t want to create any kind of committee or nominate a leader to organize the effort, as that would be resorting back to the kind of centralized authority they were trying to avoid. As James Surowiecki writes in The Wisdom of Crowds, “How can people voluntarily—that is, without anyone telling them what to do—make their actions fit together in an efficient and orderly way?”24 With this need in mind, Stephanie launched the online version of the venture, WeCommune.com, in early 2009. A simple yet innovative platform, it makes it easier for people to come together and share resources in ways that fit into modern lifestyles.

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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin, 2008). Slade, Giles. Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Harvard University Press, 2006). Stiglitz, Joseph. Making Globalization Work (W. W. Norton & Company., 2007). Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Henry Holt, 1999). Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor Books, 2005). Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio, 2008). Thackara, John. In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (MIT Press, 2006). Thaler, Richard, and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin, 2009).

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance)
by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
Published 28 Sep 2015

His experiments with pigs failed miserably, and he was forced to conclude that his work had raised more questions than it answered. Towards the end of his long life he wrote, ‘We are surrounded – nay crushed – by a mass of details demanding explanation.’ Today most neuroscientists would say we still are. Why should you rely on the ‘wisdom of crowds’? You shouldn’t. The growing consensus among mathematicians and statisticians is that the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – the idea that lots of people can produce a better answer than a few people – is a myth. Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton carried out the archetypal wisdom-of-crowds experiment in 1906. He went to a village fair and offered a prize to whoever could guess the weight of an ox.

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What is the name of the Queen’s official residence? How many English kings named Henry have there been? What dynasty did Henry VII and Henry VIII belong to? Which king of Scotland succeeded Macbeth? Which dog stood by his master’s grave for 14 years? How did Pavlov get dogs to salivate? Why should you rely on the ‘wisdom of crowds’? Why should you avoid feral pigeons? How hot does water have to be to wash the bacteria off your hands? What would happen if the world suddenly stopped spinning? What is the deepest canyon in the USA? Where is the world’s tallest statue of Jesus Christ? What species of tree is the tallest ever?

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A 2004 study showed that a varied group of problem-solvers made a better collective guess than a group of like-minded ‘experts’. It seems that if you want to improve the accuracy of a crowd’s estimate, add individuals who hold opinions that are actively opposed to the general consensus. It’s possible that the statisticians currently debunking the ‘wisdom of crowds’ are themselves a crowd whose judgments are suspect because they listen to each other. Though, paradoxically, that would be an argument both for and against the concept … Why should you avoid feral pigeons? Don’t bother – they’re not as germy as you think. Despite much scaremongering about pigeons, there’s almost nothing you can catch from them.

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data
by David Spiegelhalter
Published 2 Sep 2019

• Expected frequencies promote understanding and an appropriate sense of importance. • Odds ratios arise from scientific studies but should not be used for general communication. • Graphics need to be chosen with care and awareness of their impact. CHAPTER 2 Summarizing and Communicating Numbers. Lots of Numbers Can we trust the wisdom of crowds? In 1907 Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and polymath originator of identification using fingerprints, weather forecasts and eugenics,* wrote a letter to the prestigious science journal Nature about his visit to the Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in the port city of Plymouth.

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He got hold of 787 of the tickets that had been filled out and chose the middle value of 1,207 lb (547 kg) as the democratic choice, ‘every other estimate being condemned as too high or too low by the majority of voters’. The dressed weight turned out to be 1,198 lb (543 kg), which was remarkably close to his choice based on the 787 votes.1 Galton titled his letter ‘Vox Populi’ (voice of the people), but this process of decision-making is now better known as the wisdom of crowds. Galton carried out what we might now call a data summary: he took a mass of numbers written on tickets and reduced them to a single estimated weight of 1,207 lb. In this chapter we look at the techniques that have been developed in the subsequent century for summarizing and communicating the piles of data that have become available.

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The true value was… 1,616.2 Just one person guessed this precisely, 45% of people guessed below 1,616, and 55% guessed above, so there was little systematic tendency for the guesses to be either on the high or low side—we say the true value lay at the 45th percentile of the empirical data distribution. The median, which is the 50th percentile, over-estimated the true value by 1,775–1,616 = 159, so relative to the true answer the median was an over-estimate by around 10%, and only around 1 in 10 people got that close. So the wisdom of crowds was fairly good, getting closer to the truth than 90% of the individual people. Describing the Spread of a Data Distribution It is not enough to give a single summary for a distribution—we need to have an idea of the spread, sometimes known as the variability. For example, knowing the average adult male shoe size will not help a shoe firm decide the quantities of each size to make.

The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data
by David Spiegelhalter
Published 14 Oct 2019

Expected frequencies promote understanding and an appropriate sense of importance. Odds ratios arise from scientific studies but should not be used for general communication. Graphics need to be chosen with care and awareness of their impact. CHAPTER 2 Summarizing and Communicating Numbers. Lots of Numbers Can we trust the wisdom of crowds? In 1907 Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and polymath originator of identification using fingerprints, weather forecasts and eugenics,fn1 wrote a letter to the prestigious science journal Nature about his visit to the Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in the port city of Plymouth.

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He got hold of 787 of the tickets that had been filled out and chose the middle value of 1,207 lb (547 kg) as the democratic choice, ‘every other estimate being condemned as too high or too low by the majority of voters’. The dressed weight turned out to be 1,198 lb (543 kg), which was remarkably close to his choice based on the 787 votes.1 Galton titled his letter ‘Vox Populi’ (voice of the people), but this process of decision-making is now better known as the wisdom of crowds. Galton carried out what we might now call a data summary: he took a mass of numbers written on tickets and reduced them to a single estimated weight of 1,207 lb. In this chapter we look at the techniques that have been developed in the subsequent century for summarizing and communicating the piles of data that have become available.

…

The true value was … 1,616.2 Just one person guessed this precisely, 45% of people guessed below 1,616, and 55% guessed above, so there was little systematic tendency for the guesses to be either on the high or low side – we say the true value lay at the 45th percentile of the empirical data distribution. The median, which is the 50th percentile, over-estimated the true value by 1,775 – 1,616 = 159, so relative to the true answer the median was an over-estimate by around 10%, and only around 1 in 10 people got that close. So the wisdom of crowds was fairly good, getting closer to the truth than 90% of the individual people. Describing the Spread of a Data Distribution It is not enough to give a single summary for a distribution – we need to have an idea of the spread, sometimes known as the variability. For example, knowing the average adult male shoe size will not help a shoe firm decide the quantities of each size to make.

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data
by Michael P. Lynch
Published 21 Mar 2016

To name the most obvious: the more rankings, the more reliable we tend to take the average score to be (1,000 rankings with an average of 4 stars is far more impressive than three rankings of 4.5 stars). Of course, we also know that the fact that many people like something doesn’t mean we’ll like it too. The fact that we so often trust such rankings—at least, in the right conditions—points out that we already tend to abide by the main lesson of James Surowiecki’s 2004 landmark book The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki’s point was that in certain conditions, the aggregated answers of large groups could be wiser—could display more knowledge—than an individual, even an individual expert. Suroweicki’s most famous example comes from the work of Francis Galton, a British scientist. Galton examined a competition in which 787 contestants at a country fair estimated the weight of an ox.

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After all, the interviewer example presumes that the tacit commitment in question is itself a product of the individuals’ beliefs. If so, then perhaps the best we can say is that what we can loosely call the group’s implicit commitment “supervenes” or is a product of the individuals’ commitments. 8. Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, xii. 9. David Leonhardt, “When the Crowd Isn’t Wise,” New York Times, July 7, 2012. 10. Nate Silver, “The Virtues and Vices of Election Prediction Markets,” New York Times, October 24, 2012. 11. I was helped to see these points in discussions with Sandy Goldberg and Nate Sheff. The example in the text is similar to that in Goldberg, “The Division of Epistemic Labor,” 117. 12.

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Strawson, P. F. Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. Sunstein, Cass R. Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. _________. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Random House, 2005. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2012. Uhlmann, Eric L., David Pizarro, David Tannenbaum, and Peter Ditto. “The Motivated Use of Moral Principles.” Judgment and Decision Making 4, no. 6 (2009): 476–91.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

But in the case of prediction markets, the prices are explicitly interpreted as making a prediction about the outcome in question—for example, the probability of an Obama victory on the eve of Election Day was predicted by the Iowa Electronic Markets to be 92 percent. In generating predictions like this one, prediction markets exploit a phenomenon that New Yorker writer James Surowiecki dubbed the “wisdom of crowds”—the notion that although individual people tend to make highly error-prone predictions, when lots of these estimates are averaged together, the errors have a tendency to cancel out; hence the market is in some sense “smarter” than its constitutents. Many such markets also require participants to bet real money, thus people who know something about a particular topic are more likely to participate than people who don’t.

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As a result, ratings analysts and traders alike collectively placed too low a probability on a nationwide drop in real-estate values, and so badly underestimated the risk of mortgage defaults and foreclosure rates.14 At first, it might seem that this would have been a perfect application for prediction markets, which might have done a better job of anticipating the crisis than all the “quants” working in the banks. But in fact it would have been precisely these people—along with the politicians, government regulators, and other financial market specialists who also failed to anticipate the crisis—who would have been participating in the prediction market, so it’s unlikely that the wisdom of crowds would have been any help at all. Arguably, in fact, it was precisely the “wisdom” of the crowd that got us into the mess in the first place. So if models, markets, and crowds can’t help predict black swan events like the financial crisis, then what are we supposed to do about them? A second problem with methods that rely on historical data is that big, strategic decisions are not made frequently enough to benefit from a statistical approach.

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Modeling Contagion Through Facebook News Feed.” Third International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, at San Jose, CA. AAAI Press. Sunstein, Cass R. 2005. “Group Judgments: Statistical Means, Deliberation, and Information Markets.” New York Law Review 80 (3):962–1049. Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. New York: Doubleday. Svenson, Ola. 1981. “Are We All Less Risky and More Skillful Than Our Fellow Drivers?” Acta Psychologica 47 (2):143–48. Tabibi, Matt. 2009. “The Real Price of Goldman’s Giganto-Profits.”

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World
by James Miller
Published 17 Sep 2018

“Take away from these … wills the pluses and minuses”: Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 3, in Œuvres complètes, 3:371. According to Condorcet’s mathematical argument: See Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 70–75. “the wisdom of crowds”: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday, 2004). “I saw people pass by, arm in arm”: Louis-Sébestien Mercier, Paris pendant la Révolution (1789–1798), ou, Le Nouveau Paris (Paris, 1862), bk. 3, chap. 82. “To form a constitution for a territory”: An Authentic Copy of the New Plan of the French Constitution, as Presented to the National Convention, by the Committee of Constitution, to Which Is Prefixed the Speech of M.

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Far more emphatically than Condorcet, Rousseau also respected the role that sentiments and the passions played in public life. Rousseau’s ambivalence about reason would eventually reappear—with a vengeance—in the Convention’s debates over Condorcet’s draft constitution, which represented a remarkable attempt to institutionalize what one modern writer has called “the wisdom of crowds.” * * * ON JANUARY 21, 1793, thousands of Frenchmen flocked to the largest square in Paris, once the Place de Louis XV, but renamed the Place de la Révolution (and eventually, in a gesture of reconciliation, renamed Place de la Concorde). The crowd had gathered on that wintry day to watch their former king face death.

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My experience with participatory democracy has taught me the limits of any regime of consensus, which risks silencing disagreements over political alternatives that are important to debate openly. Our ability to reason and exercise sound political judgment is more limited than Condorcet supposed—rendering “the wisdom of crowds” a shaky assumption. But I also believe that modern institutions can do more to appeal to, and engage, people’s capacities for reflection and collective deliberation. As the American philosopher David M. Estlund observes, “We sometimes expect too little” from our liberal democracies “precisely because” we prematurely give up on an “aspirational theory,” a “normative standard that forces the question of whether more can realistically be expected.”

The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
by Jim Whitehurst
Published 1 Jun 2015

Whyte, author of The Organization Man, in a 1952 issue of Fortune. The idea is that when a group of people work together, they tend to want to reach some kind of harmony and to minimize conflict, which so often leads to terrible and even tragic results. James Surowiecki tackles this subject in his now famous book, The Wisdom of Crowds, in which he discusses the research done by the Yale University psychologist Irving Janis to understand how groupthink was responsible for the poor decision making leading up to events like the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Surowiecki writes: “Homogeneous groups become more cohesive more easily than diverse groups, and as they become more cohesive they become more dependent on the group, more isolated from outside opinions, and therefore more convinced that the group’s judgment on important issues must be right.

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Drucker, “Managing Oneself,” Harvard Business Review, January 2005, http://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself/ar/1. 2. Jonah Lehrer, “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2012. 3. Richard Wiseman, 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (New York: Random House, 2010), 213–214. 4. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor, 2005), 36. 5. Hill et al., Collective Genius, 121. 6. Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc. (New York: Random House, 2014), Kindle version, location 1374. 7. Hill et al., Collective Genius, 139. 8. Ibid., 24. 9. Linux Kernel Mailing List, https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/2/21/225. 10.

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Sheth, and David Wolfe. Firms of Endearment. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2014. Sloane, Paul, ed. A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing. Philadelphia: Kogan Page Limited, 2011. Stack, Jack, with Bo Burlingham. The Great Game of Business. New York: Crown Business, 2013. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor, 2005. Tapscott, Don, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy. Digital Capital. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. Tapscott, Don, and David Ticoll. The Naked Corporation. New York: Penguin, 2003. Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics. New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2008. ——— .

You Are Not a Gadget
by Jaron Lanier
Published 12 Jan 2010

This is an idea that will be examined in Chapter 10. An Odd Lack of Curiosity The “wisdom of crowds” effect should be thought of as a tool. The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. The point should never be the glorification of the tool. Unfortunately, simplistic free market ideologues and noospherians tend to reinforce one another’s unjustified sentimentalities about their chosen tools. Since the internet makes crowds more accessible, it would be beneficial to have a wide-ranging, clear set of rules explaining when the wisdom of crowds is likely to produce meaningful results. Surowiecki proposes four principles in his book, framed from the perspective of the interior dynamics of the crowd.

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While there is a lot of talk about networks and emergence from the top American capitalists and technologists, in truth most of them are hoping to thrive by controlling the network that everyone else is forced to pass through. Everyone wants to be a lord of a computing cloud. For instance, James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds extols an example in which an online crowd helped find gold in a gold mine even though the crowd didn’t own the gold mine. There are many forms of this style of yearning. The United States still has top universities and corporate labs, so we’d like the world to continue to accept intellectual property laws that send money our way based on our ideas, even when those ideas are acted on by others.

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions
by Lee Freeman-Shor
Published 8 Sep 2015

* * * 3 ‘Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases’, Science, by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1974). 4 Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science, by Michael Brooks (2011). 5 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes (1936). 6 How We Decide, by Johan Lehrer (2009). 7 ‘Money: A Bias for the Whole’, Journal of Consumer Research, by Himanshu Mishra, Arul Mishra and Dhananjay Nayakankuppam (2006). 8 ‘Denomination Effect’, Journal of Consumer Research, Priya Raghubir and Joydeep Srivastava (2009). 9 One Up on Wall Street, by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild (2000). 10 The Dhandho Investor, by Mohnish Pabrai (2007). 11 Quote attributed to Donald Rumsfeld. 12 Being Right or Making Money, by Ned Davis (2000). 13 Ibid. 14 Fortune’s Formula, by William Poundstone (2006). 15 blog.asmartbear.com/ignoring-the-wisdom-of-crowds.html 16 The Little Book of Behavioural Investing, by James Montier (2010). 17 An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, by Col. Chris Hadfield (2013). Referring to his first mission where the objective was to construct a docking module on the Russian space station Mir. 18 In Market Wizards, by Jack D. Schwager (1990). 19 In The New Market Wizards, by Jack D. Schwager (1994). 20 So Far, So Good, by Roy R. Neuberger (1997). 21 The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki (2005) 22 Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely (2009).

Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 27 Aug 2007

Such organizational structures may simplify data collection but can also make processing good insights more difficult. There are alternatives. Structured databases can capture and relate varied information like data on demographics, economics, and energy use. Information markets can help make sense of the “wisdom of crowds.” Analyst reports can target underlying, quantifiable trends. In many situations, from national security to corporate competitive intelligence, secret information is often valued over publicly available or open-source information, which may be marginalized or ignored altogether. A portfolio theory of collecting information, however, emphasizes using a multiplicity of data sources—both public and private.

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But the integration of all that disparate information ultimately relies upon the intuitive judgments of the human mind. 2990-7 ch09 schwarz 100 7/23/07 12:12 PM Page 100 peter schwartz and doug randall In an interview with us, James Surowiecki, New Yorker business columnist and author of The Wisdom of Crowds, noted three open-source ways to find relevant data and opinions outside of one’s most familiar frame of reference: discover unfamiliar terrain on the Internet; take high-quality but undervalued academic work and transport it to a different environment where it can be of high value; and read outside your field of expertise to find potentially useful metaphors and conceptual insights.2 When multiple sources are used and interpreted together, we have found that it is easier to separate the signal from the noise.

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Hamburg, and Joshua Lederberg, eds., Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response (Washington: National Academies Press, 2003), p. 8. Chapter Nine 1. George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs (July 1947); the article was published under the pseudonym “X.” 2. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Random House, 2004). 3. Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (University of Chicago Press, 2000). For examples of Bellah’s writings, see Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, 2nd ed. (University of California Press, 1991); The Broken Covenant, 2nd ed.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike
by Eugene W. Holland
Published 1 Jan 2009

On the basis of extensive historical studies, Fernand Braudel has pro­ posed an Important distinction between markets and antimarkets that can serve as one point of departure.38 Along similar lines, but on the basis of M arx’s theoretical investigations, Deleuze and Guattari distinguished be­ tween the positive, economic component of markets and their negative, power component.39 More specifically, James Surowiecki, in his recent work The Wisdom of Crowds, lays out the conditions under which largescale interactive systems such as markets can produce surprising results in the domains of coordination and cooperation as well as cognition.40 The prerequisites for the wisdom of crowds to emerge, as he shows, include diversity and independence of knowledge or opinion, decentralization of decisions, and some mechanism to aggregate multiple decisions to pro­ duce a result—prerequisites that truly free free markets often realize.

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The result of the aggrega­ tion mechanism of the market would then be more than mere efficiency: it would be an aggregated version of the Common Good. Like the free, open-source software movement, Wikipedia, or the NASA clickworkers discussed in the previous chapter, a nomad market intentionally oriented to the Common Good in this way would harness what James Surowiecki has called the wisdom of crowds.47 The resultant definition of the Com­ mon Good would, of course, always be an approximation, never perfec­ tion itself. And it would not constitute the kind of explicitly agreed-on ultimate end that, for von Hayek, signals the death of liberal society. N o­ mad market agents would be free to pursue their particular ends, as long as this pursuit is coupled with pursuit of their particular versions of the Common Good, with the market producing a continually aggregated and reaggregated approximation of a collective version of the Common Good.

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But it turned out that currency markets, too, can operate perfectly well without a standard of value (although they are subject to volatility when subject to the disproportionate antimarket power of certain players). Here it is crucial to distinguish between money as a means of circulation and as a standard of evaluation.131 In nomad markets, money functions solely as a means of circulation, and evaluation is not tied to a standard but left to free-market mechanisms of distributed intelligence and the “wisdom of crowds.”132 Once free from the standard of labor-value, nomad markets evaluate collectively, allocate time and resources, and do the other (in von Hayek’s words) “marvelous” things they do, in response to a range of consider­ ations informing aggregate demand and supply. Of course, even capital­ ist markets must respond in some degree to consumer demand.

