Types of Crowd Wisdom
Surowiecki breaks down the advantages he sees in disorganized decisions into three main types, which he classifies as
- Cognition
- Thinking and information Processing
- Market judgment, which he argues can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts or expert committees.
- Coordination
- Coordination of behavior includes optimizing the utilization of a popular bar and not colliding in moving traffic flows. The book is replete with examples from experimental economics, but this section relies more on naturally occurring experiments such as pedestrians optimizing the pavement flow or the extent of crowding in popular restaurants. He examines how common understanding within a culture allows remarkably accurate judgments about specific reactions of other members of the culture.
- Cooperation
- How groups of people can form networks of trust without a central system controlling their behavior or directly enforcing their compliance. This section is especially pro free market.
Read more about this topic: The Wisdom Of Crowds
Famous quotes containing the words types of, types, crowd and/or wisdom:
“Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other—only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.”
—Talcott Parsons (1902–1979)
“Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaverlike tunneling to the top.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“A body of work such as Pasteur’s is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.”
—Jean Rostand (1894–1977)
“It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldst have it, to fear and suspect the worst.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466–1536)