In this landmark work, NEW YORKER columnist James Surowiecki explores a seemingly counter-intuitive idea that has profound implications. Decisions taken by a large group, even if the individuals within the group aren't smart, are always better than decisions made by small numbers of 'experts'. This seemingly simply notion has endless and major ramifications for how businesses operate, how knowledge is advanced, how economies are (or should be) organised and how nation-states fare. With great erudition, Surowiecki ranges across the disciplines of psychology, economics, statistics and history to show just how this principle operates in the real world. Along the way Surowiecki asks a number of intriguing questions about a subject few of us actually understand - economics. What are prices? How does money work? Why do we have corporations? Does advertising work? His answers, rendered in a delightfully clear prose, demystify daunting prospects. As Surowiecki writes: 'The hero of this book is, in a curious sense, an idea, a hero whose story ends up shedding dramatic new light on the landscapes of business, politics and society'.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. Learn more. |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Amazon Review
Smart people often believe that the opinion of the crowd is always inferior to the opinion of the individual specialist. Philosophical giants such as Nietzsche thought that "Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups". Henry David Thoreau lamented: "The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest member." The motto of the great and the ordinary seems to be: Bet on the expert because crowds are generally stupid and often dangerous. Business columnist James Surowiecki’s new book The Wisdom of Crowds explains exactly why the conventional wisdom is wrong. The fact is that, under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups don’t even need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision. Why? Because, as it turns out, if you ask a large enough group of diverse, independent people to make a prediction or estimate a probability, and then average those estimates, the errors each of them makes in coming up with an answer will cancel themselves out. Not any old crowd will do of course. For the crowd to be wise it has to satisfy four specific conditions, but once those conditions are met, its judgment is likely to be accurate.
Surowieki concentrates on three kinds of problems. The first are cognition problems (problems that are likely to have definitive answers, such as: "How many books will Amazon sell this month?"). The second are problems of coordination (problems requiring members of a group to figure out how to coordinate their behaviour with one another) and the third are problems of cooperation (getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together-- despite their selfishness). The brilliant first half of the book illustrates this theory with practical examples. The second half of the book essentially consists of case studies with each chapter talking about the way collective intelligence either flourishes or flounders. Much of this part deals with business topics such as corporations, markets and the dynamics of a stock-market bubble.
Surowieki has an engaging, direct style defending his surprising central thesis in entertaining ways by, for example, talking about laying bets on football games and political elections; traffic jams; Google; the Challenger explosion and the search for a missing submarine. The Wisdom of Crowds is an entertaining book making a serious point and by the end of the superb first half the reader has been made to accept that, while with most things, the average is mediocrity, when it comes to decision-making the average results in excellence. --Larry Brown --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
A bright and lucid columnist for THE NEW YORKER . . . [Surowiecki] knows how to make a convincing, sometimes entertaining case (SUNDAY TIMES )
Erudite and entertaining . . . he has a rare gift for combining rigorous thought with entertaining examples (FINANCIAL TIMES )
Dazzling . . . will turn your world upside down. It's an adventure story, a manifesto, and the most brilliant book on business, society and everyday life that I've read in years (Malcolm Gladwell, author of THE TIPPING POINT )
A handsome addition to the books that combine the verve of smart magazine writing with a whiff of academia . . .a fantastically stylish counter to the expert-knows-best line . . . an offbeat argument for democracy. In the future, "crowd pleaser" might no (GQ )
Erudite and entertaining . . . he has a rare gift for combining rigorous thought with entertaining examples (FINANCIAL TIMES )
Dazzling . . . will turn your world upside down. It's an adventure story, a manifesto, and the most brilliant book on business, society and everyday life that I've read in years (Malcolm Gladwell, author of THE TIPPING POINT )
A handsome addition to the books that combine the verve of smart magazine writing with a whiff of academia . . .a fantastically stylish counter to the expert-knows-best line . . . an offbeat argument for democracy. In the future, "crowd pleaser" might no (GQ )
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
41 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The central premise of the book is an interesting one - that taking the average of a large number of individual viewpoints is likely to give a better result than taking the view of a single (or small number) of experts.
The paragraph above is, of course, an oversimplification. The book does go into rather more detail about when this works, and when it doesn't.
