Here are my notes from James Surowiecki's Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too Connected?, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations is meant to be quite good — it's sitting in my pile of things I need to read as soon as I get a chance. Based on his talk, I think I might bump it up a couple of positions.
Wisdom of crowds works on problems where there's a true answer,
or when some choices are better than other in some Platonic
sense. The reason this works is that people are operating on
private info, which may be bad or fragmented.The opinions are diverse — not consensus but disagreements.
People don't know much about what others are betting on or
guessing — not a lot of interpersonal interaction.Compare with Linux: large group of people working on problems,
but ultimately one person writes the code that gets committed.
The decision is centralized: one or a small number of people get
to commit code to the kernel.Compare with ant-hill: Often a metaphor for human behavior. How
to use a bunch of dumb agents (ants don't know much) whose
interaction produce stunningly intelligent results, e.g. finding
food with least amount of energy. E.g. ant graveyards and food
supplies are equidistant.Ants follow simple rules and pay a lot of attention to those
around them: interaction is the essence of intelligence. The only
way to get where they want to go is by paying close attention to
one another.Here's my message: HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT ANTS. We do not have the
biological programming or tools to allow this kind of interaction
to produce intelligence. We don't have the ability to sense or
secrete formic acid.