The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management
by Alexander Elder
Published 28 Sep 2014

A Positive Group You don't have to be a hermit—steering clear of the crowd's impulsivity doesn't mean you have to trade in total solitude. While some of us prefer doing it that way, intelligent and productive groups can exist. Their key feature has to be independent decision making. This concept is clearly explained in a book, The Wisdom of Crowds, by a financial journalist James Surowiecki. He acknowledges that members of most groups constantly influence one another, creating waves of shared feelings and actions. A smart group is different: all members make independent decisions without knowing what others are doing. Instead of impacting each other and creating emotional waves, members of an intelligent group benefit from combining their knowledge and expertise.

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Instead of impacting each other and creating emotional waves, members of an intelligent group benefit from combining their knowledge and expertise. The function of a group leader is to maintain this structure and to bring individual decisions up for a vote. In 2004, a year prior to reading The Wisdom of Crowds, I organized a group of traders along those lines. I continue to manage it with my friend Kerry Lovvorn—the SpikeTrade group. We run a trading competition, with each round lasting one week. After the market closes on Friday, the stock picks section of the website becomes closed to viewing by members until 3 p.m. on Sunday.

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The results of leading group members, posted on the site, have been spectacular. The key point is that all decisions about stock selection and direction must be made in solitude, without seeing what the leaders or other members are doing. The sharing begins after all votes are in. This combination of independent decision making with sharing brings forth “the wisdom of crowds,” tapping the collective wisdom of the group and its leaders. ■ 15. Psychology of Trends Each price represents a momentary consensus of value among market participants. Each tick reflects the latest vote on the value of a trading vehicle. Any trader can “put in his two cents worth” by giving an order to buy or sell, or by refusing to trade at the current level.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 11 Mar 2013

More than that, I'll show how to build them, the shining digital cities of our future. The Wisdom of Crowds Niccolo Machiavelli observed, in "Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius" that: "As for prudence and stability of purpose, I affirm that a people is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgment than a prince. Nor is it without reason that the voice of the people has been likened to the voice of God; for we see that wide-spread beliefs fulfill themselves, and bring about marvelous results." In his book "The Wisdom of Crowds," James Surowiecki wrote, "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."

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Magic Machines From Bricks to Bits Cost Gravity and the Digital Petri Dish The First Law A Brief History of the Internet What Drives Digital Society? Of Mice and Dinosaurs The Establishment Under Assault It's All in the Remix The Lost Continent Gets On Line The Asynchronous Society The Economic Quickening From Innocence to Authority Chapter 2. Spheres of Light The Wisdom of Crowds Wiser and More Constant than a Prince Origins of Social Architecture The Toolbox Sidebars The Collective Intelligence Index, or CII Final Thoughts Chapter 3. Faceless Societies Humanity as a Wise Crowd Sports Break The Face in the Mirror The Borgia Hypothesis Natural Born Killers Stupid, Mad, or Bad Sporting Colors Stupidity is Not Random Society Versus the Individual How The Bandit Got His Gang From Bandits to Bakers Fixing the Sick Men Summing Up Chapter 4.

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Any attempt to describe how important and valuable Wikipedia is would fail by understatement. As a species, we only really have two fundamental assets: ourselves, and our knowledge. When I scored Wikipedia in “Spheres of Light”, it hit 96%. Wikipedia is not perfect, though it comes close. This isn't accidental -- it was practically founded on the principles of the wisdom of crowds. The one area it does not handle perfectly is current events -- politics, sports, news -- where there is still money at stake. Wikipedia is the ultimate in collective property, the antithesis of private property with its strong rights, de jure protection, profits, and friction. It is the ultimate slap in the face to the right-wing economists and their belief that wealth comes from individuals rather than society.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

Several books heavily influenced my thinking, including Ilkka Tuomi’s Networks of Innovation, Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, Henry Chesbrough’s Open Innovation, Steve Johnson’s Emergence, Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark’s Design Rules, Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy’s The Future of Competition, Scott Page’s The Difference, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. The other books, papers and articles I have drawn on are listed in the bibliography. Should you think that is incomplete, you can go to the wiki version of the book and add in your own references and links. Many of the ideas were developed through projects I worked on with other people or by speaking at seminars and workshops.

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Available from http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/ issues/2005/3/up6-3Amor.pdf 10 Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2004) 11 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 10 12 Richard K. Lester and Michael Piore, Innovation: The Mission Dimension (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2004) 13 Andrew Hargadon, How Breakthroughs Happen (Boston, MA: HBS Press, 2003) 14 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (Little, Brown, 2004) 15 Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton University Press, 2007) 16 Bart Nooteboom, Learning and Innovation in Organizations and Economies (Oxford University Press, 2000) 17 Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2004) 18 Articles by Lakhani, Ghosh and Lerner in Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A.

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Journalists Is Over’, Pressthink, http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/ pressthink/2005/01/21/berk_essy.html (2005) Rosen, Jeffrey, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 2001) Rushe, Dominic, ‘Fantasy Game Turns Internet into Goldmine’, The Sunday Times, September 2006 Schienstock, Gerd, and Timo Hämäläinen, Transformation of the Finnish Innovation System: A Network Approach (Helsinki: Sitra Reports Series 7, 2001) Schwartz, Barry, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) Sen, Amartya, The Unwanted Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Penguin, 2006) Sennett, Richard, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2006) Shaw, Patricia, Changing Conversations in Organizations (Routledge, 2002) Spufford, Frances, Backroom Boys (Faber & Faber, 2003) Stacey, Ralph D., Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations (Routledge, 2001) Stacey, Ralph D., Douglas Griffin and Patricia Shaw, Complexity and Management (Routledge, 2002) Stebbins, Robert A., Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992) Steil, Ben, David G. Victor, and Richard R. Nelson (Eds), Technological Innovation & Economic Performance (Princeton University Press, 2002) Sunstein, Cass, Republic.com (Princeton University Press, 2001) Surowiecki, James, The Wisdom of Crowds (Little, Brown, 2004) Sutton, Robert I., Weird Ideas that Work (Penguin, 2001) Tapscott, Don, and Antony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Penguin, 2007) Taylor, Charles, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1992) Taylor, William C., and Polly LaBarre, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win (HarperCollins, 2006) Teece, David J., Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen, ‘Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management’ Strategic Management Journal, 18.7, pp. 509–33, 1997 Thackara, John, In the Bubble (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2005) Trippi, Joe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) Tuomi, Ilkka, Networks of Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2002) Turner, Fred, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) Vaidhyanathan, Siva, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004) Volberda, Henk W., Building the Flexible Firm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) Von Hippel, Eric, ‘Horizontal Innovation Networks – By and For Users’, MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper No. 4366–02 (2002) Von Hippel, Eric, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2005) Von Hippel, Eric, Christian Luthje and Cornelius Herstatt, ‘The Dominant Role of “Local” Information in User Innovation: The Case of Mountain Biking’, MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper (2002) Von Hippel, Eric, and Georg von Krogh, ‘Open Source Software and the Private-Collective Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science’, Organization Science (2003) Von Hippel, Eric, The Sources of Innovation (Oxford University Press, 1995) Waldman, Simon, ‘Who Knows?’

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 1 Jan 2006

Meehl, “Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgment,” in Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, ed. Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 716-29. 6 Gawande, Complications, 44. 7 Katie Haffner, “In an Ancient Game, Computing’s Future,” The New York Times, August 1, 2002. 8 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 9 Joe Nocera, “On Oil Supply, Opinions Aren’t Scarce,” The New York Times, September 10, 2005. 10 Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It?

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ar=1358&L2=18&L3=31&srid=6&gp=1. 2 Nancy Weil, “Innocentive Pairs R&D Challenges with Researchers,” Bio-IT World, May 29, 2003. 3 Some companies are trying to create an internal mechanism to match questions with answers. For example, Hewlett-Packard has a system called SHOCK (Social Harvesting of Community Knowledge); see http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/projects/shock. 4 Francis Galton, “Vox Populi,” Nature 75 (March 7, 1907): 450-451; reprint, 1949. Also, James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (New York: Random House, 2004). 5 Norman L. Johnson, “Collective Problem Solving: Functionality beyond the Individual,” LA-UR-98-2227 (1998); Jack L. Treynor, “Market Efficiency and the Bean Jar Experiment,” Financial Analysts Journal (May-June 1987): -53; Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (New York: Perseus Books, 1998), 58-59. 6 Kay-Yut Chen, Leslie R.

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Strogatz, Steven. Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. New York: Hyperion Books, 2003. Surowiecki, James. “Damn the Slam PAM Plan!” Slate, July 30, 2003. ——. “Decisions, Decisions.” New Yorker, March 28, 2003. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/24/030324ta_talk_surowiecki. ——. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. New York: Random House, 2004. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Markets and in Life. New York: Texere, 2001. ——. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest
by Ted Seides
Published 23 Mar 2021

Each reference comes with their own bias and agenda, and allocators must take their expression of support with a grain of salt. Thorough allocators call names on a reference list despite the likelihood of bias in favor of the manager. I found it surprising how infrequently references get called, particularly for popular managers where allocators may rely on the wisdom of crowds. Occasionally, on-list references share that they are not that enthusiastic about the manager. If the few chosen references are not wildly enthusiastic and that information comes without a rationale as to why, the allocator may want to take a step back and dig deeper. The most important question an allocator asks of on-list references may be the one Kip McDaniel of Institutional Investor asks of every subject: “Who else should I talk to about this?”

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” – Michael Batnick “We’re in the investing business, but it’s sort of like we’re in the fashion business. Skirts come up and down in our industry.” – Anthony Scaramucci “Great bubbles happen around great stories.” – Michael Novogratz “The market is a complex, adaptive system, which explains both why markets tend to be efficient – the wisdom of crowds – and why markets episodically go haywire.” – Michael Mauboussin “It’s not just the non-predictable regime shifts that cause abrupt moves in any financial instrument, it’s the over-reliance on short-term market financing to underpin positions.” – James Aitken “In times of easy money, a lot of stupid things work.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

“We rely so much on the data and we do so much measurement that you don’t have to worry that your idea will get picked because you’re the favorite,” Mayer said. “Data is apolitical.” Google has faith in data because it has faith in us. When you take to heart the moral of James Surowiecki’s 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds, you must realize that your crowd—your users, customers, voters, students, audience, neighbors—is wise. The next questions should be: How do you capture and act on that wisdom? How do you listen? How do you enable them to share their wisdom with each other and with you? How do you help them make you smarter (and why should they bother)?

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Air travel’s business model today is based on overselling seats, billing us for checking bags, charging for pillows and pretzels and just about everything they can think of but air, jamming planes to the point of torture, treating customers as prisoners who can be kept on runways for hours without the food and water an inmate is allowed, and withholding information—all the while raising prices. Google couldn’t fix that. No one could. But then I applied Google rules about connections and the wisdom of crowds with Zuckerberg’s law of elegant organization and my own first law and asked how travelers on planes, trains, and ships or in hotels and resorts could be given more control (of anything but the cockpit, of course). And I wondered, what if passengers on a plane were networked? What if a flight became a social experience with its own economy?

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See vendor relationship management Waghorn, Rick, 56 Wales, Jimmy, 60, 87 Wall Street Journal, 129 Wal-Mart, 54–55, 101 Washlet, 181 Wattenberg, Laura, 233 Weinberger, David, 3, 82, 96–97, 137, 149, 232 Westlaw, 224 widgets, 36–37 Wikia, 60 Wikileaks.org, 92–93 Wikinomics (Tapscott), 113, 151, 225 Wikipedia communities and, 50 growth of, 66 mistakes in, 92–93 open-source and, 60 speed of, 106 wikitorials, 86–87 Williams, Evan, 105–6 Williams, Raymond, 63 Wilson, Fred, 35, 176, 189–92, 225, 237 Wine.com, 158 WineLibrary.TV, 157 The Winner Stands Alone (Coelho), 142 Wired, 33 wireless access, 166 airlines and, 182–83 wireless spectrum, 166 The Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki), 88 The Witch of Portobello (Coelho), 142–43 WNYC, 128 Wojcicki, Anne, 205 Wolf, Maryanne, 235 World Economic Forum, 48, 113 Wyman, Bob, 211 Yahoo, 5, 36, 58 China and, 99–100 communities and, 50 Yang, Jerry, 36 Y Combinator, 193 youth, 191–94, 212 YouTube, 6, 20, 33, 37 Zappos, 161 Zara, 103–4 Zazzle, 180 Zell, Sam, 129 zero-based budgeting, 79–80 Zillow, 75, 80, 187 Zipcar, 176 Zopa, 196 Zuckerberg, Mark, 4, 48–53, 94–95 About the Author Jeff Jarvis is the proprietor of one of the Web’s most popular and respected blogs about the internet and media, Buzzmachine.com.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jan 2008

That is not because the auction produces some odd psychological quirk. It’s because while the survey of the crowd will produce the average view of the value of coins, the auction will not. Instead, the auction automatically selects the highest bid, the crazier the better. The survey uncovers what New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki calls “the wisdom of crowds.” The auction, by contrast, finds the biggest sucker. Rational players, knowing this, would dramatically scale back their bids. They would reason like this: “I think the value of the coins in the jar is twenty dollars. So maybe I should bid eighteen dollars to leave some room for profit. But wait: Either I lose the auction, in which case it doesn’t matter what my bid was, or I win the auction, in which case a hundred other people in this room thought it was worth less than twenty dollars.

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For example, when I learned how to write a decent book proposal and where to send it, all Stephen McGroarty got in repayment from me was a pint or two of Guinness, and possibly the vague sense that I owed him a favor. Another example: After I knew my book was to be published, I started to make a habit of attending book talks to pick up some tips for the forthcoming promotional tour. It cost me nothing at all to receive a lesson in how to give a book talk from James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, at my local Barnes & Noble. It’s hard to imagine how he might try to charge soon-to-be authors to hear his book talks while letting mere potential buyers of his own tome through the doors for nothing. Neither service is as easy to package and market as a hot dog. That means there exist potentially publishable authors with lousy proposals and potentially eloquent authors who are insufficiently skilled in the art of book talks, but there isn’t anyone with two dollars in his pocket and an unfulfillable desire for a hot dog.

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The age of rational poker: My sources for the Chris Ferguson story include my conversations with Ferguson around the 2005 World Series of Poker; Kaplan and Reagan, Aces and Kings; and James McManus, Positively Fifth Street (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). McManus was in Las Vegas to write an article for Harper’s magazine and ended up at the final table with Cloutier and Ferguson. If I ask each of a large number: See James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (Boston: Little, Brown, 2004). Even professional soccer players: Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, “Professionals Play Minimax,” Review of Economic Studies 70, no. 2(2003): 395–415, and Tim Harford, “Keep Them Guessing,” FT Magazine, June 17, 2006. It turns out that: “What Do Laboratory Experiments Tell Us About the Real World?

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

Anyone can add a project, anyone can download and use the code, and new projects migrate from the edges to the center as a result of users putting them to work, an organic software adoption process relying almost entirely on viral marketing. The lesson: Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era. Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the Web, and the personal diary and daily opinion column around much longer than that, so just what is the fuss all about? At its most basic, a blog is just a personal home page in diary format.

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Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnify their visibility and power. The “echo chamber” that critics decry is also an amplifier. If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value. While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole.

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(“Most people assume the fights are going to be the left vs. the right,” Wales has said, “but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.”) The jerks range from the Chinese government to the giant penis guy. But mostly they’re regular contributors who get upset about some hobbyhorse and have to be talked down or even shamed by their communities. Although he professes to hate phrases like “swarm intelligence” and “the wisdom of crowds,” Wales’s phenomenal success springs largely from his willingness to trust large aggregations of human beings to produce good outcomes through decentralized, marketlike mechanisms. He is suspicious of a priori planning and centralization, and he places a high value on freedom and independence for individuals.

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
Published 4 Oct 2006

BECKSTROM ADVANCE P R A I S E FOR THE STARFISH AND THE SPIDER "The Starfish and the Spider is a compelling and important book, rich with examples of how decentralization is fundamental to the right environment—one that promotes equal access, rich connections, and 'skin in the game' for participants." — P I E R R E O M I D Y A R , CEO, Omidyar Network; f o u n d e r and chairman, eBay Inc. "The Starfish and the Spider, like Blink, The Tipping Point, and The Wisdom of Crowds before it, showed me a provocative new way to look at the world and at business. It's also fun to read!" — R O B I N W O L A N E R , author of Naked in the Boardroom "A fantastic read. Constantly weaving stories and connections. You'll never see the world the same way again." —NICHOL AS J.

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[It has] not only stimulated my thinking, but as a result of the reading, I proposed ten action points for my own organization." —PROFESSOR K L A U S SCHWAB, executive chairman, World Economic Forum More advance praise for The Starfish and the Spider "From eBay to Google, Skype to craigs list, inspired individuals are catalyzing a marked shift from hierarchies to the wisdom of crowds. On and Rod provide sharp insights into how to avoid becoming the next victim of this market populism, or, if you arc so inclined, the strategies to take on those vulnerable incumbents." —Randy Komisar, author; Stanford professor; partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers "Highly readable and highly entertaining.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

Nor do they intend to bet on the outcome, or to find out the name of the winner when the finishing list is posted. When decisions do matter, rational people delegate them to those who have, or are willing to invest in acquiring, relevant information and the capacity to interpret that information. For all that has recently been said about ‘the wisdom of crowds’, the authors prefer to fly with airlines which rely on the services of skilled and experienced pilots, rather than those who entrust the controls to the average opinion of the passengers. 13 There is no general theory of how best to make decisions. Much of the academic literature on decision-making under uncertainty tries to frame the challenge as a puzzle.

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Our ability as humans to deal with radical uncertainty is the product of our much greater capacity for social learning and greater ability to communicate relative to other species. We are social animals; we manage radical uncertainty in a context determined by the knowledge we have acquired through education and experience, and we make important decisions in conjunction with others – friends, family, colleagues and advisers. Reference to the ‘wisdom of crowds’ makes an important point while missing another. The crowd always knows more than any individual, but what is valuable is the aggregate of its knowledge, not the average of its knowledge. Given the overwhelmingly large body of knowledge and experience which makes up our collective intelligence, and the obvious necessity for specialisation, the rational person following the requirements of logic and reason answers most questions about what will happen in the future or what will be the consequence of particular actions by saying ‘I do not know – if it matters I will try to find out’.

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I (1734) Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011, United States Census Bureau (2011) Sterling, B., Grootveld, M. and van Mensvoort, K., ‘Interview: Bruce Sterling on the Convergence of Humans and Machines’ (22 Feb 2015) < https://www.nextnature.net/2015/02/interview-bruce-sterling/ > (accessed 14 May 2018) Stevenson, M. T., ‘Assessing Risk Assessment in Action’, Minnesota Law Review , Vol. 103, No. 1 (2019), 303–84 Stevenson, R. L., ‘The Day After To-Morrow’, The Contemporary Review , Vol. 51 (1887), 472–9 Surowiecki, J., The Wisdom of Crowds (Boston: Little Brown, 2004) Swanson, I., ‘Revealed: Final Cost of Edinburgh Tram Scheme Will be £1 Billion’, The Scotsman (13 Dec 2017) Taft, J. G., ‘Why Knight Capital Was Saved and Lehman Brothers Failed’, Forbes (20 Aug 2012) < https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2012/08/20/why-knight-capital-was-saved-and-lehman-brothers-failed/ > (accessed 14 Jan 2019) Taleb, N.

Unfinished Business
by Tamim Bayoumi

Put differently, if it is known to investors that (say) shares in General Motors are undervalued and will go up soon, then investors will bid up the price immediately until it reaches this fair value. While the theory and its tests come in softer and harder forms, the idea is that no individual investor or policy institution can beat the wisdom of crowds. This has implications for short- and long-term behavior. The short-term prediction is that day-to-day movements in prices of stocks and bonds are unpredictable except to the extent that they reflect new information. Clearly, if General Motors announces profits that are higher than investors expect then the price of its shares will increase.

