Wisdom of Crowds
Posted by Brett Tackaberry on March 22nd, 2006
I’m in SXSW withdrawl these days but I’ve discovered a remedy: podcasts of the panels I couldn’t make it to. Just this morning I found James Surowiecki’s discussion on the “wisdom of crowds” concept. James is a columnist for the New Yorker and has actually written a book entitled (duh) The Wisdom of Crowds. For anybody who isn’t familiar with the idea, the premise is that a group of people have a collective intelligence that is far greater than any of the individuals in that group. Now, obviously the bigger the group the better, but groups as small as 8 have demonstrated this theory with often remarkable results. James used real-world examples ranging from horse track betting odds to jelly bean counting contests to the stock market to the page rank algorithm at the core of Google’s search engine to illustrate how effective this method of decision making can be.
It’s a really fascinating subject and I highly recommend the MP3 link above as a great primer on the topic.
March 22nd, 2006 » 9:44 pm
Steve, Wisdom of Crowds is a neat concept. You’ve mentioned minimum group size. But I thin that diversity is an even more important factor to this theory.