The “Dumbness of Crowds”
by Patrick Ruffini :: January 3rd, 2007 10:47 pmWhat is the “wisdom of crowds?” This starts off a pretty good framing of it, though I’m not sure if the author is defending James Surowiecki or attacking him:
Community. Wisdom of Crowds. Collective Intelligence. The new emphasis on net-enabled collaboration is all goodness and light until somebody gets an eye I poked out. Is it merely a coincidence that Apple, run by (as James Gosling put it) “a dictator with good taste” leads the way in tech design, while risk-averse companies using design-by-committee (or consensus) are churning out bland, me-too, incremental tweaks to existing products? And if that’s true about companies, why do we think consensus will work on an even larger scale with “users” in Web 2.0?
If I had to distill one of the key lessons of The Wisdom of Crowds, it’s Markets–Good, “Consensus”–Bad. Don’t trust the crowd to come up with the design, the great product idea, the range of available alternatives. They’ll come up with some stale variant of what already exists. But have them decide among the final options, no matter how new and exotic and they’ll make the right decision every time.
Tagged: collective intelligence 
markets wisdom of crowds
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