Word: surowiecki
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...Wikipedians argue that collaboration improves articles over time, just as free open-source software like Linux and Firefox is more robust than for-profit competitors because thousands of amateur programmers get to look at the code and suggest changes. It's the same principle that New Yorker writer James Surowiecki asserted in his best seller The Wisdom of Crowds: large groups of people are inherently smarter than an élite...
...Surowiecki's thesis posits an uncanny and generally unconscious collective intelligence working not by top-down diktat but rather in dynamic arrangements of what the economist Friedrich Hayek called "spontaneous order." Surowiecki cites the giant flock of starlings evading a predatory hawk. From the outside, the cloud of birds seems to move in obedience to one mind. In fact, Surowiecki writes, each starling is acting on its own, following four simple rules: "1) stay as close to the middle as possible; 2) stay 2 to 3 body lengths away from your neighbor; 3) do not bump into any other starling...
...paradigm, as formulated by Surowiecki, states that hoi polloi (the many) are weirdly smart and effective, even when a lot of them, as individuals, are average, or below, in their intelligence or their experience with the subject at hand. Surowiecki's sometimes Panglossian view sees a sort of invisible hand shaping the motions and outcomes of group phenomena...
...Crowds is a circus of oddments and behavioral studies--for example, of big-city pedestrian flow (an unconscious art form) and highway traffic snarls (caused by hiccups of human reaction time--"a single driver who's too ready to hit the brakes can slow down an entire highway"). Surowiecki describes a 1958 experiment in which a group of law students from New Haven, Conn., were asked to consider this scenario: You have to meet someone in New York City but don't know where to meet him or when. You cannot talk to the other person ahead of time. Where...
Common sense sticks, to some extent, with the old paradigm. A lot of things endorsed by the starlings (reality TV, politicians, best-selling books) are so moronic that they practically disprove Darwin. But Surowiecki does not claim collective perfection, only the effectiveness of a diversity of individual intelligences--like those hundreds of scientists at labs all over the world who, without overall supervision but sharing their data, succeeded in isolating the SARS virus in only a matter of weeks. The Wisdom of Crowds is a subtly intelligent book that's fun to argue with: if it becomes a best seller...