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The basic issue is that far-sighted and well-informed investors will project the dynamics of the market and realize that the future path of assets prices is unstable and will at some point collapse. As a result, they will never start down the path towards a bubble as they understand that it is inherently unstable. This inability to model “rational” asset bubbles helped fuel the popularity of the efficient markets hypothesis—in which asset prices reflected the wisdom of crowds and were thus always accurate—that helped to lull policymakers into underestimating the risks emanating from growing financial imbalances in the United States and European economies. More generally, the hyper-rational and far-seeing “homo economicus” has been elevated from a useful tool to something closer to a litmus test for economic modeling.

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Indeed, even theoretical physics has accepted for around a century the existence of general relativity and quantum mechanics, two apparently incompatible approaches. There is also a major issue as to whether a coherent view of the long-run path for the economy can be constructed. On a practical level, it assumes that individuals acting through the wisdom of crowds understand an awful lot about the economy. On a theoretical level, as discussed in an earlier chapter, the existence of “unknown unknowns” may make it impossible to calculate a well-defined future. In this case, ad hoc rules of thumb may be the best available option. The long-run may truly be a quantum process in which unexpected events cause shifts from one view of the world to another.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

This is slowly changing, but until we achieve a shift in attitudes relating to who has access to what and in what format, this will act against not only the generation and transmission of knowledge by small groups of patients, but will also prevent the occurrence of larger network effects (i.e. “the wisdom of crowds”). “This artificial distinction between a consumer and a producer is dissolving, I call it the participant economy. Web 2.0 is about people.” David Sifry, Technorati But does user-generated medicine or “open-source health” really have a future? On the one hand, you’d think that privacy issues alone would prevent any meaningful exchange of knowledge, but this doesn’t seem to be an issue.

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Digitalization, for example, means that many products and experiences can now be personalized to suit the whims and wishes of individual users. Your problem is mine Open innovation, an idea originally pioneered by the open-source software community, has the potential to radically change how and where our problems are solved. In one sense the wisdom of crowds is no different from old-fashioned suggestion boxes, but the big difference is scale and to some extent speed. With enough networked minds, all problems become shallow. Linked to this idea is another, namely collaborative consumption. This is the use of connecting technologies to allow people to share and exchange all kinds of physical and digital goods, services, assets and skills.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

One group, called the counters, say that as a matter of mathematical logic a large and more diverse group of people will answer political questions better than a smaller group—even one composed of experts.55 This line of thinking can be traced back to the seventeenth-century Dutch thinker Baruch Spinoza, who believed that ‘it is almost impossible that the majority of a people, especially if it be a large one, should agree in an i­ rrational design.’56 Spinoza’s conviction was shared by the Marquis de Condorcet, the eighteenth-century philosopher and mathematician whose famous Jury Theorem holds, in basic terms, that if a large group votes on a yes-or-no issue, the majority of voters are virtually certain to vote for the correct answer as long as: (a) the median voter is better than random at choosing correct answers, (b) voters vote independently of each other, and (c) voters vote sincerely rather than strategically. These days, this phenomenon is referred to as the wisdom of crowds.57 It explains the hoary old tale in which the average answer of 800 participants in a competition OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS The Dream of Democracy 225 to guess the weight of an ox was within one pound of the ­correct number.58 Another group of theorists, called the talkers, say that democracy is more than mere aggregation of individual opinions.

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And in a Wiki Democracy we would not merely be asked to say yes or no to a set of pre-ordained questions decided by someone else; instead we would have the chance to shape the agenda ourselves in a richer and more meaningful way.Wiki Democracy also enjoys some of the same epistemic advantages of Direct Democracy, in that it would draw on the wisdom of crowds generally and (where appropriate) experts in particular. In a full-blown Wiki Democracy, as in a Direct Democracy, there would have to be flexibility in how and to what extent individuals OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS DEMOCRACY IN THE FUTURE 245 contributed.The policymaking process could be broken down into various parts (diagnosis, framing, data-collection, drafting and refining legislation, and so forth) and each part could be guided by the groups and individuals most willing or best placed to contribute.54 In a world of code-ified law (see chapter six) the code/law could theoretically be reprogrammable by the public at large, or by persons or AI systems delegated to undertake the task for them.

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Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 55. See Landemore, Democratic Reason; Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 56. Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), cited in Landemore, Democratic Reason, 67. 57. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few (London: Abacus, 2005). 58. Landemore, Democratic Reason, 157. 59. Jürgen Habermas, cited in Landemore, Democratic Reason, xvii; see also Landemore, Democratic Reason, 97. 60. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 70. 61. Rousseau, Social Contract, 64. 62.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

She’s not sure precisely how many fans were involved overall—hundreds, she guesses—but the group was diverse enough that it tapped into a broad range of skills. “There were some very tech-savvy people on the chat, so when we started asking for something really hard they could say, ‘Okay, that’s technologically feasible and that’s not.’” This breadth of participation is key to what author James Surowiecki dubbed “the wisdom of crowds.” Crowd wisdom as a scientific phenomenon was first explored in 1906 when the British scientist Francis Galton visited a county fair and observed a contest to guess the weight of an ox. About eight hundred fair attendees put in guesses. Galton expected that compared to the guess of an expert judge of oxen, the crowd of attendees would be far off the mark.

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“If you wanted to read a 3000 word fic”: Maciej Cegłowski, “The Fans Are All Right,” Pinboard Blog, accessed March 24, 2013, blog.pinboard.in/2011/10/the_fans_are_all_right/. “These people,” he wrote later, “do not waste time”: Ibid. “the crowd’s judgment was essentially perfect”: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004), xiii. the spectacular collapse of the Los Angeles Times’s “wikitorial”: Dan Glaister, “LA Times ‘wikitorial’ gives editors red faces,” The Guardian, June 21, 2005, accessed March 25, 2013, www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/jun/22/media.pressandpublishing.

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My writing here also draws on a column I previously wrote on this subject: “Clive Thompson on the Power of Introversion,” Wired, April 2012, accessed March 24, 2013, www.wired.com/magazine/2012/03/st_thompson_introvert/. A 2011 study took several virtual groups: Jan Lorenza, Heiko Rauhut, Frank Schweitzera, and Dirk Helbing, “How Social Influence Can Undermine the Wisdom of Crowd Effect,” PNAS 108, no. 22 (May 31, 2011): 9020–25, accessed March 24, 2013, www.pnas.org/content/108/22/9020.full.pdf#page=1&view=FitH. The “rich get richer” problem has been investigated extensively by the network scientist Duncan J. Watts; he writes about his research in “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?”

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Published 19 Mar 2019

What Bush did, and why he did it, came right back to one of those eight greatest ideas of physics: phase transitions. In this book, I’ll show you how the science of phase transitions suggests a surprising new way of thinking about the world around us—about the mysteries of group behavior. We will see why good teams will kill great ideas, why the wisdom of crowds becomes the tyranny of crowds when the stakes are high, and why the answers to these questions can be found in a glass of water. I’ll describe the science briefly (skipping the boring stuff). And then we’ll see how small changes in structure, rather than culture, can transform the behavior of groups, the same way a small change in temperature can transform rigid ice to flowing water.

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* * * Loonshot Franchise Widely dismissed or ridiculed idea 1922 A 12-year-old patient with diabetes is treated with ground-up pancreas extract Insulin 1935 An 80-pound payload is accelerated to 500 miles per hour through rocket propulsion Long-range ballistic missiles 1961 A 32-year-old former milk-truck driver plays a metrosexual British spy who saves the world James Bond 1976 A script titled The Adventures of Luke Starkiller is green-lit Star Wars Phase transition Sudden transformation in system behavior, as one or more control parameters cross a critical threshold Water From liquid to solid, as temperature decreases Cars on highways From smooth flow to jammed flow, as car density increases Fires in forests From contained to uncontrolled, as wind speed increases Individuals in companies From a focus on loonshots to a focus on careers, as size of company increases * * * Which brings us to the importance of being emergent—or, at least, understanding emergence. It can help us capture the benefits of diversity while reducing the risk of collective disasters. We want to benefit from the wisdom of crowds while reducing the risk of market crashes. We want to benefit from a plurality of beliefs while reducing the risk of religious wars. Over the coming chapters, we will apply Boyle-style science to help us understand the collective behaviors of individuals in companies, much as Smith applied Boyle-style science (not Newton-style) to help us understand the collective behaviors of individuals in markets.

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A superbomb made from the element hafnium, discovered, allegedly, by a physicist experimenting with a dental x-ray machine. A plan for achieving nuclear fusion through rapidly collapsing bubbles inside liquids (a modified cleaning fluid was used). A prediction market where investors could bet on the location of the next terrorist event, in order to tap into the “wisdom of crowds.” (The project was scrapped for what might be called bad taste.) Other DARPA loonshots have transformed industries or created new academic disciplines. The early computer network ARPANET evolved into the internet. A satellite-based geolocation system evolved first into military GPS, then the consumer GPS used in nearly every car and smartphone.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

But if you listen hard to the titans of tech, that’s not the worldview that emerges. In fact, it is something much closer to the opposite of a libertarian’s veneration of the heroic, solitary individual. The big tech companies believe we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence. They invest their faith in the network, the wisdom of crowds, collaboration. They harbor a deep desire for the atomistic world to be made whole. By stitching the world together, they can cure its ills. Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality—to the empowerment of the “user”—but their worldview rolls over it. Even the ubiquitous invocation of users is telling, a passive, bureaucratic description of us.

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Facebook was hailed as a mechanism that would help diminish the importance of clubbable gasbag pundits; Amazon would bust up the cartel of effete New York book publishers. This critique was not purely an exercise in denunciation. It was coupled with an alternative vision of society, a vision of amateurs producing knowledge for the joy of it, a faith in the wisdom of crowds. Silicon Valley views its role in history as that of the disruptive agent that shatters the grip of the sclerotic, self-perpetuating mediocrity that constitutes the American elite. On the surface, the tech companies seem aware of the danger that they might repeat the sins of the very cohort they critique.

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
by Dariusz Jemielniak
Published 13 May 2014

He also does not see the liberation in the new modes of knowledge production and the demise of the traditional ones (Scott et al., 1994). Wikipedia encompasses the capitalist mode of production and is the avant-garde of the emerging informational-communal approach (Barbrook, 2000; Hardt & Negri, 2001; O’Neil, 2011a; Firer-Blaess & Fuchs, 2013). Also, Keen apparently ignores the contexts in which “the wisdom of crowds” is particularly effective (Surowiecki, 2004) and seems to believe the Taylorist divide—some think and give orders, and others physically work and are the passive recipients of morsels of knowledge graciously given by the order givers—is still effective (Blackler, 1995). Moreover, J. Lanier’s and Keen’s critique of Wikipedia assumes that the multiple authorship of Wikipedia articles dilutes authors’ intellect and individuality and reduces them to a sort of a smart mob, composed of anonymous, chaotic, and contingent passersby, heavily relying on free-riding (R.

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Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia .org/w/index.php?title=Kiel&diff=2839601&oldid=2838532 Kim, S. (2002). Participative management and job satisfaction: Lessons for management leadership. Public Administration Review, 62(2), 231–241. Kittur, A., & Kraut, R. E. (2008). Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in Wikipedia: Quality through coordination. In CSCW ’08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 37–46). New York: ACM. Kittur, A., Chi, E., Pendleton, B. A., Suh, B., & Mytkowicz, T. (2007, April 28–May 3). Power of the few vs. wisdom of the crowd: Wikipedia and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

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H. (2011). Understanding sustained participation in transactional virtual communities. Decision Support Systems, 53(1), 12–22. Sundin, O. (2011). Janitors of knowledge: Constructing knowledge in the everyday life of Wikipedia editors. Journal of Documentation, 67(5), 840–862. Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds. New York: Anchor Books. Swartz, A. (2006, September 4). Who writes Wikipedia? Raw Thought blog. Retrieved from http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia Szymanski, L. A., Devlin, A. S., Chrisler, J. C., & Vyse, S. A. (1993). Gender role and attitudes toward rape in male and female college students.

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by Laszlo Bock
Published 31 Mar 2015

Evaluation is necessary to distribute finite resources, like salary increases or bonus dollars. Development is just as necessary so people grow and improve.”121 If you want people to grow, don’t have those two conversations at the same time. Make development a constant back-and-forth between you and your team members, rather than a year-end surprise. The wisdom of crowds… it’s not just for recruiting anymore! We learned in chapter 5 that we make better hiring decisions about potential employees by relying on input from a crowd of people. The same principle holds for coaching and evaluating existing employees.122 Going back to my team member Sam, I saw only a portion of his work, so he legitimately could argue that I didn’t understand the full context of his performance.

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By now you’ll guess that promotion decisions, like rating decisions, are made by committees. They review people who are up for promotion and calibrate them against promoted people from prior years and well-defined standards, to ensure fairness. And it wouldn’t be Google if we didn’t also rely on the wisdom of crowds. Peer feedback is an essential part of the technical promotion packet that committees review. There’s just one other twist. Googlers working in engineering or product management can nominate themselves for promotion.xlv Interestingly enough, we found that women are less likely to nominate themselves for promotion, but that when they do, they are promoted at slightly higher rates than men.

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xxx For example, Scott Page of the University of Michigan has shown that averaging the guesses of President Obama’s finance team about what financial markets will do is more accurate than the analysis put out by a small group of economists at the Federal Reserve. On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, asking the audience gets you the right answer 95 percent of the time, according to former host Regis Philbin. And Google’s PageRank, an algorithm that prioritizes search results, relies heavily on the wisdom of crowds. xxxi Culture here refers specifically to the attributes described earlier in the chapter, including conscientiousness, comfort with ambiguity, etc. It’s also about broadening the kinds of people who work at Google and avoiding homogeneity. xxxii These are called “exploding offers” because the offer goes away (explodes) if not accepted by a certain date.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

First and foremost, neoliberalism masquerades as a radically populist philosophy, one that begins with a set of philosophical theses about knowledge and its relationship to society. It seems at first to be a radical leveling philosophy, denigrating expertise and elite pretentions to hard-won knowledge, instead praising the “wisdom of crowds.” The Malcolm Gladwells, Jimmy Waleses, and James Surowieckis of the world are its pied pipers. This movement appeals to the vanity of every self-absorbed narcissist, who would be glad to ridicule intellectuals as “professional secondhand dealers in ideas.”154 But of course it sports a predisposition to disparage intellectuals, since “knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts.”

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Furthermore, the audience is guaranteed to shed any residual guilt they might feel in their enjoyment at the distress of the unsuccessful and the destitute through reification of the invisible fourth wall; the lesson reiterated is that it is fine for the audience to bear witness to distress, because the mark entered the arena “voluntarily,” and the verdict was delivered through the “wisdom of crowds,” and in the last instance, there is money to be made and gratification to be experienced at the expense of the loser. Their shame in abject failure becomes a fungible commodity, albeit one of the least rare commodities on the planet. Defeat is not stoic nobility planted on this stage; it is instead the human compost of conspicuous destitution, the fertilizer of economic growth.

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• Economists have proven repeatedly that they cannot predict the turning points in the economy. • No specific economic forecasters consistently lead the pack in accuracy. • No economic forecaster has consistently higher forecasting skills predicting any particular economic statistic. • Consensus forecasts do not improve accuracy (although the press loves them. So much for the wisdom of crowds) . • Finally, there’s no evidence that economic forecasting has improved in recent decades18 Again, if this track record was widely known already to have been so very poor, then missing the onset of the crisis should not have caused such consternation on its own. Or conversely, the profession could set about writing down little models that could “retrospectively” have predicted the crisis, doing whatever worked in the past.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking
by Matthew Syed
Published 9 Sep 2019

No model can account for all this complexity. No economist is omniscient. But this implies that if we bring different models together, we create a more complete picture. No economist has the whole truth, but a group of diverse economists gets closer to the truth. Often, much closer. With prediction tasks, this is known as ‘the wisdom of crowds’. There are now dozens of examples of this aspect of diversity science. When, for example, the researcher Scott Page asked his students to estimate the length in miles of the London Underground by writing their guesses on slips of paper, the collective prediction was 249 miles. The true value is 250 miles.

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We are preoccupied with helping individuals to become smarter, more perceptive, more able to guard against biases. We noted that the fine work of the likes of Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman are written from this standpoint. And yet while this perspective is important, we should never allow it to obscure the holistic perspective. The organising concepts in this book are holistic. The collective brain. The wisdom of crowds. Psychological safety. Recombinant innovation. Homophily. Network theory. The dangers of fine-grained assorting. The content of these concepts emerges not from the parts, but the whole. This is crucial in an era where our most pressing problems are too complex for individuals to solve on their own; an era where collective intelligence is moving front and centre.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving
by Celeste Headlee
Published 10 Mar 2020

Again and again, we’ve seen that better decisions are made by polling all employees of an organization than by relying on the judgment of a CEO or one executive team. “However well-informed and sophisticated an expert is, his advice and predictions should be pooled with those of others to get the most out of him,” James Surowiecki says in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. “The more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.” Most businesses are not set up to gather the opinions of all employees, though, so how might this look in practice? Let’s say you’re deciding on a venue for an annual conference.

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few people wave: Nicholas Epley, Mindwise (New York: Knopf, 2014), 70. “The strength of the pack is the wolf”: Rudyard Kipling, “The Law for the Wolves,” in A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895). “However well-informed and sophisticated”: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 220. “Charity is really self-interest masquerading”: Anthony de Mello, Awareness (New York: Image Books, 1992). families who donated their deceased loved one’s organs: Helen Levine Batten and Jeffrey M.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

In Chapter 2 we observed cases where experts and lay people collaborate with each other, with the former, for example, reviewing, editing, or supplementing the user-generated content. A third type of online collaboration is crowdsourcing. Here large numbers of people—experts or non-specialists—are invited to contribute to a well-defined project or problem that is so large that it requires many hands, or is so difficult that it might benefit from the ‘wisdom of crowds’,24 or so obscure that an answer is most likely to be found if the net of inquiry is spread widely enough. WikiHouse and Arcbazar in architecture, and Open Ideo and WikiStrat in consulting, have run crowdsourcing projects in this manner. Realization of latent demand One of the attractions of the new approaches to professional work and, in particular, of various online services, is that practical expertise is steadily becoming more affordable and accessible.

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Glasgow Herald, 18 Nov.1985, p. 15. 17 <http://www.ey.com> (accessed 23 March 2015). 18 Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (2010), 34. 19 Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto, 36. 20 See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks—How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006). 21 <http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk>. 22 See Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now (2015), on driverless cars and doctorless patients. 23 Penelope Eckert, ‘Communities of Practice’, in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. Keith Brown (2006). 24 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (2004). 25 See e.g. David Maister, Managing the Professional Service Firm (1993). 26 See e.g. the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 in the USA (n. 15 above). 27 Directive 2014/56/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 April 2014 amending Directive 2006/43/EC on statutory audits of annual accounts and consolidated accounts. 28 With original emphasis, from Herbert L.

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Summers, Larry, ‘What You (Really) Need to Know’, New York Times, 20 Jan. 2012 <http://www.nytimes.com> (accessed 27 March 2015). Summers, Larry, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Children’, NBER Reporter, no. 4, 2014 <http://www.nber.org/reporter/2013number4/2013no4.pdf> (accessed 29 March 2015). Sunstein, Cass, Infotopia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Surowiecki, James, The Wisdom of Crowds (London: Abacus, 2004). Surowiekcki, James, ‘A Billion Prices Now’, New Yorker, 30 May 2011. Susskind, Richard, Expert Systems in Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987; paperback edn., 1989). Susskind, Richard, ‘Why Lawyers Should Consider Consultancy’, Financial Times, 13 Oct. 1992. Susskind, Richard, The Future of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; paperback edn., 1998).

