Edu-leaders

We’ve all heard these terms — unruly mob, herd mentality, bandwagon effect, peer pressure, collective hysteria — and have agreed with them. But, James Surowiecki presents a different perspective in this book. As he puts it, “Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”

Surowiecki first identifies the conditions needed for a crowd to be wise: diversity, independence, decentralisation, and summarisation. Individuals with diverse perspectives are needed to conceptualise the problem in different ways, to encourage independence of thought within the group, and to produce a varied set of possible solutions. Independent thinkers are needed to arrive at their own decisions without being unduly swayed or worried by the actions of others. Collective wisdom should be arrived at without a quest for consensus or compromise.

Surowiecki goes on to explain that, given the right conditions, collective wisdom can be used to tackle basically three types of problems:

Surowiecki derived the idea of the wisdom of crowds from watching how the markets worked, but soon saw that it had implications for all
aspects of society. The book is littered with anecdotes showing the wisdom of crowds, such as in judging the weight of an ox at an English county fair, locating a lost US submarine, the audience lifeline in the TV show ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ and the accuracy of a Google search. The book also contains examples of the stupidity of the select, such as the homogenous groups that planned the Bay of Pigs invasion and didn’t anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbour. A significant portion of the book pertains to the wisdom of crowds in the business world.

While The Wisdom of Crowds is a timely idea and certainly worth exploring further, the book itself doesn’t always hang together. Surowiecki’s explanation of the necessary condition of decentralisation is vague and he mentions the problem of cognition in the beginning but doesn’t clearly follow it through.