Book review: The wisdom of crowds - A leveraging tool

The book by James Surowiecki titled "The wisdom of crowds" fell into my hands and I read it during the summer of 2015. These are the main learning points that I drew from its reading.

Disclaimer: By no means this personal and non-comprehensive post aims to replace the reading of the book. This post is a biased set of thoughts, most of them extracted from the book, that went through my mind during the reading of this book.

- Diversity and independence are key to be kept in collective decisions.
- To these two points, add also decentralization and aggregation.
- A decision market is a working method to capture collective wisdom.
- Making a group diverse makes it better at problem solving.
- Expertise is spectacularly narrow.
- A large group of diverse and independent people will come up with better decisions.
- Collective decisions are only wise when they draw from very different information sources.
- Centralization is never the answer. Aggregation is.
- Betting markets are very good at predicting markets.
- Crowds find the way to collectively benefit even without speaking to each other if everyone knows that everybody is trying to make a decision.
- We live in a society in which convention has won over rationality (e.g. why all films costs almost the same in the cinema?).
- Maybe as individuals we do not know where we are going but as a group we can achieve great accomplishments.
- People think that people should be where they deserve. Merit is a key element in accepting reality.
- Vehicle traffic: Very easy to create traffic jams. Very complex to get rid of them. As a swarm, we drive quicker if we coordinate with surrounding vehicles.
- If the traffic jam is massive, no easy solution. Personal thought: Maybe then stop the car and read a book.
- Academic challenges in a collaborative environment are a morale booster.
- Reputation should not become the basis of a scientific hierarchy.
- Sometimes, being a member of a group can make people dumber (especially if the group is small and it has leaders on it).
- Sometimes small groups start already with the conclusions instead of reaching them after an evidence-gathering based process.
- Small group view polarization exists. Hierarquies make it worse even.
- The order in which people speak pays an important role.
- People who think of themselves as leaders will influence groups more than others, even if they lack expertise on what they talk about.
- Groups need an efficient way to aggregate their members' opinions.
- Investors not always behave rationally.
- Investors get emotionally attached to their shares.
- Individual irrationality can create collective rationality.
- On average crowds will give you a better answer than individuals.
- Healthy markets are led both by fear and greed.
- Bubbles and crashes are examples of crowd decisions going wrong.
- Groups are smart only when their information sources are balanced in terms of its ownership.
- All these points can be applied (and they are actually being applied) also into the business world.
- These thoughts justify why democracy is preferred to other organisational systems.

As Infosec professionals, if we can have these points in mind when designing security controls and security awareness sessions, our delivered value will be higher.

Happy crowded reading!

Groups fly!