The “crowds” (Amazon reviewers) liked James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, so I checked it out and read it poolside in Cabo. I wasn’t a huge fan.
While the book had a few interesting tidbits, it was mostly filled with less-than-insightful passages explaining why our collective intelligence can actually be pretty smart. For example, it doesn’t seem too surprising that a large group can fairly accurately estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar.
Surowiecki offers up Google’s algorithm as a perfect example of the wisdom of crowds in action. Google couldn’t possibly sort through the billions of webpages it indexes and rank them in a fraction of a second all by themselves, so their algorithm looks at what sites are linking to other sites for particular keyword phrases. Each link counts as a vote, with links from “higher-value” sites weighing more heavily.
But I’m skeptical as to how wise crowds really are. After all, it was a crowd that trampled a Wal-Mart employee last Christmas in search of a bargain TV. And it was a crowd that voted to take civil rights away from their fellow citizens. The book doesn’t address these kinds of collective failures, but does talk about market bubbles and the perils of “group-think.” To be truly wise, members of the crowd need to be diverse and act independently. So break away from the crowd that thought this was an awesome book and skip it.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
