More hype than substance

After hearing all the hype, I was very excited to read this book on this fascinating topic. Unfortunately, this book has too many flaws and not enough substance. The first main problem is that Surowiecki does exactly what he tells the reader not to do: he jumps to conclusions that suport his thesis rather than analyzng the evidence. For example Surowiecki looks at stocks after the Challenger explosion and concludes that the market's group wisdom determined which company was at fault, instead of any of a number of more reaonable conclusions.

This leads to the next flaw of the books, which is that the evidence presented is unecessarily thin. He presents experiments with vague descriptions and never shows any math or statisitics used to derive his results. He dances around the wonderful field of game theory, but never references it and hence misses the theory's insight on his topic.

Not surprisingly, Surowiecki contradicts himself alot. The reason for this is simple: groups have as much intrinsic wisdom as they have intrinsic idiocy. Surowiecki only tries to pretend the former is true, while being forced to admit the latter throughout the book.

Bird's of a feather folk together? Hmm ... do they?

Few books are worth weight in gold. And this one surely is. (Assuming gold is just $24.95 per ounce :-))

This is an excellent, excellent book which gives excellent insight into the complex world of group dynamics. The basic premise of the book is that a group is likely to come up with a wise collective decision provided the decision is made by set of independent people with diverse opinions and with diverse background.

This book provides answers to numerous day to day questions relating to group dynamics that might have crossed ones mind at one point or the other. Additionally the book is interspersed with excellent insights into group operations.

Some of the answers to the questions that I found interesting were ...

=> Why do people tip even at restaurant that they know they will never return to, and at restaurants in cities thousands of miles away from their homes?

=> Why do traffic jams occur? How are the different Institutions tweaking the group behaviour in order to rein in traffic jams ... for example the London's Downtown Congestion avoidance system, the Mexico's odd/even license plate system, the Singapore's smart card system.

=> How does Google's Pagerank algorithm helps us find the right information almost each and every time?

=> What leads to Stock Market(Investment) Bubbles? Also why does price of TV set never goes out of whack?

=> What makes the Linux open source world tick? How can a decentralized group with diverse background with disparate way of thinking come up and continue to enrich the Linux operating system?

Some of the insights I found interesting ...

=> How groups are better at deciding between possible solutions to a problem rather than they are at coming up with them.

=> How people rely on "anchors" when they make decisions.

=> How the Institutions harness people's preferences in a productive way by offering them more options and by shifting the frames through which they see their own financial lives. (for example ... retirement plans like 401K, tax relief on home ownerships etc.)

I can go on and on ... The above is just a small subset of interesting topics that the Author has touched upon. I just loved the way the book is organized and written. The best thing I liked about this book is that it derives examples from our day to day life.

I would highly, highly, highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding how group dynamics operates in our day to day life.

An absolute, absolute must read ...

-Sachin

Broadly addressed hypothesis

I was very satisfied with The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki's main hypothesis is that in many situations the answer a crowd arrives at can outperform that of the smartest individual in the group. He gives many interesting examples of this, and of the types of situations where the group doesn't perform well and why, breaking group interactions into three types: cognition, coordination, and cooperation.

Some of the topics included: the bubble booms of plank roads and bowling alleys, intelligence agencies and 9/11, restaurant tipping, television ratings, highway merging, SARS research, Linux, the Columbia explosion, corporate infrastructure, and the biggest most relevant group - democracy in the US.