The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Themes: wisdom of crowds, 2.0
A very fascinating book about how the wisdom of large aggregates of people often turns out better than that of a few individuals, no matter how smart. This book goes into great depth into both the pluses and minuses of using crowds. Surowiecki looks at three kinds of things: cognition problems (i.e., trying to determine a well-defined answer), coordination problems, and cooperation problems. He considers ways to get more of the crowd’s information and prevent such problems such as information cascading.