The approach in the first half of the book overall seemed OK - there were points in the first chapter where I thought that the author had fallen into some basic errors, but reading on made me realise that, no, he had considered them and had responses to the questions that I thought needed answering.
However, there are, to me, two flaws in the book.
Firstly, the second half of the book is too lightweight. He applies his theory to a whole bunch of situations (shorting of stocks, elections and so on), but doesn't present any proof of his ideas. He seems to assume that we're all so convinced in the first half that he can spend the second half saying "now we know this is true, this is what it means."
... which takes me to the second flaw.
Someone rather more intelligent than I - from memory Richard Feynman - wrote a long and interesting article about scientific rigour, and how when you do one expirement that appears to suggest a theory, you don't assume the theory is right because it fitted that one set of data. Instead, you specifically design other experiments that TEST the theory.
The problem with this book is that there appears to have been a single "real world example" which suggested the theory, but that every other example is a "class room experiment by Professor X in which a series of students did Y..."
Sadly, in a book that purports to relate to research going back 50 years, it is hard to believe that there are so few examples of the principle that can be brought to bear.
In having said all that, I have a nagging feeling that the theory is right, and that the evidence is there, but that the book was over-pruned to get down to a certain size. If this is correct, I wish he'd given more material showing why he was right, and less speculation about what would happen if he were.
The paragraph above is, of course, an oversimplification. The book does go into rather more detail about when this works, and when it doesn't.
The approach in the first half of the book overall seemed OK - there were points in the first chapter where I thought that the author had fallen into some basic errors, but reading on made me realise that, no, he had considered them and had responses to the questions that I thought needed answering.
However, there are, to me, two flaws in the book.
Firstly, the second half of the book is too lightweight. He applies his theory to a whole bunch of situations (shorting of stocks, elections and so on), but doesn't present any proof of his ideas. He seems to assume that we're all so convinced in the first half that he can spend the second half saying "now we know this is true, this is what it means."
... which takes me to the second flaw.
Someone rather more intelligent than I - from memory Richard Feynman - wrote a long and interesting article about scientific rigour, and how when you do one expirement that appears to suggest a theory, you don't assume the theory is right because it fitted that one set of data. Instead, you specifically design other experiments that TEST the theory.
The problem with this book is that there appears to have been a single "real world example" which suggested the theory, but that every other example is a "class room experiment by Professor X in which a series of students did Y..."
Sadly, in a book that purports to relate to research going back 50 years, it is hard to believe that there are so few examples of the principle that can be brought to bear.
In having said all that, I have a nagging feeling that the theory is right, and that the evidence is there, but that the book was over-pruned to get down to a certain size. If this is correct, I wish he'd given more material showing why he was right, and less speculation about what would happen if he were.
50 of 53 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book confounded my expectations. I generally dislike books like this but this one is interesting, provocative and stimulating. I do not wholly agree with the central thesis but even in the sections that I disagreed with there was enough interesting material to hold my attention, it was refreshing to need to question one's assumptions and to think about the points being made.
What is the Wisdom of Crowds?
The book defines it rather loosely suggesting that groups make better decisions if certain conditions are met. The conditions are: diversity (to ensure that different information is used to make the decision), independence and (a certain type of) decentralisation (to ensure that no one person is dictating the decision and that people are using their own private information) together with a way of summarising the different opinions into a collective view.
This loose definition allows the book to address a huge range of topics. It does not build a coherent case attempting to support and justify the central thesis. Instead it relies on a more anecdotal approach - examining situations where crowds can be wiser and situations where they fail to be wise - it is a biography of an idea rather than a manifesto.
To provide some structure three different types of problem are identified: cognition problems, co-ordination problems and co-operation problems. However, even within these broad areas large and rather diverse sets of problems are examined. To assist in the analysis a wide range to techniques are utilised including psychology, statistics and game theory.
The book makes great play of the ideas being counterintuitive and surprising; in some of the examples this is true, in others it seems to be seriously stretching the point. For example, the story about finding the lost submarine is interesting and surprising, as is the speed with which the market identified the company at fault for the Space Shuttle disaster. Less surprising are the examples which boil down to applied game theory, statistics or the fundamental nature of markets.
The most important (practical) problem with the thesis is that the conditions required for the wisdom of crowds to apply are very difficult to meet. The book recognises this and devotes considerable space to situations where crowds fail to be wise because of this. For me, these are probably the best sections of the book. It is very clear that the wisdom of crowds does not mean management by committee (as committees almost always fail to meet the necessary conditions). It is also very sharp on the culture of the 'expert' and is very clear about the need for dissent and the importance of (intellectual) diversity. The section on NASA is chilling and excellent.
