You're viewing a blog archive and some things may no longer work. For the latest, go here.


The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
by James Surowiecki

This book is about how groups that are diverse, decentralized, make decisions independently, and have some method of aggregating individual decisions, will very often consistently make better decisions than any one member of the group.

The classic example is asking a group to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar--the group's average guess will consistently be better than any one group member's guess.

Surowiecki, who writes for the The New Yorker, takes this model and applies it to areas like financial and decision markets, business strategy, and traffic patterns to show how group decisions are often better than an expert's. A fascinating and easy read--read it if you enjoyed The Tipping Point or anything by Michael Lewis.

Comments (Post)

No comments yet.

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

About

Hi, I'm Kareem Mayan. I live in LA and Product Manage at FOX Interactive Media. Prior to that, I Technically Produced at ESPN.com. I also helped bring Barcamp, a technology un-conference, to LA.

Read more about me here.

Opinions stated here are mine; FOX does not endorse them.

Contact Me: reemer -at- gmail

Subscriber Info


This blog has

Web Hosting By

The best I've ever used:
Dreamhost!

Powered By

Subscribe via RSS Subscribe to this blog
All content © 2002-2006 Kareem Mayan