How to choose your crowd wisely.

I don't intend to review Surowiecki's book here. Numerous reviews, and almost countless references, can be found on the web. We could even make the claim that wise crowds have become a sort of meme, working its way through our culture.

The following is from a review of the book that appears on one of numerous NASA sites:

Surowiecki identifies four characteristics of wise crowds:
The crowd must be diverse, which allows the individual members to bring different pieces of relevant information to the table.
It needs to be decentralized so that no individual member is dictating what the answer should be.
It needs a mechanism for distilling the group's opinion into a collective verdict.
The individual crowd members have to be independent, so they remain true to their own information and perspective while not worrying about what the other members of the group think of them.

But very similar lists, and a seemingly endless repeating of the same stories from the book, show up on a variety of sites - church sermons, stock market information sites, futurist sites, and of course blogs and more blogs. Each "community", of course, has its own particular reason for quoting Surowiecki. Sometimes it's in order to suggest how the members of that group might better make group decisions. Often, however, we get the feeling that many of these "communities" are pleased that Surowiecki has discovered what they knew all along: Our group was smart before reading the book, they seem to suggest. We're quoting from the book because it shows that we've been doing the right thing. Your group, on the other hand, should take a closer look at it.

Go to: Are crowds really that smart?