The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki
"The Wisdom of the Crowd, I actually picked it up on audio 'cause I was gonna do a road trip.
It's a nonfiction book about how often, under the right circumstances given, that a crowd is allowed to make their own judgments, that often crowds will often make better decisions than any one individual in the group. She talks about a crowd guessing the weight of a prize cow at the fair; and nobody in the crowd got it exactly on, but the average of all the different weights guessed from the crowd was within a couple ounces of the cow's actual weight. Whereas any individual in the wrong idea, when the whole group could use their own thinking, then they came up with pretty close to the right percentages of likelihood for the different events happening.
The author does address how the group decision making can slow down a decision making process. The way the author frames it is that this is -- he's come up with this radical idea that's contradictory to so many ideas and the study of sociology. So I think it would probably be most interesting for somebody with a background in sociology, but I don't have a background in sociology, and I really liked the book.
I would rate The Wisdom of the Crows about 3 -- or 4 stars out of five."
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