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 · first published 2004
35% recommend63% neutral2% critical
Why HN recommends it
Explains when groups beat individuals and when they fail, stressing diversity, independent thinking and decentralized judgment. Useful for people designing voting systems, teams, decision processes or prediction markets.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant — better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about o
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1. "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki 2. "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely 3. "The Search" by John Battelle 4. "Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath 5. "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell That should…
on “Ask YC: Road trip. Which audio books would you recommend?” ↗Have you read "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki? The book is focused on just the question of what conditions seem to be beneficial/detrimental to sourcing the "wisdom" from crowds.
on “What makes group decisions go wrong and right” ↗Your service would be really cool if you structured it around the research that has gone into best practices for decision making. For example, James Surowiecki's book the wisdom of crowds is all about improving the decision making process.
on “Ask HN: Would free copywriting assistance appeal to you?” ↗"Innovator's Solution" is okay, but Christensen's first one "The Innovator's Dilemma" was better. Also Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds" provides a better survey of the field than any of the more technical books I've read.
on “Reading list for those who love to learn” ↗…as a good starting point: Network Science: Theory and Applications[2] Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means[3] Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age[4] The Wisdom of Crowds[5] Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks[6] Diffusion of Innovations[7] Of course - being that Network Science is a multidisciplinary field, that touches a lot of other areas…
on “An Introduction to Graph Theory and Network Science” ↗…Surowiecki's book of the same name. http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/... If that's too hard, at least understand the summary on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Four_eleme... A quick look at your site and it's clear you don't get point #2 Independence as you're showing people the prior avg before they submit their answer. I'll bet your site will suffer from…
on “Approachio – Wisdom of the Crowds” ↗…because it is no longer efficient, will indexing then not underperform?" This was explained, I think, very succinctly in the Dave Collum "year in review"[2] wherein he explains: "In his must-read book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki posits that a large sample size of non-experts, when asked to wager a guess about something—the number of jelly beans in a jar, for example—will generate a distribution centered on the…
on “The Growing Peril of Index Funds: Too Much Tech” ↗…the same way isn't much smarter than just a few of those same people. A room full of pretty smart people with diverse experience and knowledge is WAY smarter than any smaller group. Read Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds.
on “Joe Kraus: Hiring. No False Positives” ↗The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki Takes a whole new approach to management, and solutions. How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
on “Ask YC: Entrepreneurial/Startup Reading List?” ↗My favorite book of 2009 was The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki: http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/12/critical-analys... The book shows how groups can work together to do great things. It also shows why some groups fail miserably. Overall…
on “Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009?” ↗…this way what is drivel could be made reality because too many people don't believe it to be drivel. There are some really interesting analysis of stock market dynamics such as this in the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki
on “Hindenburg Omen (Occurred Twice this Month)” ↗A mix of luck and people having access to incomplete information. Seibel says this: 'Though not about computers per se, 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 (Doubleday, 2004) contains an excellent answer to the question, "If Lisp's so great how come everybody isn't using it?" See the section on "Plank-Road Fever" starting on page 53.' http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/conclusion-whats-next.html…
on “Ask HN: Language inversion-- why do you think it exists?” ↗A nice book I liked is "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki. From what I remember, the gist is you want people to be coming up with solutions to a problem independently, and then you want them to voice their proposals independently (so as…
on “What makes group decisions go wrong and right” ↗…true for any sociopolitical system, and the reason why i push back on dichotomous thinking, especially "left-right" or "democrat-republican" in political discussions. this is the central exploration of Wisdom of Crowds, which i recommend to everyone even though it's considered 'old' now.
on “What Causes Alzheimer's? Scientists Are Rethinking the Answer” ↗…addresses the point head-on: "Diverse teams make better decisions than homogenous ones. I won’t recap the academic research that underlies this assertion; for that, you should read James Surowecki’s excellent Wisdom of Crowds.
on “Why Diversity Matters” ↗