I heard this guy on the BBCWS, a few weeks back--interesting stuff; he goes so far as to suggest that a group will often be smarter than its smartest member due to the dynamic created, and given a large enough sampling over a long enough period of time will actually outperform the best single experts in any given field, or something to that effect.

Andrew Lih wrote:

FYI, this book has been getting attention lately, so you may want to take a look:

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki

To Wikipedians, this merely reinforces what we've all know and have experienced firsthand. But it is interesting that the theme of the "power of many" is being picked up by the mainstream and it may prove a useful reference for folks who just "don't get wiki." It's a more general book than Rheingold's "Smart Mobs," which could be dismissed as too technocentric and focusing on mobile devices

Instead, Surowiecki's "Wise crowds" are described as having (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. (four points quoted from Amazon.com's review).

I'm sure Wikipedians will find these concepts quite familiar.

The last thing I needed was an excuse to buy another book (or two). :-)

It's one of those paradoxical ideas that make experts cringe. Just as experts can at times come out with extraordinarily stupid ideas, so too can the crowd outdo them in that. These kinds of activities are not amenable to rigid scientific studies. Large flocks of birds or schools of fish change their collective movement without problems. Marching groups of soldiers cannot do this without one person giving orders lest they all run into each other.

Experts have a vested interest in having their views accepted as truth, and have the backing of scientific rigour to support them. The last person they want to hear from is the trickster.

I've long believed that the development of the internet has put us on the threshhold of a paradigm shift in the way that it has allowed communication to be initiated and information to be shared between individuals who previously would never have known of each other's existence. This is important in obscure fields where the number of interested individuals worldwide is very small. In the old world there may have been a single recognized expert in the field, and all communications needed to be through the expert who would avoid sharing lists of correspondents under the guise of protecting their privacy. That is no longer the case, and the "expert" is being marginalised.

The recent issue of "Utne" magazine has an article entitled "Global Village or Virtual Shopping Mall?" in which is discussed the lobbying efforts being made on behalf of the major telecom companies to maintain control of broadband access. The effort is being made to restrict your choice of ISPs to insure that you obliged to take the whole advertising package that they offer. They give a link for further information www.democraticmedia.org/ddc

The four characteristics describe by amazon are worth noting, but we can depend on the WP for only the fourth one.

Ec