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

On the whole, these markets work in the way canonically attributed to Smith on the model of the so-called ‘invisible hand’, with supply and demand tending towards competitive equilibrium, and they work extremely well. Another way of thinking of these markets is that they exhibit what has become known as the ‘wisdom of crowds’, and they do so because they satisfy four conditions: those involved are diverse in their access to information and in their opinions; they are independent, each person exercising his or her own view and not deferring to others; they are decentralized, so that they can specialize or draw on local knowledge; and there is a means—a market mechanism—to aggregate or gather their private judgements or choices together into a collective decision.

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C., A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830, William Collins 1999 Steuart, Sir James, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, ed. Andrew Skinner, Oliver & Boyd 1966 Stiglitz, Joseph E., Globalisation and its Discontents Revisited, Penguin Books 2017 Stiglitz, Joseph E., The Price of Inequality, Penguin Books 2012 Surowiecki, James, The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday Books 2004 Szechi, Daniel, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe 1688–1788, Manchester University Press 1994 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan, Random House 2007 Tavris, Carol and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), Mariner Books 2015 Thompson, Harold, A Scottish Man of Feeling: Some Account of Henry Mackenzie… and of the Golden Age of Burns and Scott, Oxford University Press 1931 Tirole, Jean, Economics for the Common Good, Princeton University Press 2017 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, Lord Woodhouselee, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, T.

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In other words, market failure is endemic, and can never be the sole justification for policy interventions; and there can be no escape through economic theory from the need for political economy. I am very grateful to Tim Besley for this point; see especially his ‘The New Political Economy’, Economic Journal, 117.524, 2007. See also Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg, Imperfect Knowledge Economics, Princeton University Press 2007 Wisdom of crowds: cf. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday Books 2004 Veblen goods: see Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, Macmillan 1899. In his essay on the imitative arts (in EPS) Smith memorably analyses the phenomenon of topiary in Veblenian terms: ‘It was some years ago the fashion to ornament a garden with yew and holly trees, clipped into the artificial shapes of pyramids, and columns, and vases, and obelisks.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

The theorem does not imply that any collection of diverse models will be accurate. If all of the models share a common bias, their average will also contain that bias. The theorem does imply that any collection of diverse models (or people) will be more accurate than its average member, a phenomenon referred to as the wisdom of crowds. That mathematical fact explains the success of ensemble methods in computer science that average multiple classifications as well as evidence that individuals who think using multiple models and frameworks predict with higher accuracy than people who use single models. Any single way of looking at the world leaves out details and makes us prone to blind spots.

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In point of fact, the correlations in performance could result from similarities in investment portfolios as well as one bank holding assets in another. 15 See Geithner 2014. 16 See Weisberg 2012 for a description of the San Francisco Bay model and its usefulness in policy. 17 See Stone et al. 2014 for a full account. 18 I thank Josh Epstein for the first example. 19 See Dunne 1999 and Raby 2001. Chapter 3: The Science of Many Models 1 Levins 1966. 2 See Page 2007, 2017 for more detailed descriptions and derivation. 3 See Suroweicki 2006 on the wisdom of crowds; Tetlock 2005 on how foxes outperform hedgehogs; Kalyvas 1999 on the failure of political science to predict the fall of the Soviet Union; and Patel et al. 2011 on ensemble methods in computer science. 4 Hong and Page 2009 show that independent models require a unique set of categorizations.

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Storchmann, Karl. 2011. “Wine Economics: Emergence, Developments, Topics.” Agrekon 50, no. 3: 1–28. Suki, Bela, and Urs Frey. 2017. “A Time Varying Biased Random Walk Model of Growth: Application to Height from Birth to Childhood.” Journal of Critical Care 38: 362–370. Suroweicki, James. 2006. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Press. Syverson, Chad. 2007. “Prices, Spatial Competition, and Heterogeneous Producers: An Empirical Test.” Journal of Industrial Economics 55, no. 2: 197–222. Taleb, Nassim. 2001. Fooled by Randomness. New York: Random House. Taleb, Nassim. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry
by David Robertson and Bill Breen
Published 24 Jun 2013

“Kjeld stood up and told us, ‘You people are the future of the company,’ ” remembered Tveskov. “And we totally believed him.” Foster open innovation—heed the wisdom of the crowd. During the first years of the past decade, the heaving growth of massive online communities inspired books such as Open Innovation, Wikinomics, and The Wisdom of Crowds, which showed how creative companies were harnessing the collective genius of virtual communities to spur innovation and growth. LEGO, a conservative company whose numerous battles over patent infringements had made it hyperprotective of its intellectual property, certainly did not rush into the crowdsourcing craze.

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So began the LEGO Group’s disciplined bid to amplify one of the past decade’s most talked-about business innovations—tapping the “wisdom of the crowd” to create breakthrough products. Keep in mind that LEGO launched its experiment with crowdsourcing in 2004, a full year before James Surowiecki came out with his groundbreaking book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which he posited that because groups of people are “often smarter than the smartest people in them,” a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts. Since the publication of that and other books on customer cocreation, initiatives ranging from LINUX to Wikipedia to more than 240,000 open-source software development projects (according to SourceForge.net) have amply demonstrated that crowdsourcing opens an organization up to a broad swath of insights and ideas that it could never muster by itself.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

This is one of the things social tools don’t change about group life—small groups are more effective at creating and sustaining both agreement and shared awareness. The core characteristics of large groups are the inverse. People have to be less tightly connected, on average, to one another. As a result, such groups are better able to produce what James Surowiecki has called “the wisdom of crowds.” In his book of that name he identified the ways distributed groups whose members aren’t connected can often generate better answers, by pooling their knowledge or intuition without having to come to an agreement. We have many ways of achieving this kind of aggregation, from market pricing mechanisms to voting to the prediction markets Surowiecki champions, but these methods all have two common characteristics: they work better in large groups, and they don’t require direct communication as the norm among members.

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Yang Huanming’s lament about the obstacles to their work can be found in translation at the YaleGlobal journal, in “Chinese Scientists Say SARS Efforts Stymied by Organizational Obstacles” (yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=1745. ). Martin Enserink has a broader review of the Chinese performance in “SARS in China: China’s Missed Chance” Science 301 (5631), July 18, 2003, and at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/301/5631/294). CHAPTER 11: PROMISE, TOOL, BARGAIN Page 267: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 2004) Page 276: equality matching The idea of equality matching (and the other listed forms of social participation) come from Alan Page Fiske’s Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, Market Pricing, Free Press (1991).

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

In retrospect, Lanier’s worry in his 2010 You Are Not a Gadget was prescient, but all too late: “A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.”6 Perhaps the hive mind idea itself seems a little quaint today, if only for the equally depressing reason that major ideas about human potential have receded. In 2005 Google was still a marvel, a wonderful example of human innovation. Today, our ubiquitous search engine giant is like the keychain in our pocket. We have ceased to even notice it. Less than a decade after James Surowiecki’s 2005 hit The Wisdom of Crowds, the idea that people on Twitter or other social networks display collective wisdom—or wisdom at all—seemed laughable.7 It is telling that mythology about AI has not also been ridiculed, and seems ever more on the rise. Chapter 16 AI MYTHOLOGY INVADES NEUROSCIENCE “Hive mind” remains in the lexicon, even if it isn’t invoked with such seriousness anymore.

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Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 4. Ibid., Epigraph. 5. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 6. Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget, 1. 7. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor, 2005). Chapter 16: AI Mythology Invades Neuroscience 1. Sean Hill, “Simulating the Brain,” in Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman, eds., The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 123–124. 2.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

This is a classic case of Goodhart’s Law, which says that once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be useful, partly because so many people have an incentive to doctor numbers to meet it.6 One useful and timely data source is the prices in global financial markets, which in normal times will accurately capture the world’s best collective guess about the likely prospects of an economy. What author James Surowiecki has called “the wisdom of crowds” has substance, and the market embodies it, second by second, subject to emotional contagions but not wild revisions.7 A sharp decline in the price of copper has almost always been an ominous sign for the global economy, earning the base metal the moniker “Dr. Copper” in financial circles.

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EPWP1401, February 2014. 4 Ghada Fayad and Roberto Perrelli, “Growth Surprises and Synchronized Slowdowns in Emerging Markets: An Empirical Investigation,” International Monetary Fund, 2014. 5 Lant Pritchett and Lawrence Summers, “Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 20573, October 2014. 6 “Goodhart’s Law,” BusinessDictionary.com. 7 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 8 Ned Davis, Ned’s Insights, November 14, 2014. 9 “Picking Apart the Productivity Paradox,” Goldman Sachs Research, October 5, 2015. Chapter 1: People Matter 1 Rick Gladstone, “India Will Be Most Populous Country Sooner Than Thought.”

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“The Ever-Emerging Markets: Why Economic Forecasts Fail.” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 1 (2014). ——. “China’s Stock Plunge Is Scarier Than Greece.” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2015. Studwell, Joe. How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region. New York: Grove, 2013. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Tilton, Andrew. “Still Wading Through ‘Great Stagnations.’ ” Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, September 17, 2014. ——. “Growth Recovery and Trade Stagnation Evidence from New Data.”

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 10 Nov 2011

If the market concurred with the Fed’s judgment on deflation, then there should be no run on gold—in fact, the Fed might have to be a buyer of gold to maintain the price. Conversely, if the market questioned the Fed’s judgment, then a rush to redeem paper for gold might result, which would be a powerful signal to the Fed that it needed to return to the original money-gold ratio. Based on what behavioral economists and sociologists have observed about the “wisdom of crowds” as reflected in market prices, this would seem to be a more reliable guide than relying on the narrow judgment of a few lawyers and economists gathered in the Fed’s high-ceilinged boardroom. A variation of this approach would be to allow the Fed to exceed the gold coverage ratio ceiling upon the announcement of a bona fide financial emergency by a joint declaration from the president of the United States and the speaker of the House.

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New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Steil, Benn, and Robert E. Litan. Financial Statecraft: The Role of Financial Markets in American Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Stewart, Bruce H., and J. M. Thompson. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, 2nd ed. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2002. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. Tarnoff, Ben. Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson
Published 1 Jan 2008

The bad news, perhaps, is that technologically speaking, privacy is dead or dying. The good news is that all this connectivity is increasing transparency and hence our behavior may actually become more honest. We may even get smarter at making decisions, because our connectivity will allow instant polling and the wisdom of crowds is nearly always greater than the intelligence of any single member. We will thus see a subtle shift from “me” to “we”. GRIN technologies Machines will be a dominant feature of the future. Computers will eventually become more intelligent than people, at which point humanity will be faced with something of a dilemma.

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But while Kurzweil sees computers doubling in speed and power and programmers working feverishly to this end, Kapor believes that human beings differ so totally from machines that the test will never be passed, not least because we are housed in bodies that feel pleasure and pain and accumulate experience and knowledge, much of which is tacit rather than expressed. Other experts such as neurophysiologist Bill Calvin suggest that the human brain is so “buggy” that computers will never be able to emulate it. Ultimately, though, this might not be the point; as some have suggested — such as James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds — the internet is already fostering an unanticipated form of AI, a highly efficient marketplace for ideas and information known as collective intelligence or the “hive mind”. In other words, if we connected up all the computers on the planet and asked the resultant network or grid a question like “Is there a God?”

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
Published 14 Sep 2015

Dragonfly Eye In 1906 the legendary British scientist Sir Francis Galton went to a country fair and watched as hundreds of people individually guessed the weight that a live ox would be after it was “slaughtered and dressed.” Their average guess—their collective judgment—was 1,197 pounds, one pound short of the correct answer, 1,198 pounds. It was the earliest demonstration of a phenomenon popularized by—and now named for—James Surowiecki’s bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds. Aggregating the judgment of many consistently beats the accuracy of the average member of the group, and is often as startlingly accurate as Galton’s weight-guessers. The collective judgment isn’t always more accurate than any individual guess, however. In fact, in any group there are likely to be individuals who beat the group.

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Robert Shiller, interview with the author, August 13, 2013. 7. Supernewsjunkies? 1. David Budescu and Eva Chen have invented a contribution-weighted method of scoring forecasters that gives special weight to those who see things before others do; see D. V. Budescu and E. Chen, “Identifying Expertise to Extract the Wisdom of Crowds,” Management Science 61, no. 2 (2015): 267–80. 2. Doug Lorch, in discussion with the author, September 30, 2014. The Arctic sea ice question, like the Arafat-polonium question (and others), pushed the ideological hot buttons of many forecasters. They saw bigger questions behind the smaller ones.

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life
by David Mitchell
Published 4 Nov 2014

It’s very easy to see where that money comes from and, if you don’t like Stoke City or Lady Gaga, you don’t have to contribute yourself. But, when it comes to financial services executives, I agree with Howe that this lack of understanding exists – but I don’t agree that it’s a problem. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s the product of the wisdom of crowds. People don’t understand why bank and building society executives are so highly paid simply because there is no adequate explanation. It’s an anomaly which, practically speaking, could only be corrected by the very people who benefit from it. That is a key failing with the current financial system.

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When a restaurant owner approaches a website to ask for some negative reviews to be removed, saying they’re biased, the claim is going to be viewed with scepticism – in the unlikely event that the website has any staff to view it at all. Online reviews, either anonymous or with no verifiable name, customarily go up unchallenged. We assume that the wisdom of crowds will ensure that a fair impression is given overall – that the uncensored self-expression of hundreds of millions will tend towards the truth. Half the time it just regresses to the mean. And the rest of the time it goes the other way: overeffusive, hysterical praise. So often you’ll read a review that couldn’t be bettered if the hotelier, restaurateur, musician, bar owner or author had written it themselves.

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web
by Paul Adams
Published 1 Nov 2011

See the Wikipedia article on Social Norms for more information. 12. See the 2010 poster presentation “N170 responses to faces predict implicit ingroup favoritism” by Kyle Ratner and David Amodio. 13. See the work of Herbert Simon and the Wikipedia article on Bounded Rationality. 14. See James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor, 2005). 15. See the 2010 research paper “Optimally interacting minds” by Bahrami and others. 16. Data from the NCCN private community of cancer patients as described in Groundswell, a book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Harvard Business Press, 2008). 17. See Philip Tetlock’s book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It?

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 7 Mar 2017

Notably, people in the study received monetary payments for getting the right answer, so their mistakes were really mistakes—not an effort to curry favor with others. The authors conclude that for decision makers, the advice given by a group “may be thoroughly misleading, because closely related, seemingly independent advice may pretend certainty despite substantial deviations from the correct solution.”22 There’s a lesson there for the wisdom of crowds in online settings. Because people are interacting with one another, they might not be so wise. SEGREGATION, MIGRATION, AND INTEGRATION The Daily Me is not a lived reality, at least for most of us. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts can certainly spread diverse points of view, and many people use them in exactly that way.

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.; Granovetter, “Threshold Models,” 1422–24. 18.Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral, and Sean J. Taylor, “Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment,” Science 341, no. 6146 (2013): 647–51. 19.Ibid., 650. 20.See Jan Lorenz, Heiko Rauhut, Frank Schweitzer, and Dirk Helbing, “How Social Influences Can Undermine the Wisdom of Crowd Effect,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 22 (2011): 9020–25. 21.See ibid. Note, however, that even with diminished diversity, the crowd was still somewhat more accurate than a typical individual. This is a “soft” result, as the conclusion depends on the statistics used to analyze the data, but overall, groups were still wiser than individuals, though not always at conventional levels of statistical significance. 22.Ibid., 9024. 23.See R.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith
Published 26 Jun 2019

Gallup also reports drops in confidence versus historical averages for institutions as varied as banking, criminal justice, medicine, organized labour, big business, police, print media, broadcast media, public schools and organized religion.3 Meanwhile, faith in the opinion of the masses is soaring. What was once derided as ‘lowest common denominator’ is now hailed ‘the wisdom of crowds’. This ‘wisdom’ isn’t only being exploited by populist politicians; it is the life blood of today’s AI. The fact that expertise proved hard to fathom for expert systems is exactly what led to the AI winter. Since then there have been no significant technical breakthroughs on modelling how smart people reason.

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As Mickey said, ‘A bookie sets the odds to get what he needs … And trust me, the bettors have no idea about the probabilities.’ 4 Scientific Pride and Prejudice 50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong. Album cover, spotted at Floyd’s Live Catfish, 1984 Given the cold computational underpinning of AI, there is a widespread assumption that algorithmic decision-making is objective and without bias. With big data analysis, this assumption has become married to the ‘wisdom of crowds’. Like those Elvis fans, there is a feeling that a great mass of people (or conclusions based on great masses of people) can’t be wrong, if unbiased algorithms are mining their statistics. Such population-based conclusions can only cause society to positively evolve. In many areas of society – policing, defence, law, education, health, childcare, transport and the media – this implicit belief has led to billions being invested in research and development for the application of big data analytics (US$20–30 billion in 2017, according to McKinsey1).

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
by Angela Nagle
Published 6 Jun 2017

Compare the first election won by Obama, in which social media devotees reproduced the iconic but official blue-and-red stylized stencil portrait of the new president with HOPE printed across the bottom, a portrait created by artist Shepard Fairey and approved by the official Obama campaign, to the bursting forth of irreverent mainstream-baffling meme culture during the last race, in which the Bernie’s Dank Meme Stash Facebook page and The Donald subreddit defined the tone of the race for a young and newly politicized generation, with the mainstream media desperately trying to catch up with a subcultural in-joke style to suit two emergent anti-establishment waves of the right and left. Writers like Manuel Castells and numerous commentators in the Wired magazine milieu told us of the coming of a networked society, in which old hierarchical models of business and culture would be replaced by the wisdom of crowds, the swarm, the hive mind, citizen journalism and user-generated content. They got their wish, but it’s not quite the utopian vision they were hoping for. As old media dies, gatekeepers of cultural sensibilities and etiquette have been overthrown, notions of popular taste maintained by a small creative class are now perpetually outpaced by viral online content from obscure sources, and culture industry consumers have been replaced by constantly online, instant content producers.

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life
by Jim Benson and Tonianne Demaria Barry
Published 2 Feb 2011

Stay loose enough from the flow that you can observe it, modify, and improve it. ~ Donald Rumsfeld FLOW: WORK’S NATURAL MOVEMENT Flow: The natural progress of work Cadence: The predictable and regular elements of work Slack: The gaps between work that make flow possible The Tao of Physics. Flow. Freakonomics. Nonzero. Predictably Irrational. The Wisdom of Crowds. There’s no shortage of best sellers expressing how the world is awash in both chaos and order. Much like the quote from Mr. Rumsfeld, these books suggest that observing a specific event is often less informative than observing a stream of events. It is precisely this flow which gives us context, and that context leads to clarity.

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets
by David J. Leinweber
Published 31 Dec 2008

When every other customer complains about meeting a man with a stomach pump, you’re better off packing your own lunch. Markets themselves are a form of collective intelligence (CI), and since transactions occur, they clearly arrive at prices seen as fair by buyers and sellers alike for everything from stocks to Pez dispensers (the first eBay merchandise). A recent book by James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (Random House, 2004) has nearly 300 pages of examples of group wisdom. One such example is the television quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Contestants are asked a series of increasingly difficult 227 228 Nerds on Wall Str eet questions, worth increasingly large payoffs if answered correctly.

