Date: August 28, 2004

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few & How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki

BCDC's rating: 3.0

The menu for this meeting: Joni's spinach quiche, gazpacho, fruit smoothies, bagels, cheese, cookies, and more!

The BCDC Reading Guide for this book is below.

• Who is the intended audience for this book?
• The chapter on the Challenger disaster suggests that it is better to have a diversity of opinion than a diversity of fact. What do you think?
• Do you have any personal examples of the wisdom (or foolishness) of crowds? How does this compare with Surowiecki's anecdotes?
• Does the independence characteristic for "smart" groups suggest that bowling alone isn't so bad?
• How big must a group be to become wise?
• If you could rewrite this book, what would you change?
• Does this book suggest anything to you about Fox News?
• What is the point of this book?
• During the recent Olympics, the crowd felt that the judges for the individual men's gymnastics high-bar competition had not graded the Russian gymnast's performance correctly, and proceeded to boo and make noise until the panel of six judges changed their ratings. Is this anexample of Surowiecki's these or an example of mob rule?
• Is our book group wise? What characteristics (diversity, independence, decentralization, aggregation) does our group have or not have?
• Does the author have a coherent thesis?
• The author says that he is not talking about sociological [sic] diversity but about diversity of information. Is it possible that sociological [sic] diversity is diversity of information?
• Now that you've read this book, what would you do if you were on the 'price is right' and you needed help picking a price - would you listen to your dear spouse who was signalling you from the crowd? Or would you try to assess the crowd?
• Does Surowiecki cover possible aspects of "gaming market systems" enough, since this is a negative to his argument which seems to imply a championing of using markets for making decisions?