Four Elements Required To Form A Wise Crowd
Not all crowds (groups) are wise. Consider, for example, mobs or crazed investors in a stock market bubble. According to Surowiecki, these key criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:
| Criteria | Description |
|---|---|
| Diversity of opinion | Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts. |
| Independence | People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them. |
| Decentralization | People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge. |
| Aggregation | Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision. |
Based on Surowiecki’s book, Oinas-Kukkonen captures the wisdom of crowds approach with the following eight conjectures:
- It is possible to describe how people in a group think as a whole.
- In some cases, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.
- The three conditions for a group to be intelligent are diversity, independence, and decentralization.
- The best decisions are a product of disagreement and contest.
- Too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent.
- Information aggregation functionality is needed.
- The right information needs to be delivered to the right people in the right place, at the right time, and in the right way.
- There is no need to chase the expert.
Read more about this topic: The Wisdom Of Crowds
Famous quotes containing the words elements, required, form, wise and/or crowd:
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.”
—Socrates (469–399 B.C.)
“Death never takes the wise man by surprise,
He is always ready to go.”
—Jean De La Fontaine (1621–1695)
“Most days I feel like an acrobat high above a crowd out of which my own parents, my in-laws, potential employers, phantoms of “other women who do it” and a thousand faceless eyes stare up.”
—Anonymous Mother. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)