James Surowiecki - The Wisdom of Crowds
or, as Michael likes to call it, The Opposite of Blink. (Though it should be said that Gladwell and Surowiecki are colleagues at the New Yorker, and the former provided a blurb while the latter praises The Tipping Point in his book.) I think the argument of the book is relatively self-evident: crowds as a whole end up making smarter decisions than individuals. When they don't, there are things they could have done differently to make smarter choices - if they know those strategies, they can make them work again.
It's a pretty upbeat book, if you think about it. Crowds tend to make the right choices in the end, particularly if you define a crowd as a market or some other virtual, not physical, entity. Just as Gladwell wants to help us harness the power of our unconscious, Surowiecki wants to help us recognize and appreciate the power of our collective (un?)conscious.
This is another in-progress review, so I'm mostly going to leave it at that. Surowiecki's "Financial Page" columns in the New Yorker have always made me happy. (I'm going to try to remember to come back and link to a couple of archives if I can find them.) He's such an elegant writer, good at interweaving story and theory. And I appreciate his ability to change my mind on Starbucks. While they may indeed be a corporate behemoth, they - by creating a market for fancy coffee drinks that didn't really exist before - actually grew the market for small independent coffee houses, of which there are more now than there were in pre-Starbucks days. So I can drink my frappuccino without feeling too guilty, as long as I patronize the indie places too. (Hurrah for justification.)
Anyway, Surowiecki is awesome.
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God, I wish I could believe this guy's premise. I mean, I guess I do in a general, long-term sense (it's hard to deny that things have gotten better, humanitarily speaking, over the past tens of centuries-- after all, we rarely boil people in oil anymore [RNCs excepted])... but yet, I can't help but feel that for every two steps we could be taking forward, we end up taking one of those steps back due to tendencies of the majority to compromise with loud members of the minority who represent the status quo.
Also, I think we must make a firm distinction between sound decision-making in abstract and philosophical senses, and the implementation of those decisions. While it may be true that "crowds" tend to make rational decisions (eventually), I don't believe that all of those ideas are implemented as quickly as they could be because social change is often driven by those with the means, money, and opportunity to control it on a large scale, and those people tend to be fueled by ulterior motives such as money, re-election, commerce, power, etc. Furthermore, these people have almost uniformly found that they can bolster their holds on these things not by appealing to the rationality of the crowd, but instead, their fears! Through this, I think that the sense of the crowd is often second-guessed to the point of non-existence. But in the end, over geological time-scales, I think we're getting better, people are becoming more open-minded, and ignorance is being slowly destroyed.
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