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The Wisdom of Crowds |
The Wisdom of Crowds is a popular science book that explains many of the mechanics of the Web 2.0, but which is also quite misunderstood. The common misunderstanding is that many people can solve a problem better than a few experts in general. The book tells the opposite: that there are certain problems that can be solved by many people better than by a few experts. These problems include in particular estimations of unknown variables or predictions of future values, e.g. the size of the market of digital music downloads. The trick here is statistical sampling: of course, most people guess wrong, but because the wrong estimations are balanced the outliers compensate each other. Most interesting is that the author, James Surowiecki, identified conditions which are essential for crowd intelligence.
There are four conditions that can be reduced to one simple, but in its consequence complex statement: network connectivity. It’s about the density of the network and the strength of its connections. A too dense network with too strong connections ends up in a uniform mass with no intelligence at all. The opposite is bad either. Information won’t flow between the nodes. The same you can learn from the observation of biochemical networks: they have to balanced.
So stay independent, but connected and have a good time!
