The Wisdom of Crowds

Wikipedia: “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.”

Henry Jenkins summarizes Surowiecki’s “contexts where his ideas about the wisdom of crowds apply:

“There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd’s answer. It needs a way of summarizing people’s opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.”

Cass Sunstein, author of the excellent Infotopia and Raph Koster qualifies the usefulness of the Wisdom of Crowds further: “Technically, Surowiecki’s conception of “wisdom of crowds” is ONLY applicable to quantifiable, objective data. The very loosey-goosey way of using it to discuss any sort of collective discussion and opinion generation is a misrepresentation of the actual (and very interesting) phenomenon.

“You can summarize the core phenomenon as ‘given a large enough and varied population offering up their best estimates of quantity or probability, the average of all responses will be more accurate than any given individual response.’ But this is of very narrow application — the examples are of things like guessing weight, market predictions, oddsmaking, and so on. The output of each individual must be in a form that can be averaged mathematically. What’s more, you cannot use it in cases where one person’s well-expressed opinion can sway another, as that introduces a subsequent bias into everything (which is why the wisdom of crowds doesn’t always work for identifying the best product on the market, or the best art, or the like).”

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