[FRIAM] Amazon.com: The Wisdom of Crowds: Books: James Surowiecki

[Michael Agar]

Book's on my shelf, too, haven't read it yet. Don't forget De  
Toqueville's line about the tyranny of the masses, not to mention  
decades of work in mob psychology. Not so easy to map those key  
conditions onto real social swarms. Doesn't swarm formation weaken if  
not contradict the first two conditions right away? Coupling and  
constraints and all that?

Mike


On Jun 6, 2006, at 9:30 AM, David Mirly wrote:

> I have not personally read the book but it is on my list.
>
> However, I did recently read this article which focuses on the
> negative results of collective thinking.
> It does give a mention or two to positive uses of crowd thinking  
> though.
>
> http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html
>
>
> On Jun 5, 2006, at 9:02 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
>> I've been reading this critter:
>>    http://tinyurl.com/hexhe
>> .. and am interested in its application to social modeling, and
>> possibly business/organizational modeling.
>>
>> The thesis is that good decisions can be made by crowds if they are:
>> - Diverse
>> - Independent
>> - Decentralized
>> - Good method for aggregating the results.
>>
>> I started on the book a while back while discouraged after the
>> democrats shot themselves in the foot the last election.  Thinking
>> crowds were stupid, I was surprised a bit by the author's thesis.
>>
>> Anyone read it?  Have opinions?  Got ideas how to apply it to
>> community modeling?
>>
>>      -- Owen
>>
>> Owen Densmore
>> http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org
>>
>>
>>
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>
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