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The Wisdom of Crowds By James Surowiecki ( Anchor )
Release Date: 2005-08-16
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $14.95
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Product Description
In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant–better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.
With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.
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 No charts, no data, small font ( mindin )
This book has no data and no charts. Maybe for a lot of folks that is fine. But those of you like me-- who would expect a book with a title that sounds like a mathematical theory to at least have some statistical references-- should at least take this into your decision about whether you really want this book.
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More Nuanced Than I Expected ( billswift3 )
From a lot of the hype and reviews, I expected more of a polemic; this was a readable and nuanced view of collective behavior. Both when they get things right and when they go wrong. Three types of problems were addressed - cognitive/informational judgements, coordination problems, and cooperation problems. He also covered the requirements for collective judgement to work, the most important of which are independence (lack of which promotes bubbles and mobs) and a means of aggregating the independent judgements (the market is one example). He also covered the problems with it and when it cannot work, such as bubbles and traffic jams. It's density of ideas makes it harder to read than it otherwise would be.
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Summary book of crowd behavior
I read this book because I wanted to stay up-to-date with trends in mass collaboration and how that is evolving with the internet. I found this book to be a good summary to be conversational with others when talking about the terms he defines such as coordination and cooperation problems. However, I found myself not doing much note taking or highlighting of passages that are relevant to my life as an IT professional.
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 Book review
Recommended by a friend for my husband who is very picky about his books. He is enjoying it. Shipping was quick.
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 High expectations, yet disappointing ( pickcentral )
I was excited to read Wisdom of Crowds feeling that it would present some unique ideas, however, was disappointed in the presentation and the lack of supporting evidence for some concepts. An alternative to "wisdom of crowds" in my opinion is the knowledge of crowds vs. the wisdom of the few.
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Addiction
