The Wisdom of Crowds

Andy Bromberg: The wisdom of crowds is giving way to the “wisdom of communities.” In a world of ever-greater complexity, no one person can possibly make sense of all the signals and all the noise — from a single, static vantage point. A networked group is required to adapt to this new world... People are no longer being polled in isolation but rath... See more

A decentralized system can only produce genuinely intelligent results if there's a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system.

One of the key lessons of the Wisdom of Crowds is that we don't always know where good information is. That's why, in general, it's smarter to cast as wide a net as possible, rather than wasting time figuring out who should be in the group and who should not. This idea is well suited to the internet.

10 Crowds tend to make accurate predictions when three conditions prevail—diversity, aggregation, and incentives. Diversity is about people having different ideas and different views of things. Aggregation means you can bring the group’s information together. Incentives are rewards for being right and penalties for being wrong that are often, but n

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