James Surowiecki Quotes

Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.

Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromising. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead…the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

“The Wisdom of Crowds” suggests that if enough bumbling people act in concert, they’ll find their way to a less bumbling place.

The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.

No one is as smart as all of us.

The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality, though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.

This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

People's intelligence tends to be in inverse proportion to their number. People don't tend to get smarter as they get into bigger groups.

For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.

When a species wants to tap the collective intelligence of a population, they don't take a poll; they don't take a vote. They form a real-time system.

A poll finds the average opinion of a group. It takes the temperature of a crowd. A swarm focuses a group together, in real time, and has them work together as a system to answer a question instead.

Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up.

This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have.

We can be more clever than one, but not more clever than all.

No one person, no one alliance, no one nation, no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.

Most innovation comes from people working together, collaborating in teams.

To be successful, we need everyone to think independently and work through disagreement to decide what's best.

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

To believe in your choice you don't need to prove that other people's choices are wrong.

I hire people who can do their jobs and who will advise me of things they don't agree with. The worst thing you can do is get in a room with 14 people who say, "OK!" Then you really are making decisions about engineering and finance and other areas.

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

One can often hear from the young people:" I do not want to live according to others' mind. I can think of it myself. " Why should one think of something, when it is already thought about. Take it and go farther, this is the strength of the mankind.