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The funniest line in that skit, a long disconnected utterance that failed to parse as English, was taken verbatim from the actual interview. 3. Treynor is widely regarded as having been a shoo-in to have shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in economics had he only published a paper that was sitting in his desk drawer. 4. Still in print after 150 years (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995). 5. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds:Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (New York: Random House, 2004), xix. 6. Used in other chapters, this is a fabulous site founded to allow the historians of the Internet era to have something to use. The Internet Archive is at www.archive.org, and also has an extensive collection of nearly 400,000 free music downloads.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

On the Internet, wondrous creations were produced via shared brainpower: Linux, the open-source operating system; Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia; MoveOn.org, the grassroots political movement. These collective productions, exponentially greater than the sum of their parts, were so awe-inspiring that we came to revere the hive mind, the wisdom of crowds, the miracle of crowdsourcing. Collaboration became a sacred concept—the key multiplier for success. But then we took things a step further than the facts called for. We came to value transparency and to knock down walls—not only online but also in person. We failed to realize that what makes sense for the asynchronous, relatively anonymous interactions of the Internet might not work as well inside the face-to-face, politically charged, acoustically noisy confines of an open-plan office.

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We also see talkers as leaders: Simon Taggar et al., “Leadership Emergence in Autonomous Work Teams: Antecedents and Outcomes,” Personnel Psychology 52, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 899–926. (“The person that speaks most is likely to be perceived as the leader.”) 16. The more a person talks, the more other group members: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 2005), 187. 17. It also helps to speak fast: Howard Giles and Richard L. Street Jr., “Communicator Characteristics and Behavior,” in M. L. Knapp and G. R. Miller, eds., Handbook of Interpersonal Communication, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 103–61. 18. college students were asked to solve math problems: Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff, “Why Do Dominant Personalities Attain Influence in Face-to-Face Groups?

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

Smith’s “invisible hand” might be thought of as a Bayesian process, in which prices are gradually updated in response to changes in supply and demand, eventually reaching some equilibrium. Or, Bayesian reasoning might be thought of as an “invisible hand” wherein we gradually update and improve our beliefs as we debate our ideas, sometimes placing bets on them when we can’t agree. Both are consensus-seeking processes that take advantage of the wisdom of crowds. It might follow, then, that markets are an especially good way to make predictions. That’s really what the stock market is: a series of predictions about the future earnings and dividends of a company.8 My view is that this notion is mostly right most of the time. I advocate the use of betting markets for forecasting economic variables like GDP, for instance.

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The heuristic of “follow the crowd, especially when you don’t know any better” usually works pretty well. And yet, there are those times when we become too trusting of our neighbors—like in the 1980s “Just Say No” commercials, we do something because Everyone Else Is Doing it Too. Instead of our mistakes canceling one another out, which is the idea behind the wisdom of crowds,74 they instead begin to reinforce one another and spiral out of control. The blind lead the blind and everyone falls off a cliff. This phenomenon occurs fairly rarely, but it can be quite disastrous when it does. Sometimes we may also infer that the most confident-acting neighbor must be the best forecaster and follow his lead—whether he knows what he’s doing.

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For 1980, they are taken from data on the market capitalization within the New York Stock Exchange (“Annual reported volume, turnover rate, reported trades [mils. of shares],” http://www.nyxdata.com/nysedata/asp/factbook/viewer_edition.asp?mode=table&key=2206&category=4) and multiplied by the ratio of all U.S. stock holdings to NYSE market capitalization as of 1988, per World Bank data. All figures are adjusted to 2007 dollars. 74. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Random House, 2004). 75. Silver, “Intrade Betting Is Suspicious.” 76. Marko Kolanovic, Davide Silvestrini, Tony SK Lee, and Michiro Naito, “Rise of Cross-Asset Correlations,” Global Equity Derivatives and Delta One Strategy, J.P. Morgan, May 16, 2011. http://www.cboe.com/Institutional/JPMCrossAssetCorrelations.pdf. 77.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

The correct answer is 5 pence, since only with a bat worth £1.05 and a ball worth 5 pence are both conditions satisfied.12 If any field has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the way financial markets work, it must surely be the burgeoning discipline of behavioural finance.13 It is far from clear how much of the body of work derived from the efficient markets hypothesis can survive this challenge.14 Those who put their faith in the ‘wisdom of crowds’15 mean no more than that a large group of people is more likely to make a correct assessment than a small group of supposed experts. But that is not saying much. The old joke that ‘Macroeconomists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions’ is not so much a joke as a dispiriting truth about the difficulty of economic forecasting.16 Meanwhile, serious students of human psychology will expect as much madness as wisdom from large groups of people.17 A case in point must be the near-universal delusion among investors in the first half of 2007 that a major liquidity crisis could not occur (see Introduction).

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Mauboussin, More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (New York / Chichester, 2006). 12 Mark Buchanan, The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You (New York, 2007), p. 54. 13 For an introduction, see Andrei Shleifer, Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance (Oxford, 2000). For some practical applications see Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, 2008). 14 See Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving (New York, 2007). 15 See for example James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York, 2005); Ian Ayres, Supercrunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted (London, 2007). 16 Daniel Gross, ‘The Forecast for Forecasters is Dismal’, New York Times, 4 March 2007. 17 The classic work, first published in 1841, is Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York, 2003 [1841]). 18 Yudkowsky, ‘Cognitive Biases’, pp. 110f. 19 For an introduction to Lo’s work, see Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving , ch. 4.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

Is there a danger that the popularity of Facebook might nudge activists toward embracing some kind of “group fetishism,” in which they opt for a group solution to problems that could be solved much faster and better by solo artists? Now that almost every problem could be tackled by collective action rather than individually, is there a risk that a collective urge might also delay the solution? Before the Silicon Valley crowd went gung-ho about the wisdom of crowds, social psychologists and management experts were already studying conditions under which individuals who work as groups may be less effective than the same individuals working solo. One of the first people to discover and theorize this discrepancy was the French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann.

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Hearing of Ringelmann’s experiments today, one can’t help noticing the parallels to much of today’s Facebook activism. With the power of Facebook and Twitter at their fingertips, many activists may choose to tackle a problem collectively when tackling it individually would make more strategic sense. But just as “the madness of crowds” gives rise to “the wisdom of crowds” only under certain, carefully delineated social conditions, “social loafing” leads to synergy only once certain conditions are met (it’s possible to monitor and evaluate individual contributions, and the group members are aware that such evaluation is going on; tasks to be performed are unique and difficult, etc.)

A Man for All Markets
by Edward O. Thorp
Published 15 Nov 2016

The Ned polling method works remarkably well in certain situations, like guessing the number of beans in a barrel, or the weight of a pumpkin. The average of all the guesses by the crowd is typically much better than most of the individual guesses. This phenomenon has been called the wisdom of crowds. But like most simplifications, this has a flip side, as in the Madoff case. Here there were just two answers, fraudster or investment genius. The crowd voted for investment genius and got it wrong. I call the flip side to the wisdom of crowds the lunacy of lemmings. By 1991, I had simplified to a staff of four people. Steve Mizusawa was hedging Japanese warrants, with some assistance from me. I was also managing a portfolio of hedge funds for myself, with help from Judy McCoy.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014

Information systems aren’t just code. They are also about content and culture. We must select our frame of reference very carefully, because the solution is shaped by how we define the problem. This step is often skipped by eager teams that are ready to roll. We’re in an era of imbalance where the wisdom of crowds drowns out individual insight. We need both. We should embrace teamwork, prototypes, feedback, iteration, but we must also engage experts in research, planning, and design. We all know what it’s like to learn the hard way. We never forget the time we touched the hot stove. Initially we learn by experience.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Chapter 2: The Global Village 1 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962). 2 Eric Norden, ‘The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan’, Playboy, March 1969. 3 James Madison, ‘Federalist No. 10 – The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection’, 23 November 1787. 4 Thomas Hawk, ‘How to unleash the wisdom of crowds’, www.theconversation.com, 9 February 2016. 5 See especially the following authors: Zeynep Tufekci, Eli Pariser and Evgeny Morozov. On ‘post-truth’, see books by Matthew D’Ancona, James Ball and Evan Davies. 6 Bruce Drake, ‘Six new findings about Millennials’, www.pewresearch.org, 7 March 2014.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P. W. Singer
Published 1 Jan 2010

Adams, “The Real Military Revolution,” Parameters 30, no. 3 (2000). 231 “boids,” artificial birds Craig W. Reynolds, “An Evolved, Vision-Based Model of Obstacle Avoidance Behavior,” in Proceedings, ed. C. Langton (Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1994). 231 follow three simple rules Adams, “The Real Military Revolution.” 232 “the wisdom of crowds” James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations, 1st ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 232 “We don’t want to copy” Tobey Grumet, “Robots Clean House,” Popular Mechanics 180, no. 11 (2003): 30. 232 “an unassailable wireless ‘Internet in the sky’” Lakshmi Sandhana, “The Drone Armies Are Coming,” Wired News, August 30, 2002, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2002/08/54728. 232 “They should just go ahead” Scientist, interview, Peter W.

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There are many other examples of how complex, self-organizing systems work outside of nature. One is how big cities like New York never run out of food, despite the fact that no one is in charge of creating a master plan for moving food into and around the city. Another is the odd phenomenon known as “the wisdom of crowds,” where a mass of relatively uninformed people tend to make smarter decisions in the aggregate than better-informed individuals do on their own. This explains how the index of the stock market beats almost every professional stock picker. Roboticists are now using these same approaches to get relatively unsophisticated robots to carry out very sophisticated tasks.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

A “wiki workplace” refers to a collaborative venture involving scores, hundreds, and even thousands of people—some experts and others amateurs—usually across many different fields, who come together to share their ideas and problem-solve. These new fl at collaborative learning environments mobilize the collective wisdom of crowds, and their track record is impressive when compared to traditional hierarchically organized corporate learning environments. The phenomenon known as the “wisdom of crowds” is not something that just emerged with the advent of distributed computing technology. Francis Galton, a scientist best known for his championing of human eugenics—he was also Charles Darwin’s half cousin—was the first to grasp the importance of collaborative wisdom. In 1906, Galton was visiting a country fair in his home town of Plymouth, England.

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“Distributed Computing: Grassroots Supercomputing.” Science. Vol. 308. No. 5723. May 6, 2005. pp. 810-813. 10 Ibid. 11 “List of Distributed Computing Projects.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects 12 Bohannon. “Distributed Computing: Grassroots Supercomputing.” 13 Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. New York: Doubleday, 2004. p. xiii. 14 Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Penguin, 2006. p. 8. 15 Ibid. p. 9. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. p. 13. 18 McGirt, Ellen.

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William Sayers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977. Strang, Heather. Repair or Revenge: Victims and Restorative Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Suttie, Ian D. The Origins of Love and Hate. New York: Julian Press, 1952. Svenson, Ola, and A. J. Maule, eds. Time Pressure and Stress in Human Judgment and Decision Making.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

In fact, his sources don’t even know one another, Walters told me. This serves two purposes. First, it protects him in case one source is compromised. Walters doesn’t take kindly to disloyalty; he’s had a falling-out with Mindlin ever since Mindlin welched on a debt in 1986. Second—intentionally or not—Walters is following academic research on the wisdom of crowds. Group decision-making is more likely to be wiser when members of the group are able to operate independently, reducing the potential for groupthink. “I’m looking for independent opinions,” he said. “I’m not looking for something that’s going to be skewed by someone else.” Winners Not Welcome You might reasonably assume there’s no worse time to watch TV than if you’re in a swing state in the week before a major election; literally every commercial is a political ad.

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Fox: Along with a hedgehog, one of two decision-making personality typologies proposed by Phil Tetlock. Per the Greek poet Archilochus—“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”—foxes tend to be incrementalist, probabilistic jacks-of-all-trades, and are often willing to compromise or defer to the wisdom of crowds. Freeroll: A gambling situation in which you can’t lose money but have a chance of winning something, occasionally colorfully extended by Riverians to real-life situations: “Come to the party. Maybe you’ll meet someone—it’s a freeroll!” Friction: Constraints that make it harder for someone to exercise an option that is nominally available to them.

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Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, July 27, 2017, justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/william-t-billy-walters-sentenced-manhattan-federal-court-43-million-insider-trading. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT ever since Mindlin: Thomsen, “The Gang That Beat Vegas.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT wisdom of crowds: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books, 2005). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT deluged the airwaves: Peter Kafka, “DraftKings and FanDuel Look Wobbly, and So Does $220 Million in TV Ads,” Vox, November 11, 2015, vox.com/2015/11/11/11620574/draftkings-and-fanduel-look-wobbly-and-so-do-220-million-in-tv-ads.

Collaborative Futures
by Mike Linksvayer , Michael Mandiberg and Mushon Zer-Aviv
Published 24 Aug 2010

Social Contracts and Mediation Academic research into the techno-social dynamics of Wikipedia shows clear emergent pa erns of leadership. For example the initial content and structure outlined by the first edit of an article are o en maintained through the many future edits years on. (A Ki ur, RE Kraut; Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikipedia: Quality through Coordination) The governance mechanism of the Wiki so ware does not value one edit over the other. Yet, what is offered by the initial author is not just the initiative for the collaboration, it is also a leading guideline that implicitly coordinates the contributions that follow. 52 Much like a state, Wikipedia then uses social contracts to mediate the relationship of contributions to the collection as a whole.

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School
by Alexandra Robbins
Published 31 Mar 2009

Yet many perceived popular students demand that group members stick to the same bland fare. In the school setting, the higher a group’s status, the more likely it is to require unanimity. “The more influence a group’s members exert on each other . . . the less likely it is that the group’s decisions will be wise ones,” journalist James Surowiecki wrote in The Wisdom of Crowds. “The more influence we exert on each other, the more likely it is that we will believe the same things and make the same mistakes.” The conformity that tends to characterize student social circles, then, negates many of the benefits of belonging to a group in the first place. It is arguable that outcasts are not only courageous, not only crucial, valuable contributors to society, but also, in a way, lucky.

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“The more diverse the group”: Ibid. Note: Diverse groups do not polarize. See, for example, Fishkin, James S. and Luskin, Robert C. “Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal: Deliberative Polling and Public Opinion,” Acta Politica, Vol. 40, 2005. “The more influence a group’s members”: See Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds, New York: First Anchor Books, 2005. Acknowledgments I am exceptionally lucky to have supportive parents who have always encouraged me to be myself and clearly communicated that they love me not despite my goofy idiosyncrasies, but because those quirks help to make me who I am. A line on an acknowledgments page is not nearly enough to thank them.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Published 27 May 2009

Michael Snow, Article Creation Restricted to Logged-in Editors (Dec. 5, 2005), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-12-05/Page_creationrestrictions. 51. See supra note 19. 52. Wikipedia, Congressional Staffer Edits to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con gressional_staffer_edits_to_Wikipedia (as of June 1, 2007, 09:00 GMT). 53. Time on Wikipedia Was Wasted, LOWELL SUN, Jan. 28, 2006. 54. See generally JAMES SUROWIECKI, THE WISDOM OF CROWDS (2004). 55. Centiare, Directory: MyWikiBiz, http://www.centiare.eom/Directory:MyWikiBiz (as of June 1, 2007, 09:05 GMT). 56. Id. 57. Wikipedia, User Talk:MyWikiBiz, http://en.wikipedia.Org/wild/User_talk:MyWikiBiz/Archive_1 (as of June 1, 2007, 09:05 GMT). 58. E-mail from Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia, to WikiEN-1 mailing list, about My WikiBiz (Aug. 9, 2006, 02:58 PM), http://www.nabble.com/MyWikiBiz-tf2080660.html 59.

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See John Borland, See Who’s Editing Wikipedia, Wired.com, Aug. 15, 2007, http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker (explaining the mechanics of Wikiscanner); Posting of Kevin Poulsen to meat level, Vote on the Most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs, Wired.com, http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/wikiwatch/ (Aug. 13, 2007, 23:03 GMT) (curating a user-contributed library of particularly notable instances of organizational censorship on Wikipedia). 4. See generally James Surowiecki, THE WISDOM OF CROWDS (2004). For a discussion of communitarian views of democratic citizenship and participatory meaning-making, see, for example, Michael Walzer, Response, in PLURALISM, JUSTICE, AND EQUALITY 282 (David Miller & Michael Walzer eds., 1993). 5. Communitarians have championed citizens’ role in shaping their communities.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
by Kathryn Schulz
Published 7 Jun 2010

(Longmans, Green and Co., 1886), lxxii–lxxiii. Thomas Gilovich. Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (The Free Press, 1991), 112. Cass Sunstein. Cass Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Harvard University Press, 2005), v. James Surowiecki. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor Books, 2005), 43. John Locke and David Hume. This rejection of secondhand information as insufficient grounds for knowledge is part of the same epistemological tradition articulated by, among others, Descartes (who cautioned against believing anything based on scanty evidence) and William Clifford (James’s foil in “The Will To Believe”).

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* To be clear, Gilovich, Surowiecki, and Sunstein all acknowledge serious limitations to this follow-the-crowd logic. Among other problems, Gilovich points out, we tend to assume that most rational people believe what we believe, so our sense of the consensus of the crowd might itself be in error. Surowiecki believes strongly in the wisdom of crowds—he is the author of a 2004 book by that name—but only if their decisions reflect the aggregation of many independently developed beliefs, rather than the belief of a few people snowballing into the belief of the masses. Sunstein, meanwhile, acknowledges the potential utility of conformity largely as a preamble to exposing its dangers, and especially its political dangers—which is the central theme of his own book, Why Societies Need Dissent

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 1 Jan 2007

Rather, it generates an ethos of schizophrenia that helps condition the attitudes and behavior it requires for its own survival. It fosters “me” thinking on the model of the narcissistic child and discourages “we” thinking of the kind deliberative grown-up citizens recognize as wisdom and that constitutes what James Surowiecki (business columnist for The New Yorker) has called “the wisdom of crowds”—a wisdom that rests on “diversity and independence” that allow “disagreement and contest.”22 Consumerism thus builds psychic monkey traps into its free-range marketplace. If the attitudes and behaviors that result turn out to undermine other important cultural values, which however are extraneous to capitalism’s concerns—however deeply relevant they may be to moral and spiritual frameworks and to the shaping of an ideal public culture—too bad.

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Postwar Harvard political theorist Louis Hartz dismissed the Tocquevillian obsession with the tyranny of the majority by noting that the much maligned American majority “has been an amiable shepherd dog kept forever on a lion’s leash” (Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution [New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1955], p. 129). 21. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 22. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. xix. 23. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (edited and translated by J. Strachey; New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), pp. 55, 59. Freud’s grand schematic no longer has much creditability in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy, but it remains useful as a cultural metaphor for the impact of repression, guilt, regression, and infantilization in political culture; that is to say, it offers what Freud calls “a pathology of cultural communities” that illuminates what I here am calling the infantilist ethos. 24.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Shenker, J. The Egyptians: A Radical Story. London: Penguin, 2016. Shirky, C. Here Comes Everybody. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Starr, P. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Surowiecki, J. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Tapscott, D. and Williams, A.D. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Old Saybrook, CT: Tantor Media, 2006. Walmsley, R. Peterloo: The Case Reopened.

