eBooks - Business - Business - James Surowiecki - The Wisdom of Crowds
The Wisdom of Crowds eBooks
by James Surowiecki
|
Platforms
Windows 98SE+, Mac OS X+, Palm Features
|
Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
|
|
Platforms
Windows 98+, Tablet PC, Pocket PC 2003 Features
|
Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
|
|
Platforms
Windows PC, Palm, Pocket PC, eBookMan, SmartPhones, and more. Features
|
Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
|
|
Platforms
All Palm & Pocket PC handheld devices plus all Windows and Macintosh computers. Features
|
Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
|
The Wisdom of Crowds Summary
|
The Wisdom of Crowds I If, years hence, people remember anything about the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, they will probably remember the contestants' panicked phone calls to friends and relatives. Or they may have a faint memory of that short-lived moment when Regis Philbin became a fashion icon for his willingness to wear a dark blue tie with a dark blue shirt. What people probably won't remember is that every week Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? pitted group intelligence against individual intelligence, and that every week, group intelligence won. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was a simple show in terms of structure: a contestant was asked multiple-choice questions, which got successively more difficult, and if she answered fifteen questions in a row correctly, she walked away with $1 million. The show's gimmick was that if a contestant got stumped by a question, she could pursue three avenues of assistance. First, she could have two of the four multiple-choice answers removed (so she'd have at least a fifty-fifty shot at the right response). Second, she could place a call to a friend or relative, a person whom, before the show, she had singled out as one of the smartest people she knew, and ask him or her for the answer. And third, she could poll the studio audience, which would immediately cast its votes by computer. Everything we think we know about intelligence suggests that the smart individual would offer the most help. And, in fact, the "experts" did okay, offering the right answer--under pressure--almost 65 percent of the time. But they paled in comparison to the audiences. Those random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio picked the right answer 91 percent of the time. Now, the results of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? would never stand up to scientific scrutiny. We don't know how smart the experts were, so we don't... |
|
|
|
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. |
|
|
eBooks - Titles - Authors - Business - Business - James Surowiecki - The Wisdom of Crowds eBooks