The title The Wisdom of Crowds kind of speaks for itself when the main thought behind the text and author James Surowiecki is that collective thinking is more effective than individual thought. The main focus of the book is that you shouldn’t have to search the crowd for that individual to answer your question or solve a problem, but instead ask the entire crowd, as in Surowiecki’s opinion, you’ll get the answer much quicker and more often that not the crowd will be more intelligent than the individuals in them.
There is an effective diagram in a separate publication, a summary of the same book, where many arrows pointing inwards to the words surround the words ‘Collective Intelligence’, and the word ‘Expert’ has a lot of arrows pointing away from the word. In the case of the collective intelligence, it is the idea that lots of ideas go into this thinking, in order to make it better rounded and informative, whereas with one expert, it is just one person giving out their one opinion to others. Even something so simple as a diagram with words and arrows shows how effective the idea of collective intelligence can be.[1]
The idea that this type of brainpower could solve different types of problems also surprised me, as it seemed so obvious. There are the ‘Cognition’ problems, where a certain solution may not exist, but collectively a group can find and think up new alternatives. Also ‘Co-ordination’ problems are self-explanatory; the group must work together and this depends on not just what the individual thinks but the group around them also. All three link with the final type of problem, ‘Co-operation’, where the group must come up with solutions that are good for everybody. Although the three are very similar and preach the same ideas overall, their subtle differences make up the different types of collective intelligence.
What I didn’t like so much about the book was that it dismissed the fact that people could just be thrown together by chance into a group to solve the problem at hand and that it would work, but it gave a sort of checklist of conditions each individual must acquire. These included diversity of opinion, independence – to decrease the ‘herding’ mentality[2], decentralization and aggregation. I understand why these qualities are important but it somewhat dismisses the idea that certain minds can and can’t work together. The book is riddled with examples of how collective intelligence works, one of which was it’s relation to traffic jams. What many people fail to notice is how things around them have come to be. The idea that the actual road is smart because of the team that designed it, as opposed to it being down to the individual driver, really made me understand the concept a lot more.[3] The idea of a group decision rather than an individual is also reflective of the democratic system I thought, as it can be seen that a democratic society is happier and more prosperous than a society run by, say, one dictator making all the decisions. This is talked about more in the ‘Collective Intelligence and Democracy’ part, and what I found interesting was when Surowiecki talked about the actual democracy itself not representing the wisdom of the crowd, but the decision to have a democracy in the first place does.
[2] Surowiecki, J., 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few. (Abacus.) pp. 49.
[3] Surowiecki, J., 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few. (Abacus.) pp. 145.
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