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‘Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)’, New Republic, 4 March 2009; Paul Starr 3. Quoted in ‘Newspapers Last Bastion Against Political Corruption’; Oliver Burkeman, Guardian, 27 March 2009 4. A reasoned case for the power of ‘open information’ had been advanced in 2004 by the author James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds; see Bibliography. 5. An inquest found he had been unlawfully killed. The policeman who struck him was found not guilty after the jury deliberated for four days. He was dismissed from the police for ‘gross misconduct’ towards Tomlinson, and for using ‘excessive and unlawful force’. 6. Three G4S security guards were cleared of his manslaughter in 2014.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore
Published 18 Jun 2018

The manual included design patterns, written guidance, job descriptions, links to communities of practice, and much more besides. It built goodwill, clarified meaning and created some collective ownership for what good looked like from right across the organisation. It should not be for a few people in a central team to keep defining the new rules on their own – the wisdom of crowds will ultimately provide a far richer view. The role of the central digital institution as a setter of standards should evolve over time to becoming a chairperson: making sure discussions on what good looks like don’t rumble on indefinitely without coming to a decision, and curating things that capture the current version of best practice.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
by Kevlin Henney
Published 5 Feb 2010

Programmers mediate between the negotiated and uncertain truths of business and the crisp, uncompromising domain of bits and bytes and higher constructed types. With so much to know, so much to do, and so many ways of doing so, no single person or single source can lay claim to "the one true way." Instead, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know draws on the wisdom of crowds and the voices of experience to offer not so much a coordinated big picture as a crowdsourced mosaic of what every programmer should know. This ranges from code-focused advice to culture, from algorithm usage to agile thinking, from implementation know-how to professionalism, from style to substance.

100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them
by Christopher W Mayer
Published 21 May 2018

It was one of the two questions that, in his own words, “long obsessed” him. The other was whether the stock market was wise in its judgments or merely a “foolish consensus of crowds.” One of his books, Wealth, War and Wisdom, dealt explicitly with these questions through the lens of World War II history, a hobby interest of his. On the wisdom of crowds, Biggs found that the stock markets of the world showed “surprisingly good intuitions at the epic turning points. As the old saying goes, when coming events cast their shadows, they often fall on the NYSE.” He wrote how • “the British stock market bottomed . . . in 1940 just before the Battle of Britain”; • “the US market turned forever in late May 1942 around the epic Battle of Midway”; and • the German market “peaked at the high-water mark of the German attack on Russia just before the advance German patrols actually saw the spires of Moscow in early December 1941.”

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Being successful at party politics requires a very different set of skills, attitudes, and organizational structures than successfully editing Wikipedia; small and tiny contributions by everyone might be enough to produce a decent article, but they may not be enough to build an effective political party. For all their reliance on the wisdom of crowds, the Pirates have not yet produced any meaningful positions on issues that do not touch upon the purely digital. The Pirates have little to say on matters of social inequality, the European debt crisis, or the future of climate change, not to mention gender inequality, a problem to which their own male-dominated party is a living testament.

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Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for our newly empowered geeks and engineers to recognize that there are good reasons not to run our politics as a startup; that our politicians face competing demands and that the quest to eradicate lies and hypocrisy may do more harm than good; that there are good reasons to value subjective but high-quality criticism, even if it doesn’t stem from the “wisdom of crowds”; that the dream of flawless communication across nations may not only be unachievable but also undesirable; that humans are complex and occasionally irrational creatures who care about why they do certain things as much as they care about what it is they are doing; that numbers often tell us less than we think and quantification as such might actually thwart reforms.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

In 2007 this database revealed something that had eluded distinguished critics and listeners: that more than one hundred recordings released by the late English pianist Joyce Hatto—music by Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Liszt, and others—were actually stolen performances by other pianists. MIT established a Center for Collective Intelligence, devoted to finding group wisdom and “harnessing” it. It remains difficult to know when and how much to trust the wisdom of crowds—the title of a 2004 book by James Surowiecki, to be distinguished from the madness of crowds as chronicled in 1841 by Charles Mackay, who declared that people “go mad in herds, while they recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”♦ Crowds turn all too quickly into mobs, with their time-honored manifestations: manias, bubbles, lynch mobs, flash mobs, crusades, mass hysteria, herd mentality, goose-stepping, conformity, groupthink—all potentially magnified by network effects and studied under the rubric of information cascades.

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Streufert, Siegfried, Peter Suedfeld, and Michael J. Driver. “Conceptual Structure, Information Search, and Information Utilization.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2, no. 5 (1965): 736–40. Sunstein, Cass R. Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Swade, Doron. “The World Reduced to Number.” Isis 82, no. 3 (1991): 532–36. ———. The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. London: Little, Brown, 2000. ———. The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer.

Alpha Trader
by Brent Donnelly
Published 11 May 2021

We find broad-based and significant evidence for the anchoring hypothesis; consensus forecasts are biased towards the values of previous months’ data releases, which in some cases results in sizable predictable forecast errors. Trader bias # 9 : Herding One great paradox of markets is that they are mostly driven by the wisdom of the crowd but occasionally by its madness. Separating the two is a key source of alpha. Before we talk about herding and temporary madness in markets, let’s first discuss the wisdom of crowds. Most of the time, the errors made by buyers and sellers cancel out and the average of all the transactions is some approximation of a reasonable equilibrium price. This outcome is similar to the jelly bean experiment. In that experiment, a crowd of people are asked to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar.

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This is astounding and suggests you should be humble when trying to beat the market. Instead of a bunch of undergrads guessing how many jelly beans are in the jar, imagine 1,000 highly-trained quants who have millions of dollars to invest in jelly bean estimation technology. Do you think you can beat them? That’s a more apt analogy for the markets. The wisdom of crowds, though, relies on diverse and unbiased opinion. And it relies on incentives. If there is no prize, estimates will be lazy and less accurate. Or (for example) if the jar is extremely far away from the people trying to estimate the number of jelly beans (say at the very front of a huge lecture hall), the crowdsourced conclusion might be too low because the jar looks smaller from afar.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms
by Jeffrey Bussgang
Published 31 Mar 2010

The typical start-up that is a good fit for VC money may not generate any revenue for two to four years, if ever. And the typical entrepreneur who is a good fit for VC money wants and needs the very active participation of the capital provider in the oversight of the business. THE PLAYERS A VC firm tends to be organized (often unwittingly) around the thesis of James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds—that is, no one person can be as smart as a group of informed, independent-minded people. And the way to make the best investment decisions is to construct a democratic process rather than a hierarchical one. Thus, VC firms typically gather a group of experienced investment professionals with diverse backgrounds and perspectives and do not allow any one individual’s power or status to sway the discussion.

Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd
by Youngme Moon
Published 5 Apr 2010

But in the past couple of decades, something has turned. There has been a change in the tenor of our conversation around group behavior. Today, our cultural lexicon is replete with references to a newfound optimism in the benefits of self-organizing systems. Col ective intel igence. Smart mobs. The wisdom of crowds. The central conceit in this more recent dialogue is that organic col usion of the sort that arises from intel igent, independent decision making can lead to optimal and even beautiful outcomes. I raise these two countervailing perspectives, not to argue for the validity of one over the other, but because I believe there’s a crux in their reconciliation.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
Published 24 Oct 2011

The procedure I adopted to tame the halo effect conforms to a general principle: decorrelate error! To understand how this principle works, imagine that a large number of observers are shown glass jars containing pennies and are challenged to estimate the number of pennies in each jar. As James Surowiecki explained in his best-selling The Wisdom of Crowds, this is the kind of task in which individuals do very poorly, but pools of individual judgments do remarkably well. Some individuals greatly overestimate the true number, others underestimate it, but when many judgments are averaged, the average tends to be quite accurate. The mechanism is straightforward: all individuals look at the same jar, and all their judgments have a common basis.

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Malone, “Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in the Rejection of False Information,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 601–13. descriptions of two people: Solomon E. Asch, “Forming {#823. Impressions of Personality,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41 (1946): 258–90. all six adjectives: Ibid. Wisdom of Crowds: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books, 2005). one-sided evidence: Lyle A. Brenner, Derek J. Koehler, and Amos Tversky, “On the Evaluation of One-Sided Evidence,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 9 (1996): 59–70. 8: How Judgments Happen biological roots: Alexander Todorov, Sean G. Baron, and Nikolaas N.

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse
by Mohamed A. El-Erian
Published 26 Jan 2016

Fourth, all this makes the argument for passive versus active investment a lot more nuanced and a lot less extreme. It is not an either/or, which much of the discussion in the financial media would have you believe. Rather it is about striking the right balance: using smart passive exposures where investor conviction and foundation do not dominate the wisdom of crowds and where broad-based risk exposure is not undermined by construct defects; but, concurrently, being willing to deviate via high-conviction trades, relative positioning, and risk-management-motivated portfolio overlays. A final point in closing this chapter: The onus on smart communication is central to successfully managing a world in which technological advances engage and empower so many individuals and collectives.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

Successful internet platforms, such as eBay, Uber, and Amazon, have similarly figured out ways of making most transactions run smoothly and acting as arbitrator in those that don’t (and, in Uber’s case, using a proprietary algorithm that governs how to connect drivers and customers). The market maker can screen out undesirables from all sides of the platform, but as cases like eBay and Uber suggest, often the job is left to platform participants themselves. The platform manager makes customer feedback possible, and in theory, the wisdom of crowds takes care of the rest, solving the asymmetric information problem that George Akerlof identified as the enemy of market function back in 1970. This has led to all sorts of match-making platforms for goods or services where it was hard to find a reliable provider in the pre–internet era. If Akerlof had wanted to renovate his house in the ’70s, for instance, he would have had to find a Berkeley-area contractor who had the skills for the job, had the time to take it on, was reliable, would quote a fair price, and wouldn’t try to jack up the price once he’d knocked down a few walls.

Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success
by Greg Nudelman and Pabini Gabriel-Petit
Published 8 May 2011

Figure 14-11: A Social Search Service Diagram (Image credit: Wired, November 2010): http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/st_flowchart_social/. Yet, there’s another class of social search services that makes use of aggregated social data from large networks. I call this “collective social search” since it’s like the wisdom of crowds effect, in that you can see trends from the collective that might be useful in guiding your search. Google Search Suggest is an example of this—it shows you the common search phrases for a given few words. Twitter’s Trending Topics and OneRiot are similar. I think the popularity of this approach is that it’s algorithmic, meaning you can throw more programmers at it and hopefully improve the results.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance
by Parag Khanna
Published 11 Jan 2011

Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law After Military Interventions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Sullivan, Nicholas P. You Can Hear Me Now: How Microloans and Cell Phones Are Connecting the World’s Poor to the Global Economy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. New York: Doubleday, 2004. SustainAbility. The 21st Century NGO in the Market for Change. London: SustainAbility, 2005. SustainAbility and the Global Compact. Gearing Up: From Corporate Responsibility to Good Governance and Scalable Solutions.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

The brightest moments of human discovery are those unplanned and random instants when you thumb through a strange book in a foreign library or talk auto maintenance with a neuroanatomist. We need our searches to include cross-wiring and dumb accidents, too, not just algorithmic surety. And besides the need for accidental connections, there’s the fact that some things, clearly, are beyond the wisdom of crowds—sometimes speed and volume should bend to make way for theory and meaning. Sometimes we do still need to quiet down the rancor of mass opinion and ask a few select voices to speak up. And doing so in past generations has never been such a problem as it is for us. They never dealt with such a glut of information or such a horde of folk eager to misrepresent it

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms
by Hannah Fry
Published 17 Sep 2018

‘Ask the audience’ was typically used in the early rounds of the game, when the questions were a lot easier. None the less, the idea of the collective opinions of a group being more accurate than those of any individual is a well-documented phenomenon. For more on this, see James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 4. 22. Netflix Technology Blog, https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-recommendations-beyond-the-5-stars-part-2-d9b96aa399f5. 23. Shih-ho Cheng, ‘Unboxing the random forest classifier: the threshold distributions’, Airbnb Engineering and Data Science, https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/unboxing-the-random-forest-classifier-the-threshold-distributions-22ea2bb58ea6. 24.

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

Philosophers from Aristotle onwards have argued that the best way to avoid individual errors of judgement is to pool our opinions so that the weight of numbers can tell. Collective decision-making works better than any individual’s choices if our biases are allowed to cancel each other out. This is the wisdom of crowds. The internet age has seen an enormous revival of interest in this idea. Digital technology now enables the pooling of opinions on a vast scale. Collectively we can rate products, predict futures, solve puzzles and even edit an encyclopedia better than any one of us could do on our own. The internet has also dramatically lowered the barriers to entry.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
by Simon Sinek
Published 29 Oct 2009

by Spencer Johnson, M.D., The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, Freakanomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, FISH! By Stephen Lundin, Harry Paul, John Christensen and Ken Blanchard, The Naked Brain by Richard Restack, Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb, American Mania by Peter Whybrow, M.D., and the single most important book everyone should read, the book that teaches us that we cannot control the circumstances around us, all we can control is our attitude—Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankel.

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior
by Jonah Berger
Published 13 Jun 2016

Group members who were on the fence tend to conform, and unless someone has strong objections, they tend to keep their opposition to themselves. Without much of a peep, the group quietly goes one way when they could have just as easily gone the opposite. Groupthink has been blamed for everything from the space shuttle Challenger disaster to the Cuban missile crisis. People talk about the wisdom of crowds, but crowds are only wise when the group has access to everyone’s individual information. Aggregating these pieces can lead to better decisions than any person could have made alone. But if everyone just follows everyone else, or keeps their information to themselves, the value of the group is lost.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

Group dynamics Committees control decision making out of necessity. Transport involves tasks and projects that are far too large to be completed by one person, so people must come together, typically with a range of skills, objectives and levels of seniority in a hierarchy. We often assume that groups universally outperform individuals: the wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, many brains are better than one. And this can be the case when the way that people decide follows structured diversity of thought and perspectives. For example, in a 2018 study, groups were found to outperform individuals on a controlled task that required them to match ­climate-change policies against climate scenarios of varying severities.19 Despite prompting, 80% of individuals failed to produce alternative arguments, whereas groups generated more self-reflection on the impacts of emissions growth.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

But tenacious Albanian partisans kept reinserting the claim. The Einstein-in-Albania tug-of-war lasted weeks. I became worried that the obstinacy of a few passionate advocates could undermine Wikipedia’s reliance on the wisdom of crowds. But after a while, the edit wars ended, and the article no longer had Einstein going to Albania. At first I didn’t credit that success to the wisdom of crowds, since the push for a fix had come from me and not from the crowd. Then I realized that I, like thousands of others, was in fact a part of the crowd, occasionally adding a tiny bit to its wisdom. A key principle of Wikipedia was that articles should have a neutral point of view.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
by Andrew Lih
Published 5 Jul 2010

Credentials and central control, once considered the most important parameters for generating quality content, now yield to new terms: crowdsourcing, peer production, and open source intelligence. What was once only done top-down is now being viewed bottom-up. Books and essays have addressed the impact of projects freely driven by communities of scattered individuals: The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Infotopia by Cass R. Sun-stein, and Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. This book, however, goes in with a deeper focus on Wikipedia, explaining how it evolved to become the phenomenon it is today, and showing the fascinating community behind the articles and the unique online culture the site has fostered.

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow
Published 12 May 2008

Gamson and Norman A. Scotch, “Scapegoating in Baseball,” American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 1 (July 1964): 69–72; on soccer, Ruud H. Koning, “An Econometric Evaluation of the Effect of Firing a Coach on Team Performance,” Applied Economics 35, no. 5 (March 2003): 555–64. 3. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 218–19. 4. Armen Alchian, “Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 58, no. 3 (June 1950): 213. Chapter 1: Peering through the Eyepiece of Randomness 1. Kerstin Preuschoff, Peter Bossaerts, and Steven R. Quartz, “Neural Differentiation of Expected Reward and Risk in Human Subcortical Structures,” Neuron 51 (August 3, 2006): 381–90. 2.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

Market Markets are frequently spoken of as if they have thoughts and feelings and intentions, and this puzzles outsiders: I’ve often been asked what on earth it means when commentators say, “The market thinks that . . .” The answer is that markets aggregate a whole range of widely divergent views and end up in effect expressing a single aggregate opinion. This process is discussed fascinatingly and at length in James Surowiecki’s brilliant book The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s often an aid to clarity to regard the market as an individual, expressing an individual view: “The market hates sterling today,” for instance, even though many of the people taking part in that market in fact think the exact opposite. It is crucial to remember that this individual, dubbed Mr.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

I loved politics but found the role of money distasteful. It felt like a complete subversion of the Founding Fathers’ notions of government of, by, and for the people. At the same time, I was becoming steeped in open-source programming and a range of heady ideas—crowd sourcing, distributed network power, the wisdom of crowds—embraced by the nerd godfathers discussed in chapter 1. Leaving Washington to pursue a nonpolitical job in New York, I immersed myself in the growing world of grassroots political blogs, which reminded me of the online communities I had encountered in high school. After September 11, 2001, becoming concerned by the growing momentum toward war in Iraq, I began to spend more and more time surfing the emerging political blogosphere, lurking on sites like MyDD.com.

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets
by Michael Blastland
Published 3 Apr 2019

Even worse, these theories – although often interesting and plausible when considered individually – are fundamentally incoherent when viewed collectively.’ Like the aphorisms we came across earlier that point both ways – ‘look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost’ – theory often does the same. At a popular level, there’s the wisdom of crowds, and the madness of crowds (or groupthink); the value of impulsive judgement (Blink), and the dangers of impulsive judgement (Kahneman’s ‘system 1’ thinking). In its defence, social science is more than a manual. Duncan Watts says it helps us ‘to challenge common-sense assumptions about the nature of social reality, provide rich descriptions of lived experience, inspire new ways of thinking about human behaviour and shed light on specific empirical puzzles – that do not directly address practical problems but can still provide valuable insight’.

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age
by Claudia Hammond
Published 5 Dec 2019

And the more you know about how important restful activities are, I find, the easier it is to do them deliberately and without guilt. Like the music charts, the Rest Test top ten is counted down in reverse order, starting with the tenth most popular restful activity, and ending with number one. I’m happy to tell you from the outset that the most popular activity turned out to be reading. You know what they say about the wisdom of crowds: 18,000 people can’t be wrong. Enjoy the book, things don’t get any more restful than reading, it seems, and what could be more restful than reading a book about rest? 10 MINDFULNESS Question: What is a mindfulness teacher’s favourite food? Answer: Raisins This is not a joke, as you’ve probably noticed.

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes
by Ian Leslie
Published 23 Feb 2021

Harvey (eds), Attribution, Communication Behavior, and Close Relationships, Cambridge University Press, 2001 Sloman, Steven, and Fernbach, Philip, The Knowledge Illusion: the myth of individual thought and the power of collective wisdom, Pan, 2018 Smith, Dana, interview with James Evans: ‘The Wisdom of Crowds Requires the Political Left and Right to Work Together’, Scientific American, 8 March 2019 Sobo, Elisa, ‘Theorising (Vaccine) Refusal: Through the Looking Glass’, Cultural Anthropology, 31 (3), 2016 Stokoe, Elizabeth, Talk: The Science of Conversation, Little Brown, 2018 Sun, Katherine Q., and Slepian, Michael L., ‘The conversations we seek to avoid’, Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 60, September 2020 Talhelm, Thomas, et al., ‘Liberals Think More Analytically (More “WEIRD”) Than Conservatives’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41 (2), 24 December 2014 Tan, Chenhao, et al., ‘Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions’, Proceedings of the 25th International World Wide Web Conference, 2016) Tesser, Abraham, et al., ‘Conflict: the role of calm and angry parent–child discussion in adolescent adjustment’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8 (3), 1989 Thibodeau, David, and Whiteson, Leon, A Place Called Waco, PublicAffairs, 1999 Thompson, George, Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion, HarperCollins USA, 2014 Tiedens, Larissa Z., ‘Anger and Advancement versus Sadness and Subjugation: The Effect of Negative Emotion Expressions on Social Status Conferral’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80 (1), 2001 Trevors, Gregory, et al., ‘Identity and Epistemic Emotions During Knowledge Revision: A Potential Account for the Backfire Effect’, Discourse Processes, 53 (5), January 2016 Wallace, David Foster, ‘Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage’, in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, Little Brown 2006 Wasserman, Noam, The Founder’s Dilemmas, Princeton University Press, 2013 Watters, Ethan, ‘We Aren’t the World’, Pacific Standard, 25 February 2013 Wender, Jonathan, Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life, University of Illinois Press, 2009 West, Richard F., et al., ‘Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103 (3), 2012 Whipps, Judy D., ‘A Pragmatist Reading of Mary Parker Follett’s Integrative Process’, Faculty Peer Reviewed Articles, 8, 2014, https://scholarworks.gvso.edu/lib-articles/8 Witkowski, Sadie, ‘Psychology Researchers Explore How Vaccine Beliefs Are Formed’, Voice of America News, 16 August 2018 Wolf Shenk, Joshua, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs, John Murray, 2014 Zanes, Warren, Petty: The Biography, Macmillan USA, 2015 Zartman, I.

