The Wisdom of Crowds

The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki

The victory of the gasoline-powered engine was not a foregone conclusion. Thomas Edison, for instance, had designed a battery-powered vehicle, and in 1899 one sage had offered the prediction that “the whole of the United States will be sprinkled with electric changing stations.” At one point, a third of all the cars on U.S. roads were electric-powered. Similarly, steam-powered engines were seen by many as the most logical way to propel a vehicle, since steam obviously worked so well in propelling trains and boats -- Auta: para, prąd, benzyna

the early days of the business are characterized by a profusion of alternatives, many of them dramatically different from each other in design and technology. As time passes, the market winnows out the winners and losers, effectively choosing which technologies will flourish and which will disappear. -- Wolny rynek rozwiązań

When a scout bee has found a nectar source that seems strong, he comes back and does a waggle dance, the intensity of which is shaped, in some way, by the excellence of the nectar supply at the site. -- Jak pszczoły znajdują kwiaty

Adding in a few people who know less, but have different skills, actually improves the group’s performance. -- Dobrze włączyć też tych co wiedzą mniej

Thomas Watson of IBM declaring in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

But experts are much like normal people: they routinely overestimate the likelihood that they’re right. A survey on the question of overconfidence by economist Terrance Odean found that physicians, nurses, lawyers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and investment bankers all believed that they knew more than they did. -- A co z Dunning-Krugerem?

psychologist Irving Janis called “groupthink.”

After a detailed study of a series of American foreign-policy fiascoes, including the Bay of Pigs invasion and the failure to anticipate Pearl Harbor, Janis argued that when decision makers are too much alike—in worldview and mind-set—they easily fall prey to groupthink

Guyana jungle. A group of army ants was moving in a huge circle. The circle was 1,200 feet in circumference, and it took each ant two and a half hours to complete the loop -- Mrówki w koło

II In 1968, the social psychologists Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz decided to cause a little trouble. First, they put a single person on a street corner and had him look up at an empty sky for sixty seconds. A tiny fraction of the passing pedestrians stopped to see what the guy was looking at, but most just walked past. Next time around, the psychologists put five skyward-looking men on the corner. This time, four times as many people stopped to gaze at the empty sky. When the psychologists put fifteen men on the corner, 45 percent of all passersby stopped, and increasing the cohort of observers yet again made more than 80 percent of pedestrians tilt their heads and look up -- Konformizm, Milgram

Decentralization is also crucial to what the economist Friedrich Hayek described as tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t be easily summarized or conveyed to others, because it is specific to a particular place or job or experience, but it is nonetheless tremendously valuable -- Tacit knowledge

Google relies on the local knowledge of millions of Web-page operators to make Google searches ever-smarter and ever-quicker.

Pedestrians are constantly anticipating each other’s behavior. No one tells them where or when or how to walk. Instead, they all decide for themselves what they’ll do based on their best guess of what everyone else will do. And somehow it usually works out well. There is a kind of collective genius at play here. -- Koordynacja

As Schelling wrote, “People can often concert their intentions and expectations with others if each knows that the other is trying to do the same.”

We drive on the right-hand side of the road because it’s easier to have a rule that everyone follows rather than to have to play the guessing game with oncoming drivers.

first-come, first-served

So in the 1980s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram decided to find out what would happen if you did just that. Milgram suggested to a class of graduate students that they ride the subway and simply ask people, in a courteous but direct manner, if they could have their seats.

Congestion pricing” has been around as an idea since the 1920s, but its most important advocate was the Nobel Prize–winning economist William Vickrey. For Vickrey, road space was like any other scarce resource: if you wanted to allocate it wisely, you needed some way to make the costs and benefits of people’s decisions obvious to them. -- Podatek od korków

Newton pointed to something like this when he spoke of “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Warren Hagstrom talked about science as a “gift economy

Evidence-based juries usually don’t even take a vote until after they’ve spent some time talking over the case, sifting through the evidence, and explicitly contemplating alternative explanations. Verdict-based juries, by contrast, see their mission as reaching a decision as quickly and decisively as possible

Social psychologist Garold Stasser, for instance, ran an experiment in which a group of eight people was asked to rate the performance of thirty-two psychology students. Each member of the group was given two relevant pieces of information about the students (say, their grades and their test scores), while two members of the group were given two extra pieces of information (say, their performance in class, etc.), and one member of the group received another two. Although the group as a whole therefore had six pieces of useful information, their ratings were based almost entirely on the two pieces of information that they all shared.

This doesn’t mean that the ideal jury will follow the plot of Twelve Angry Men, where a single holdout convinces eleven men who are ready to convict that they’re all wrong.

Group polarization

As a general rule, discussions tend to move both the group as a whole and the individuals within it toward more extreme positions than the ones they entered the discussion with.

Earlier comments are more influential, and they tend to provide a framework within which the discussion occurs

Even when higher-status people don’t really know what they’re talking about, they’re more likely to speak.

extremists tend to be more rigid and more convinced of their own rightness than moderates, discussion tends to pull groups away from the middle

Most investors go long on stocks, meaning that they buy a stock hoping that its price will rise. A short seller goes short.

If you go long as an investor, you’re making an optimistic bet. If you go short, you’re predicting that bad things will happe

Napoleon deemed the short seller “an enemy of the state

Short selling was illegal in New York State in the early 1800s, while England banned it outright in 1733 and did not make it legal again until the middle of the nineteenth century

In January of 2003, 343 people, carefully chosen so that they represented an almost perfect cross-section of the American population, gathered in Philadelphia for a weekend of political debate. The topic was American foreign policy, with the issues ranging from the impending conflict with Iraq to nuclear proliferation to the global AIDS epidemic. Before the weekend, the participants were polled to get a sense of their positions on the issues. They were then sent a set of briefing materials that, in a deliberately evenhanded fashion, tried to lay out relevant facts and provide some sense of the ongoing debate about the issues. Once they arrived, they were divided up into small groups led by trained moderators, and went on to spend the weekend deliberating. Along the way, they were given the chance to interrogate panels of competing experts and political figures. At the end of the weekend, the participants were polled again, to see what difference their deliberations had made. The entire event, which bore the unwieldy name of the National Issues Convention Deliberative Poll

Deliberation Day, which Fishkin and Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman proposed, would be a new national holiday on which, two weeks before major national elections, registered voters would gather in their neighborhoods, in small groups of fifteen and large groups of five hundred, to discuss the major issues at stake in the campaign. Citizens who participated and then voted the following week would be paid $150

Bibliografia

• James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, New York: Anchor Books 2005.