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