Traders at Work: How the World's Most Successful Traders Make Their Living in the Markets
by Tim Bourquin and Nicholas Mango
Published 26 Dec 2012

But many of the wealthy traders I talked with realized early on in their trading careers that the markets are driven by human greed, fear, and panic—the same emotions that drive rioters to overturn cars and break store windows. There are several excellent trading books that aren’t actually about trading at all but nevertheless will give you insight into what drives human behavior in a variety of situations. One my favorites is The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 2004). Another is The Art of Strategy, by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008). And finally, a third book I recommend is Markets, Mobs, and Mayhem, by Robert Menschel (Wiley, 2002). Books that address the basic premises of human nature will give you a new perspective on how supply and demand in any market move prices—and price is king.

Death of the Liberal Class
by Chris Hedges
Published 14 May 2010

“There are some things crowds can do, such as count the jelly beans in the jar or guess the weight of the ox,” Lanier said:I acknowledge this phenomenon is real. But I propose that the line between when crowds can think effectively as a crowd and when they can’t is a little different. If you read [James] Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, he, as well as other theorists, say that if you want a crowd to be wise, the key is to reduce the communication flow between the members so they do not influence each other, so they are truly independent and have separate sample points. It brings up an interesting paradox. The starting point for online crowd enthusiasts is that connection is good and everyone should be connected.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

Subsequent models also see personal and moral development as progressing in stages of increasing mental complexity, most prominently the developmental psychology of Robert Kegan (see Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982]). 85 Lars Skov Henriksen, Kristin Strømsnes, and Lars Svedberg, eds., Civic Engagement in Scandinavia: Volunteering, Informal Help and Giving in Denmark, Norway and Sweden (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018). 86 Elizabeth Anderson, “The Epistemology of Democracy,” Episteme 3, no. 1–2 (2006): 8–22. 87 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books, 2005); Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 88 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (Paris: P. Pourrat Frères, 1839), 93.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

,” South China Morning Post, April 28, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3081939/coronavirus-covid-19-task-force-dutertes-rolex-12-plan-marcos. 7.Korina Sanchez, Henry Omaga-Diaz, and Ces Oreña-Drilon were the founding anchors of Bandila. 8.We co-opted two key ideas: crowdsourcing from James Surowiecki, who wrote the book The Wisdom of Crowds, and the tipping point from the book The Tipping Point, written more than a decade earlier by Malcolm Gladwell. 9.“Ako ang Simula,” YouTube, October 20, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbm1HfW9HYs. 10.Joseph Campbell was right about the power of myth, and we thought about universal truths that would resonate for the Philippines. 11.Video call to action available here: bravenewworldressa, “Boto Mo, iPatrol Mo Maria Ressa Stand Up and Say AKO ANG SIMULA!

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

Their headlines were hyped, although recently their desire to be serious news providers had improved quality. BuzzFeed and Vice depended on social media sharing, a broad metric called “engagement,” which included time spent reading, the number of likes, shares, and comments on social media, and a host of other factors. The wisdom of crowds, with commenters rather than professional journalists setting the terms, drove coverage. The breathless news cycle left little time for formal training of the young, aspiring journalists who mostly sat behind computers scraping previously published content off the internet and rewriting it or spinning it in new directions.

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In 2014 the ad industry’s bible, Ad Age, detailed Facebook’s strategy for taking on its main rival. Zuckerberg’s first move was mimicry. A popular feature on both BuzzFeed and YouTube was showing how many views a particular video had enjoyed. Viewers liked to watch stories that had high traffic, assuming popular tastes revealed the wisdom of crowds. So Facebook announced that it too would include data on numbers of views for each video. It also gave preference to videos displayed on its own digital player and made it cumbersome to watch YouTube videos on Facebook. YouTube had already established profitable partnerships with content-makers like Vice, giving them a cut of ad revenue.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

When artists assessed one another’s performances, they were about twice as accurate as managers and test audiences in predicting how often the videos would be shared. Compared to creators, managers and test audiences were 56 percent and 55 percent more prone to major false negatives, undervaluing a strong, novel performance by five ranks or more in the set of ten they viewed. We often speak of the wisdom of crowds, but we need to be careful about which crowds we’re considering. On average, the combined forecasts of all 120 circus managers were no better than a typical single creator’s predictions. Managers and test audiences tended to fixate on a particular category of favored acts and reject the rest.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

The process is still poorly understood by social science, with its search for external causes of behavior, but is essential to bridging the largest chasm in intellectual life: that between individual psychology and collective culture.”13 As above, so below. The effort to make things on different levels conform to the same rules had become explicit. Economics writer and The Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki explained to libertarian Reason magazine that Hayek’s notion of catallaxy—amplified by Santa Fe’s computers—could well become a universal approach to understanding humans: “In the 20th Century, this insight helped change the way people thought about markets. In the next century, it should change the way people think about organizations, networks, and the social order more generally.”14 And so scientists, economists, cultural theorists, and even military strategists15 end up adopting fractalnoia as the new approach to describing and predicting the behavior of both individual actors and the greater systems in which they live.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 29 Mar 2015

The effect of this publicity was to make no place safe from the idea of normalcy.5 INDIVIDUALITY IS PASSÉ Merely to raise concern about the fate of individuality in contemporary culture is probably to appear old-fashioned. It would seem to be a 1950s through 1970s sort of preoccupation, the stuff of The Catcher in the Rye or the cigarette and hi-fi advertisements in your dad’s old Playboys. “Conformity” was the great worry of half a century ago. Now we are fascinated with “the wisdom of crowds” and “the hive mind.” We are told that there is a superior global intelligence arising in the Web itself. This collective mind is more meta, more synoptic and synthetic, than any one of us, and aren’t these the defining features of intelligence? Of course all this crowd-loving lines up pretty well with Silicon Valley’s distaste for the concept of intellectual property, and with the fact that there is a lot more money to be made as an aggregator of “content” than as a producer of it.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

During breaks, academic presenters often conducted a hasty Google search and revealed to these analog counterterrorists that their precious secret intelligence sat on the World Wide Web for everyone to see. The advantages the U.S. intelligence community had once enjoyed were slipping away in the open-source world. A few years before, in 2004, American journalist James Surowiecki had published a book called The Wisdom of Crowds, which described how the internet provided a vehicle for crowds to make smarter decisions than even the smartest person in the crowd, working alone, could make. Collective intelligence mined from the internet through crowdsourcing proved effective in three types of decisions: coordination challenges, where groups work together to determine an optimal solution, such as the best way to get to work or travel overseas; cognition calculations, where people involved in a market compete to provide the right answer, such as guessing the winner of an election; and cooperation networks, where a central system collects information and the crowd then controls behavior and enforces compliance—think Wikipedia as an example.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

New York: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, Laurie. 2004. “Wal-Mart’s Way: Heavyweight Retailer Looks Inward to Stay Innovative in Business Technology.” Information Week (September 27). http://www.informationweek.com. Sunstein, Cass R. 2001. Republic.com. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Surowiecki, James. 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books. Swartz, Mimi, with Sherron Watkins. 2003. Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron. New York: Doubleday. Sweezy, Paul M. 1972. Modern Capitalism and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Tanselle, G. Thomas. 1992. A Rationale of Textual Criticism.

The Unusual Billionaires
by Saurabh Mukherjea
Published 16 Aug 2016

Throughout the late 1990s, HDFC Bank’s ROA (return on assets, an indicator of a bank’s profitability which is calculated by dividing net profit by total assets) was 100 bps higher than that of its peers. Phase 2: 2000–08 Building the Retail Bank ‘The fundamental problem with banks is what it’s always been: they’re in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated is inherently risky.’—James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds (2004). HDFC Bank was acutely aware of the opportunities that lay in retail banking: taking savings deposits from customers and in turn providing them loans like car loans, credit cards, etc. Whilst the bank had started talking about the opportunity in 1997, the focus of the bank was still on building its corporate franchise and there was no separate retail group within the bank.

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis
by Kevin Rodgers
Published 13 Jul 2016

A widespread faith in the efficacy and inexorable ‘rightness’ of markets led, first from changes in the US, and then via inter-country rivalry, to a regulatory framework embodying the belief that professionals had, in Alan Greenspan’s words, ‘[the] ability to protect themselves’. What is ironic is that the banking industry, in a reverse of the idea of ‘the wisdom of crowds’ that lay at the foundation of the theory of efficient markets, took a lot of extremely clever people and, collectively, as a mass, contrived to have us act like idiots. A simplifying idea (markets are right, rational and self-correcting) had been draped comfortingly over the complex reality of an entire industry in much the same way as simplifications like VaR or credit ratings obscured the complex reality of risk.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

Communities can thereby come up with rules that allow true beliefs to emerge from the rough-and-tumble of argument, such as that you have to provide reasons for your beliefs, you’re allowed to point out flaws in the beliefs of others, and you’re not allowed to forcibly shut people up who disagree with you. Add in the rule that you should allow the world to show you whether your beliefs are true or false, and we can call the rules science. With the right rules, a community of less than fully rational thinkers can cultivate rational thoughts.31 The wisdom of crowds can also elevate our moral sentiments. When a wide enough circle of people confer on how best to treat each other, the conversation is bound to go in certain directions. If my starting offer is “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don’t get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind,” I can’t expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there’s no good reason that I should get privileges just because I’m me and you’re not.32 Nor are we likely to agree to the deal “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, and you get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill me and my kind,” despite its symmetry, because the advantages either of us might get in harming the other are massively outweighed by the disadvantages we would suffer in being harmed (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits).

…

That meant that the chance of an Islamist attack in Western Europe by the end of March was about one in three. A manner of forecasting very different from the way most people think led to a very different forecast. Two other traits distinguish superforecasters from pundits and chimpanzees. The superforecasters believe in the wisdom of crowds, laying their hypotheses on the table for others to criticize or amend and pooling their estimates with those of others. And they have strong opinions on chance and contingency in human history as opposed to necessity and fate. Tetlock and Mellers asked different groups of people whether they agreed with statements like the following: Events unfold according to God’s plan.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

Available at: http://timharford.com/2009/11/how-a-celebrity-chef-turned-into-a-social-scientist/; and Michele Belot and Jonathan James, ‘Healthy School Meals and Educational Achievements’, Nuffield College Working Paper. Available at: http://cess-wb.nuff.ox.ac.uk/downloads/schoolmeals.pdf 30 There is some evidence that the more ambitious: see James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (London: Abacus, 2005), pp. 253–4. Surowiecki refers to two studies that reach this commonsense conclusion, but I have not been able to discover a precise citation. 30 Even when leaders and managers: Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 138–9. 31 I spent the summer of 2005 studying poker: Tim Harford, ‘The Poker Machine’, Financial Times, 6 May 2006.

The Elements of Statistical Learning (Springer Series in Statistics)
by Trevor Hastie , Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman
Published 25 Aug 2009

Suppose each of the weak learners G∗b have an error-rate eb = e < 0.5, and let S1 (x) = PB ∗ b=1 I(Gb (x) = 1) be the consensus vote for class 1. Since the weak learners are assumed to be independent, S1 (x) ∼ Bin(B, 1 − e), and Pr(S1 > B/2) → 1 as B gets large. This concept has been popularized outside of statistics as the “Wisdom of Crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004) — the collective knowledge of a diverse and independent body of people typically exceeds the knowledge of any single individual, and can be harnessed by voting. Of course, the main caveat here is “independent,” and bagged trees are not. Figure 8.11 illustrates the power of a consensus vote in a simulated example, where only 30% of the voters have some knowledge.

…

Statistical significance for genomewide studies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100-: 9440– 9445. Storey, J., Taylor, J. and Siegmund, D. (2004). Strong control, conservative point estimation, and simultaneous conservative consistency of false discovery rates: A unified approach., Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 66: 187–205. 724 References Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies and Nations., Little, Brown. Swayne, D., Cook, D. and Buja, A. (1991). Xgobi: Interactive dynamic graphics in the X window system with a link to S, ASA Proceedings of Section on Statistical Graphics, pp. 1–8.

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising
by Jim Jansen
Published 25 Jul 2011

“Auctions and Bidding.” Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 25(2), pp. 699–738. ╇ [5] Krishna, V. 2002. Auction Theory. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. ╇ [6] Varian, H. R. 2007. “Position Auctions.” International Journal of Industrial Organization, vol. 25(6), pp. 1163–1178. ╇ [7] Surowiecki, J. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. New York: Random House. ╇ [8] Jansen, B. J. and Mullen, T. 2008. “Sponsored Search: An Overview of the Concept, History, and Technology.” International Journal of Electronic Business, vol. 6(2), pp. 114–131. ╇ [9] Zhou, Y. and Lukose, R. 2006.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 10 Jan 2011

Arcane as this all may seem, the representativeness heuristic is likely to account for a number of investing mistakes such as chasing hot funds or excessive extrapolation from recent evidence. Herding In general, research shows that groups tend to make better decisions than individuals. If more information is shared, and if differing points of view are considered, informed discussion of the group improves the decision-making process. The wisdom of crowd behavior is perhaps best illustrated in the economy as a whole by the free-market price system. A variety of individual decisions by consumers and producers leads the economy to produce the goods and services that people want to buy. Responding to the forces of demand and supply, the price system guides the economy through Adam Smith’s invisible hand to produce the correct quantity of products.

Beautiful security
by Andy Oram and John Viega
Published 15 Dec 2009

Imagine the effectiveness of a more professional social network where security engineers could share empirical data and results from tests and experiments. Security in Numbers Social networking isn’t just about connecting people into groups to trade. It’s a medium for crowdsourcing, which exploits the wisdom of crowds to predict information. This could also play an interesting role in the future security market. To give you a simple example of crowdsourcing, one Friday at work someone on my team sent out a simple spreadsheet containing a quiz. It was late morning on the East Coast, and therefore late on Friday afternoon in Europe and late evening in our Hyderabad office.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age
by Robert Wachter
Published 7 Apr 2015

With the advent of widespread and increasingly expensive copayments and deductibles, the temptation for patients to self-diagnose, self-treat, and crowdsource medical advice over the Web will become irresistible. After all, how many of us consult “expert” restaurant reviews anymore? We trust the wisdom of crowds on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. As we enter a similarly information-rich world in healthcare, patients will face this question with greater frequency: When do I really need to consult with, and trust, a credentialed expert? There will be times when the answer is obvious, but increasingly the line will be shifting and subtle.

Designing Social Interfaces
by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone
Published 30 Sep 2009

These sites count on each person bringing his personal network into the online experience. The concept of tribes and friends has become more important than ever and has driven the development of many products. What was ho-hum in 1997 is now the core—for user features as well as opportunities for making money. Additionally, the power of the many, or the wisdom of crowds, is being leveraged to exert some control over content creation and self-moderation processes. Companies are learning that successful social experiences shouldn’t and can’t be overly controlled. They are learning they can leverage the crowd to do some of the heavy lifting, which in turn spares them some of the costs.

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk From the Frontline
by Cathy O'Neil and Rachel Schutt
Published 8 Oct 2013

Terminology: Crowdsourcing and Mechanical Turks These are a couple of terms that have started creeping into the vernacular over the past few years. Although crowdsourcing—the concept of using many people to solve a problem independently—is not new, the term was only fairly recently coined in 2006. The basic idea is a that a challenge is issued and contestants compete to find the best solution. The Wisdom of Crowds was a book written by James Suriowiecki (Anchor, 2004) with the central thesis that, on average, crowds of people will make better decisions than experts, a related phenomenon. It is only under certain conditions (independence of the individuals rather than group-think where a group of people talking to each other can influence each other into wildly incorrect solutions), where groups of people can arrive at the correct solution.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

Instead, many planners now recognise the value of a street-up approach, of designing for the way that people actually live rather than the way one might hope they behave. One way of opening the potential for street-up communities is by doing away with planning restrictions altogether: let the people decide what their neighbourhoods look like. If you believe in the wisdom of crowds, the result is likely to be more complex and interesting than a community built from the imagination of one architect. In the district of Almere, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, such an experiment is underway. Holland is one of the most densely populated nations in Europe, so every inch of land needs to be managed and planned to cope with the demands of a growing population; yet in this unique neck of the woods it is still thought that allowing people to self-build their own homes may be the best way forward.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

Those customers were significantly more likely to shop again at Crate & Barrel than those in a control group who did not receive a voucher (and many of them gave additional money of their own once they came to the site and got excited by a project). “Customers love being trusted,” says Best. Even more exciting is the possibility of joining with sites such as DonorsChoose and Kiva to tap the “wisdom of crowds”—the possibility that large groups in aggregate may have a better grasp of the truth than a few so-called experts looking down on a situation from above. In 2009, the Gates Foundation allocated $4 million to match any gifts made by citizen philanthropists to projects posted on DonorsChoose by high school teachers preparing students to go to college.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

Crowdsourcing can help you get a sense of what a wide array of people think about a topic, which can inform your future decision making, updating your prior beliefs (see Bayesian statistics in Chapter 5). It can also help you uncover unknown unknowns and unknown knowns as you get feedback from people with previous experiences you might not have had. In James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, he examines situations where input from crowds can be particularly effective. It opens with a story about how the crowd at a county fair in 1906, attended by statistician Francis Galton, correctly guessed the weight of an ox. Almost eight hundred people participated, each individually guessing, and the average weight guessed was 1,197 pounds—exactly the weight of the ox, to the pound!

Influence: Science and Practice
by Robert B. Cialdini
Published 1 Jan 1984

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32, 300–309. Styron, W. (1977). A farewell to arms. New York Review of Books, 24, 3–4. Suedfeld, P., Bochner, S., & Matas, C. (1971). Petitioner’s attire and petition signing by peace demonstrators: A field experiment. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1, 278–283. Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds. New York: Doubleday. Swap, W. C. (1977). Interpersonal attraction and repeated exposure to rewards and punishers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3, 248–251. Szabo, L. (2007, February 5). Patient protect thyself. USA Today, p. 8D. Taylor, R. (1978). Marilyn’s friends and Rita’s customers: A study of party selling as play and as work.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

As we grow accustomed to this change, we also learn that the two worlds are not mutually exclusive, and what happens in one has consequences in the other. What seem like defined debates today over security and privacy will broaden to questions of who controls and influences virtual identities and thus citizens themselves. Democracies will become more influenced by the wisdom of crowds (for better or for worse), poor autocracies will struggle to acquire the necessary resources to effectively extend control into the virtual world, and wealthier dictatorships will build modern police states that tighten their grip on citizens’ lives. These changes will spur new behaviors and progressive laws, but given the sophistication of the technologies involved, in most cases citizens stand to lose many of the protections they feel and rely upon today.

