The Wisdom of Crowds

I started this book much earlier this last year (happy new year!), but finally finished it during our long flights to and from California over the Christmas holiday.  The general idea of the book is how the collective wisdom of a diverse and independent group is better than even the most expert member of the group when solving particular sorts of problems.  It also shows how when some of those conditions of the components of the group, like diversity and independence, are absent, the results can be disastrous. It uses a lot of interesting and contemporary topics like economic bubbles and the SARS epidemic as examples.  It also touched on some ideas about our (sometimes quite irrational) social behaviors that I found interesting, like how people will act irrationally (from an economic point of view) to punish what they deem as unfair behavior, which acts to help improve the wisdom of the crowd.  Also interesting are some of the ways that people have tried to harness the wisdom of crowds by aggregating the groups knowledge using a market, to do things like help make company decisions or to try to predict events like elections results.  I think that we're all somewhat pre-wired to rely on the wisdom of the crowd.  Like when making a big ticket purchase, we like to go with bestsellers, since presumably they wouldn't be bestsellers if they weren't good buys.  Surowiecki explains how from an evolutionary standpoint it is advantageous for members of a society to work this way.  It allows for specialization and more efficient use of individuals knowledge.  Of course, we do have our own brains, and we ought to think for ourselves, too.  At the least, Surowiecki's analysis of the conditions required for the crowd's decision to be of high quality helps us to look out for cases when it might not be the best idea to go with the crowd.