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:
“But all subsists by elemental strife;
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—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-coloured bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)