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by Susan Pinker
Published 30 Sep 2013

Instead of offering little to no training, basement-level wages, constantly changing schedules, minimal benefits, and no opportunities to move up (as experienced by nearly 20 percent of the American workforce), they “eliminated waste in everything but staffing, and let employees make some decisions,” she wrote.48 Their stores are better places to work, obviously, but they also generate more profit per square foot than their barebones competitors. Citing a study showing that every extra dollar a five-hundred-store retailer spent on payroll netted it between $4 and $28 in new sales, James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, points out that the opposite is also true: cutting back on human resources can harm a business. Of course, if you have a lousy product selection, a bigger payroll won’t help much. But there’s a strong case to be made that corporate America’s fetish for cost-cutting has gone too far.… When Bob Nardelli took over Home Depot, in 2000, he reduced the number of salespeople on the floor and turned many full-time jobs into part-time ones.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies, University of Washington There are tasks, even work, best done by machines who can think—at least in the sense of sorting, matching, and solving certain decision and diagnostic problems beyond the cognitive abilities of most (all?) humans. The algorithms of Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc., build on but surpass the wisdom of crowds in speed and possibly accuracy. With machines that do some of our thinking and some of our work, we may yet approach the Marxian utopia that frees us from boring and dehumanizing labor. But this liberation comes with potential costs. Human welfare is more than the replacement of workers with machines.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition)
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 5 Jan 2015

Arcane as this all may seem, the representativeness heuristic is likely to account for a number of investing mistakes such as chasing hot funds or excessive extrapolation from recent evidence. Herding In general, research shows that groups tend to make better decisions than individuals. If more information is shared, and if differing points of view are considered, informed discussion of the group improves the decision-making process. The wisdom of crowd behavior is perhaps best illustrated in the economy as a whole by the free-market price system. A variety of individual decisions by consumers and producers leads the economy to produce the goods and services that people want to buy. Responding to the forces of demand and supply, the price system guides the economy through Adam Smith’s invisible hand to produce the correct quantity of products.

The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions
by Victor Haghani and James White
Published 27 Aug 2023

There were also developments on the higher‐level questions of what role options should and would play in improving the welfare of society. There was general agreement that the existence and trading of options would in theory make everyone better off by providing more and higher quality information—through the wisdom of crowds—which would increase economic efficiency through an improved allocation of resources. Options were thought to make markets more “complete,” which is a state of optimal sharing of risks among all members of society. It was thought that options would improve the welfare of individuals by allowing them to construct custom‐tailored portfolios that gave them just the payoffs they wanted in all different states of the world.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

Beaman, Bonnel Kentz, Edward Diener, and Soren Svanum (1979), “Self-Awareness and Transgression in Children: Two Field Studies,” Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 37:1835–46. There's a great word Oliver Conway (22 Jun 2004), “Congo Word ‘Most Untranslatable,'” BBC News. Quakers would cooperate Adrian Cadbury (2003), “Beliefs and Business: The Experience of Quaker Companies,” The Foundation of Lady Katherine Leveson. James Surowiecki (2004), The Wisdom of Crowds, Anchor. Steven Davison (2011), “The Double-Culture Period: Factors in Quaker Success,” unpublished manuscript. Maghribi traders Avner Greif (2008), “Contract Enforcement and Institutions among the Maghribi Traders: Refuting Edwards and Ogilvie,” SIEPR Discussion Paper 08–018, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography
by Stephen Fry
Published 27 Sep 2010

This inconvenient truth extends to those on whom we lavish our patronizing pity too. If the social-networking services of the digital age teach us anything it is that only a fool would underestimate the intelligence, intuition and cognitive skills of the ‘masses’. I am talking about more than the ‘wisdom of crowds’ here. If you look beyond sillinesses like the puzzling inability of the majority to distinguish between your and you’re, its and it’s and there, they’re and their (all of which distinctions have nothing to do with language, only with grammar and orthographical convention: after all logic and consistency would suggest the insertion of a genitival apostrophe in the pronominal possessive its, but convention has decided, perhaps to avoid confusion with the elided it is, to dispense with one), if, as I say, you look beyond such pernickety pedantries, you will see that it is possible to be a fan of reality TV, talent shows and bubblegum pop and still have a brain.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

Interview with Erik Voorhees, June 16, 2015. 78. www.sec.gov/about/laws/sa33.pdf. 79. http://www.wired.com/2015/12/sec-approves-plan-to-issue-company-stock-via-the-bitcoin-blockchain/. 80. http://investors.overstock.com/mobile.view?c=131091&v=203&d=1&id=2073583. 81. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21007/nasdaq-selects-bitcoin-startup-chain-run-pilot-private-market-arm/. 82. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2014). 83. www.augur.net. 84. From e-mail exchange with the Augur team: Jack Peterson, Core Developer; Joey Krug, Core Developer; Peronet Despeignes, SpecialOps. 85.

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market
by Steven Drobny
Published 31 Mar 2006

I never locked myself down to investing in one style or in one country because the greatest trade in the world could be happening somewhere else. My advice would be to make sure that you do not become too much of an THE FAMILY OFFICE MANAGER 43 expert in one area. Even if you see an area that is inefficient today, it’s likely that it won’t be inefficient tomorrow. Expertise is overrated. There’s a book called The Wisdom of Crowds (by James Suroweicki) that contains a lot of examples where the average results of a group were much better estimators than expert opinions. We wrongly tend to look at other people as experts. If you ask currency experts where an exchange rate is going, they are just as likely to be wrong as some average guy on the street.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
Published 2 Nov 2010

The institution of the festival—once the only exhibition chance for the potential art-house film, of which many were made but few were chosen—slowly evolved into something of a filter or wholesale market. Firms like Miramax, and its imitators like Sony Film Classics and Fine Line, began to see that by buying low and selling high, exposure to independent film could be profitable again. There is a certain genius to the approach, which might be said to depend on the wisdom of crowds over the judgment of a single producer. Given the quarry, there may be no other realistic way of hunting for it: nearly ten thousand independent films are produced in the United States every year, and thousands more are made abroad. As with any other commodity, most are average or below average, but some will be brilliant; among that smaller cohort, an even smaller portion will have potential for popularity with the public.

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
by Lauren A. Rivera
Published 3 May 2015

Qualitative Sociology 34:337–52. Stuber, Jenny M. 2009. “Class, Culture, and Participation in the Collegiate Extra-Curriculum.” Sociological Forum 24:877–900. ———. 2011. Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Surowiecki, James. 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51:273–86. Thorndike, Edward. 1920. “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.” Journal of Applied Psychology 4:25–29. Tilcsik, András. 2011. “Pride and Prejudice: Employment Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States.”

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Published 29 May 2009

It is when we get away from investing and start considering those affected by financial markets that broader questions of market efficiency come into play. It’s not just whether one can beat the market, but whether one can rely on the prices prevailing on financial markets to be right. A popular concept in recent years has been the “wisdom of crowds”—the notion that groups can often make better-informed decisions than individuals. It’s a valid enough idea, and the title of an excellent book by James Surowiecki, but the wording is misleading. Crowds—and markets—possess many useful traits. Wisdom is not one of them. It is as Henri Poincaré wrote a century ago: When men are brought together, they no longer decide by chance and independently of each other, but react upon one another.

Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy J. Siegel
Published 18 Dec 2007

Gerard, “A Study of Normative and Informational Social Influences upon Individual Judgment,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 51 (1955), pp. 629–636. 8 Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowd, London: Bentley, 1841. 9 See James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, New York: Anchor Books, 2005. CHAPTER 19 Behavioral Finance and the Psychology of Investing 325 Dave, have you ever been in a new town and found yourself choosing between two restaurants? One perfectly rational way of deciding, if they are close in distance, is to see which restaurant is busier since there’s a good chance that at least some of those patrons have tried both restaurants and have chosen to eat at the better one.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy Siegel
Published 7 Jan 2014

Gerard, “A Study of Normative and Informational Social Influences upon Individual Judgment,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 51 (1955), pp. 629-636. 8. Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, London: Bentley, 1841. 9. See James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, New York: Anchor Books, 2005. 10. Robert Shiller, “Conversation, Information, and Herd Behavior,” American Economic Review, vol. 85, no. 2 (1995), pp. 181-185; S. D. Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch, “A Theory of Fashion, Social Custom and Cultural Change,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 81 (1992), pp. 637-654; and Abhijit V.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
by Jane McGonigal
Published 20 Jan 2011

“No one today has a clear picture of oil availability or what will happen when demand inevitably outstrips supply,” Eklund wrote in his proposal. “That will largely depend on how well ordinary people respond to the crisis. Until now, no one has ever thought to ask them what they might do. WWO will evoke the wisdom of crowds in advance, as players work together to gain grassroots insights into the forces that will rule at street level in a crisis—and figure out the best ways to prepare, cooperate, and collectively create solutions if and when a real peak-oil shortage happens.” It was designed as a massively multiplayer thought experiment: players would spend six weeks imagining how such a crisis might play out in their local communities, their industries, and their own lives.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

And she quickly learned to adapt to the founders’ nerd-comic sensibilities, writing jokes about how many pizzas a group of programmers could consume. TGIF’s grandest invention was Dory, a computer system (named after the Pixar character) for submitting audience questions and voting on them. Those with the most votes were asked. Dory reflected Google’s deepest held beliefs in data, efficiency, the wisdom of crowds. Dory felt like how a true democracy should feel and, for many there, quite different from what it felt like under George W. Bush. Google’s leaders openly chafed at Bush’s Patriot Act and began flaunting the company’s liberal California bona fides more often. The summer Stapleton joined, Google made the largest-ever corporate purchase of solar panels for its campus.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Published 10 May 2010

On the eve of the crash that inaugurated the Great Depression, Princeton economist Joseph Lawrence confidently declared, “The consensus of judgment of the millions whose valuations function on that admirable market, the Stock Exchange, is that stocks are not at present overvalued.” Lawrence evidently believed in the wisdom of crowds, challenging anyone to “veto the judgment of this intelligent multitude.” In theory, the Great Depression should have put an end to this sort of nonsense, but postwar academic departments of economics and finance breathed new life into the old fallacy. Much of the credit—if that’s the word—goes to the economics department at the University of Chicago.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

getting real The fact is that the performance of economic models based purely on assumptions of rational expectations has been and continues to be poor, in both an absolute sense and a relative one. Furthermore, although they might be beguiled by its theoretical logic and purity, not even its most ardent adherents would suggest that the various tenets of new classical economics should be a viewed as a literal description of how people behave. Rather, overlapping with the notions of ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and ‘the law of large numbers’, its supporters instead present it as the most appropriate and workable approximation of reality within which to frame policy. It is a better analytical framework than any of the alternatives They contend that market prices do tend to efficiently incorporate a huge amount of relevant information, and that people do utilize it to plan ahead and make decisions.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

New York: Penguin Group, 2012. Stover, John F. American Railroads. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo, ed. Learning in the Global Era: International Perspectives on Globalization and Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Tapscott, Don and Anthony Williams. MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World. New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2010. Tawney, R. H. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011. ———. The Acquisitive Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1920.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
by Jennifer Burns
Published 18 Oct 2009

A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seem to both embody and defy Rand’s beliefs. The website’s emphasis on individual empowerment, the value of knowledge, and its own risky organizational model reflects Rand’s sensibility. But its trust in the wisdom of crowds, celebration of the social nature of knowledge, and faith that many working together will produce something of enduring value contradict Rand’s adage “All creation is individual.” Similar contradictions undergird the response to Rand of Craig Newmark, the founder of the online advertising site Craigslist.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

A combination of overconfidence and pride meant that the powers were “sleepwalkers” heading to war.4 Europe’s leaders may have been deceived by the speedy outcomes to mid-19th century wars between Prussia and Austria, and Prussia and France. The appropriate precedent, however, was the US Civil War, which dragged on for four years despite the economic and military advantages enjoyed by the northern side. Stock markets are supposed to be guided by the “wisdom of crowds”, as investors use their judgement to assess the outlook. But as the historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out, the markets barely reacted to the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28th 1914 – the event that sparked the drive to war. It was not until July 21st that investors began to respond, as the Austrians made threatening noises towards Serbia, whose agents were deemed to be behind the assassination.

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan
Published 16 Jan 2018

Only one person has accepted—and the offer’s still on the table. The Politics of Social Desirability Bias Americans relentlessly gripe about schools and colleges, but virtually no one wants to cut spending on education. If education is as wasteful as I claim, why is it universally popular? The “Wisdom of Crowds” is fallible, but are we really supposed to believe billions of people from every major culture have converged on a common error? That’s quite a bullet to bite. When you chew this bullet, however, it melts in your mouth. Collective folly is inherently plausible. Weigh the intellectual payoffs.

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest
by Andrew W. Lo and Stephen R. Foerster
Published 16 Aug 2021

And so, you need to look at the prices and how the market is telling us information. So, derivative markets are telling us information. The spot markets are telling us information. The forward markets and other ways are telling us huge amounts of information. And, I think, it’s better to use the consensus or the wisdom of crowds, millions of people making decisions.” Having helped create modern derivative markets, Scholes now wants investors to listen to those markets in order to form the Perfect Portfolio, thus coming full circle. 7 Robert Merton, from Derivatives to Retirement IMAGINE BEING the son of Robert K.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

According to iCarpool’s founder, Lakshmi Krishnamurthy, the community support and feedback benefited iCarpool even more than the cash and the promotion: “The potential to tap into a fast growing diverse community of founders, funders, and technology and business experts—to be able to discuss ideas and exchange feedback—is amazing,” she says. “I believe community capital has a bright future. VenCorps is the American Idol for entrepreneurs.” By creating this virtual economy, an ad hoc meritocracy if you will, VenCorps harnesses its community of passionate participants, to leverage both the wisdom of crowds and the production capability of the masses. This duality is at the heart of wikinomics. The new collaboration is not just about the community picking the winners; it is also about the community building the winners together. Was the winner iCarpool.com the best choice? Did it have the best technology and solution?

The Architecture of Open Source Applications
by Amy Brown and Greg Wilson
Published 24 May 2011

Eclipse has so many consumers with diverse use cases and our expansive API became difficult for new consumers to adopt and understand. In retrospect, we should have kept our API simpler. If 80% of consumers only use 20% of the API, there is a need for simplification which was one of the reasons that the Eclipse 4.x stream was created. The wisdom of crowds does reveal interesting use cases, such as disaggregating the IDE into bundles that could be used to construct RCP applications. Conversely, crowds often generate a lot of noise with requests for edge case scenarios that take a significant amount of time to implement. In the early days of the Eclipse project, committers had the luxury of dedicating significant amounts of time to documentation, examples and answering community questions.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
by Joseph Henrich
Published 27 Oct 2015

However, individual experiences will vary, so suppose that long experience alone leads to only a 50% chance of an angler converging on the blood knot, a 30% chance of using the fisherman’s knot, and a 20% chance of using one of five other knots. A conformist learner can exploit this situation and jump directly to the blood knot without experience. Thus, the wisdom of crowds is built into our psychology. There is some laboratory evidence for conformist transmission, both in humans and sticklebacks (a fish), though there is not nearly as much as for the model-based cues discussed above. Nevertheless, when problems are difficult, uncertainty is high, or payoffs are on the line, people tend to use conformist transmission.24 Of course, we should expect learners to combine the learning heuristics I’ve described.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

The boss’s gamification strategy paid off and received widespread attention among his workers, with the Ferrari reserved for the chosen “employee of the month.” From Crowdsourcing to Crime Sourcing Of all the business innovation techniques utilized by Crime, Inc., perhaps none has been as widely adopted as crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing began as a legitimate tool to leverage the wisdom of crowds to solve complex business and scientific challenges. The concept of crowdsourcing first gained widespread attention in an article written in 2006 by Jeff Howe for Wired. Howe defined crowdsourcing as the act of “outsourcing a task to a large, undefined group of people through an open call.”

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

Wikipedia is an example of crowdsourcing Ayers, P., Matthews, C., & Yates, B. (2008). How Wikipedia works: And how you can be a part of it. San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press, p. 514. More than 4.5 million people Kickstarter, Inc. (2014). Seven things to know about Kickstarter. Retrieved from http://www.kickstarter.com the group average comes Surowiecki, J. (2005). The wisdom of crowds. New York, NY: Penguin. and, Treynor, J. L. (1987). Market efficiency and the bean jar experiment. Financial Analysts Journal, 43(3), 50–53. the cancer is now in remission Iaconesi, S. (2012). TED (Producer). (2013). Why I open-sourced cures to my cancer: Salvatore Iaconesi at TEDGlobal 2013 [Video file].

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

For when there are many, each has his share of goodness and practical wisdom’.182 The legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron calls this the ‘doctrine of the wisdom of the many’.183 Twenty-five hundred years ago, that was the original ‘crowdsourcing’. The internet offers us opportunities to create our own self-governing online communities and draw on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ across frontiers. Within the technical, legal and political outer limits set by the big cats and dogs, we can establish communities where we say: ‘we wish to conduct this debate by certain rules. If you don’t want to live by those rules, go somewhere else’. In the best case, what in the online world are usually called ‘community standards’ are exactly that—the self-determined standards of a self-governing community.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

If it includes left-leaning institutions like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), it puts right-wingers off. Far better to crowd-source national symbols and allow people to read what they want into them, picking and choosing what moves them. This leverages people’s unique vantage points, realizing the wisdom of crowds. Politicians can affirm a multi-vocal understanding of nationhood by tuning into particular audiences. When speaking to liberals or an ethnically diverse crowd, they can talk about diversity and multiculturalism. When addressing conservative whites, it’s important to nod to white majority ethno-traditions.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Frankl), The Fourth Turning; Generations (William Strauss), Slow Sex (Nicole Daedone), Mindset (Carol Dweck) Rodriguez, Robert: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Simon Sinek) Rogen, Seth: Watchmen (Alan Moore), Preacher (Garth Ennis), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams), The Art of Dramatic Writing (Lajos Egri), The Conquest of Happiness (Bertrand Russell) Rose, Kevin: The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation (Thich Nhat Hanh), The Wisdom of Crowds (James Surowiecki) Rowe, Mike: The Deep Blue Good-by; Pale Gray for Guilt, Bright Orange for the Shroud; The Lonely Silver Rain, Nightmare in Pink; A Tan and Sandy Silence; Cinnamon Skin (John D. MacDonald), At Home: A Short History of Private Life; The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (Bill Bryson), A Curious Discovery: An Entrepreneur’s Story (John Hendricks) Rubin, Rick: Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu, translation by Stephen Mitchell), Wherever You Go, There You Are (Jon Kabat-Zinn) Sacca, Chris: Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived (Laurence Shames and Peter Barton), The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All; The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert (Richard Betts), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel (Mohsin Hamid), I Seem to Be a Verb (R.

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

This section includes three domains of thought that explore thinking processes and issues through the lenses of ­economics, applied philosophy, and electronic hyperlink theory. Robin Hanson’s “Idea Futures” was an early explication of a mechanism that has since come to be known as “decision markets.” These markets harness the “wisdom of crowds” to improve decision-making and forecasting accuracy. Subsequent work has shown how decision markets typically yield results more accurate than those from the best experts in areas as diverse as ­predicting sales of printer supplies and box-office take for movies in their first days of release.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

—Jerome Groopman, New York Times bestselling author of How Doctors Think “Dan Ariely is a genius at understanding human behavior: no economist does a better job of uncovering and explaining the hidden reasons for the weird ways we act, in the marketplace and out. Predictably Irrational will reshape the way you see the world, and yourself, for good.” —James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds “Predictably Irrational is a charmer—filled with clever experiments, engaging ideas, and delightful anecdotes. Dan Ariely is a wise and amusing guide to the foibles, errors, and bloopers of everyday decision-making.” —Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Stumbling on Happiness “Predictably Irrational is going to be the most influential, talked-about book in years.