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, crowd and/or wisdom:
“... there are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“However glorious an action in itself, it ought not to pass for great if it be not the effect of wisdom and intention.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)