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Books : The Wisdom of CrowdsIn association with Amazon.comby: James Surowiecki  List Price: $14.95 Amazon.com's Price: $10.17 You Save: $4.78 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 303.38 EAN: 9780385721707 ISBN: 0385721706 Label: Anchor Manufacturer: Anchor Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 336 Publication Date: August 16, 2005 Publisher: Anchor Release Date: August 16, 2005 Studio: Anchor Sales Rank: 1210 Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: 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. With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, 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 our world. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Hilarious!Hee, hee, hee! This title and this book sure look funny right now (September 22nd, 2008). Do we follow the wisdom of the crowds on Wall Street (which, if left to its own devises will continue to drive financial titans into bankrupcy), or the machinations of the dubious experts (Paulson & Bernanke), who will put us on the hook for hundreds of billions for years to come? Maybe it's time to dust off that 19th Century classic "The Madness of Crowds" instead of reading this smug balderdash. Rating: - Why don't quantum physicists let a crowd predict the Higgs' particle mass-energy?The author's thesis is that the answers of huge numbers of people tend to be more accurate than those of individuals even if these individuals are experts in the specific subject. He makes clear that this is not true for any specific trial in which one individual might score better than the average, but in a series of trials, the crowd outperforms any individual. The author also explains "magnification " of mistakes by peer conformance, a phenomenon that does not occur when the answer comes from a random ... Read More Rating:  - wisdom of crowdsAs the title suggests, this books attempts to explore the collective intelligence of crowds. It covers a variety of settings, from traffic jams to the stock market performance. The book reminds me of Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" but feels a bit more cerebral and densely written. In talking about the wisdom of crowds, Surowiecki recounts a 1958 study that demonstrates the collective wisdom of groups. Students were asked to meet someone in NYC. They didn't know where to meet, and had ... Read More Rating: - Never judge a book by its cover!I have a confession to make. I started reviewing this book before reading it, based purely on the rather lengthy subtitle `Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations'. First, I planned to make a sneering reference to the dotcom bubble as evidence of this collective wisdom. Then, point to Charles Mackay's classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. How sad that this ignorant journalist had pinched the title ... Read More Rating:  - Excellent PrimerThere's a reason why democracy is the crappiest form of government, except all others (to paraphrase somebody famous). The theme of this book is that groups of people are smarter than individual people. It's sort of counterintuitive to the American spirit of individualism, but James Surowiecki does a creditable job of providing a good case to support his thesis in a very readable format. Anyone who regularly works in problem-solving groups will immediately recognize the fundamental truth of the ... Read More Browse for similar items by category:
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