In spite of the issues this is still a fascinating book. There is a huge range of stories and examples about how the wisdom of crowds can work and how it can fail spectacularly. I found it a thoroughly engaging and interesting book.
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
James Surowiecki writes the "Financial Page" column in The New Yorker, where he's consistently able to come up with unusual takes on seemingly familiar topics, and he has a great knack for making business stories compelling and entertaining as well as understandable. But the column is only a page long, and I always wondered how Surowiecki would do if he was able to develop his ideas and arguments more fully. Luckily, "The Wisdom of Crowds" lives up to all my expectations. It's wonderfully readable, full of terrific stories, funny, and its basic argument -- that groups, under certain conditions, can make better decisions than even the smartest individuals -- is counterintuitive without being willfully contrarian.
The roots of the argument obviously stem from the way markets work -- buyers and sellers find each other and reach efficient outcomes without anyone being in charge, while the stock market (at least some of the time) does as good a job as possible of setting prices. But what I really like is the way Surowiecki extends this argument way beyond business and markets, showing how collective wisdom can be seen (and can potentially be used) in a host of other situations, including the racetrack, on the Internet, and on city streets. He also does a good job of drawing out the possible implications of this for everything from the U.S. intelligence community to the way companies are run.
This is definitely a big-idea book, but the author is cautious in laying out his evidence, and is careful to show that groups, even if they're potentially wise, are often stupid and dangerous. The chapter on small groups in particular, which focuses on NASA's mismanagement of the Columbia mission, is powerful stuff, and useful to anyone interested in how to run a meeting well (or badly, for that matter). The least satisfying part of the book is the chapter on democracy, where Surowiecki shies away from pushing his conclusion to its logical end. But on the whole, this is just a wonderful book, elegant and enlightening.
If you're interested in this book, it's also worth checking out Paul Seabright's "The Company of Strangers" and Robert Wright's "Nonzero."
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
›
Go to Amazon.com to see all 219 reviews
3.9 out of 5 stars
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not all it's cracked up to be
For me, this book kept threatening to get interesting without ever actually being so. In the end I didn't come away with the impression that Surowiecki has any grand theory to put... Read more
Published 2 months ago by G. MCEWAN
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book - very interesting
I actually bought this copy to give to one of the Directors of a large company that I advise. He was dabbling in consensual feedback as the core of a brainstorming session that I... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Sean
4.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting theory
Really good book on the way a crowd can have a better guess at the solution to a problem that an expert.
Well worth reading
Well worth reading
Published 7 months ago by Half Man, Half Book
4.0 out of 5 stars
The wisdom of James Surowiecki
This book is a truly definitive insight into groups and crowds - how they behave and how you can lead them to greatness. Ever wondered why groups act, react and make decisions? Read more
Published 13 months ago by Steve
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting insights about the crowds thinking
The book is really interesting. Telling and analyzing stories about different situations where harnessing the wisdom of the many pays more than an expert opinion. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Ahmed
4.0 out of 5 stars
Does not dethrone leadership, can inspire team leaders.
As the title suggest crowds can be wise. I guess a lot of people would never concur, others will be happy to indicate situations when collective wisdom can outperform most... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Mikolaj Pietrzyk
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fine book on social psychology
For many people this book represents a totally different view about crowds, and also about groups and teams. Read more
Published on 22 Feb 2011 by Fernando Sousa
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good but not amazing
Summary:
Not sure that it really, proves the point it tries to make, although it keep covering supporting examples. Read more
Not sure that it really, proves the point it tries to make, although it keep covering supporting examples. Read more
Published on 14 Jan 2011 by Peter Slattery
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very convincing
An excellent and very well written book. The anecdotes are interesting and he also supplies more concrete evidence and statistics to back up his thesis. Read more
Published on 3 Dec 2010 by The Emperor
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic !!!
Just got delivered this book (2of2) on time and it's in excellent condition !!!
What a bargain and so full of knowledge !!!
Thanks Amazon!
What a bargain and so full of knowledge !!!
Thanks Amazon!
Published on 27 Oct 2010 by sbastos
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
