Thursday, May 04, 2006

Book Review: The Wisdom Of Crowds

I haven't added anything to the original BlowdenBlog (kid-tested, mother-approved) in quite some time, so I thought I'd add some book reviews. Since I'm not a member of the East Coast Mainstream Media Elite, I don't have access to their perks, like pre-release comped books. I have to buy my books the old-fashioned way, through Amazon's website using my credit card. Also, I don't have the time to read that I would like, what with the six-hour work days, video games, and web surfing. That is a verbose way of saying the books I will be reviewing were released a long time ago.

My first review will be James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki is a regular writer for The New Yorker. His "Financial Page" column is always well-written, well-argued, and interesting. In fact, I can't think of a better writer on economic matters. He always explains the issues in a way that is easy to understand without being, to my non-economist mind at least, simplistic. My only criticism of his articles is that he always seems to come to decisive opinions about the best course of action for a given economic topic. Economics in my mind has always been an imprecise science, and I'm uneasy about unequivocal opinions on financial matters. Not that Surowiecki comes across as arrogant or partisan - his conclusions seem well-reasoned and objective.

As a fan of Surowiecki's work, I eagerly looked forward to reading The Wisdom of Crowds, and it was an enjoyable book. His central thesis is that groups of independently thinking decision-makers can come up with better choices than a small group of experts. His first example is Frances Galton, who discovered that the average guess of a cow's weight at a local fair was better than any individual guess.

He uses other examples, such as the method used to find the missing submarine USS Scorpion. Dr. John Craven of the US Navy was tasked to find the vessel, and he used probability analysis to get a consensus best guess of the sub's location based on several independent estimates. This turned out to be highly accurate, and enabled the Navy to find the missing sub.

Surowiecki discusses how groups of independent actors organize themselves in various ways, from betting on sporting events, to negotiating traffic, to participating in group discussions. One of the most compelling chapters in the book is the account of the meetings leading up to the Columbia space shuttle disaster. Surowiecki gives a persuasive example of how all opinions need to be heard, even unpopular ones, and that centralized decision making does not always lead to better results.

The Wisdom of Crowds is a lively entertaining read. Unfortunately, by ranging over such a variety of issues, his point about group dynamics is often lost. This problem is evident in many of the popular eclectic non-fiction titles of the past few years, such as Freakonomics and Blink (the latter of which I will be reviewing in a separate article). By giving a series of anecdotes, the reader can sometimes be left wondering what the overall point is. I don't think there is a central point to be gleaned from Freakonomics, for example (which is collected from a series of standalone articles and feels like it). Similarly, The Wisdom of Crowds is partially composed of material from Surowiecki's New Yorker columns, and it is hard to read as a unified whole.

Perhaps that is because this new wave of general interest non-fiction is in fact written by journalists (Surowiecki, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Dubner) who specialize in short story-driven features. Not that I was expecting a dull monograph on decision-theory or sociology, but I would have liked The Wisdom of Crowds to have more thematic unity and a stronger conclusion. So groups of independent thinkers can arrive at decisions better than small groups of experts, where does that knowledge take us? Surowiecki gives some brief ideas, but I wanted more. Leaving your audience craving more is mostly a good thing, and Surowiecki left me urgently waiting for a followup.

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