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Notes on The Wisdom of Crowds

Here are my notes on The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Overview

Under the right circumstances, groups are smarter than the smartest people in them, even if the group doesn’t contain expert members.

Experts are as likely to disagree as agree. Experts’ individual consistency is also 0.5. Experts overestimate the likelihood that they are correct – little correlation between self-assessment and performance. Therefore, however well informed and sophisticated and expert is, his advice should be pooled with that of others and the larger the group the better. So we should stop “chasing…