Bolg post 7

The Suroweicki excerpts from his work “The Wisdom of Crowds” really interested me due to his idea that the collective knowledge of man is greater than that of the elite few. It is easily misconstrued in society that hierarchy in intelligence is necessary to achieve a desired outcome.

It begs to question: why do we bother to pursue higher education if research shows how effective the knowledge of the whole is? Surowiecki alludes to subtly answer my inquiry through his explanation of tacit knowledge, which he defines as “knowledge that can’t be easily summarized or conveyed to others, because it is specific to a particular place or job or experience” (71).

What we fail to realize is the positive results of practicing decentralization has played a huge part in society even though we are a society that is deeply rooted in the idea that we should “chase the expert”. I believe that once we begin to realize just how effective the wisdom of crowds is, we will be able to get satisfactory estimates as far as gathering intelligence for problems ranging from small businesses to impending attacks on the US. According to Surowiecki, the reason why this aggregated knowledge is successful is because us as humans are “boundedly rational”- there is no single individual who has all the answers, but everybody has enough information to find the answers.

There are three types of problems that Suroweicki in which collective intelligence is an effective approach. The first of the three is cognitive problems. Cognitive problems have definite solutions, and although they may not have one right answer, but has “answers [that are] certainly better than others”. Second type of problems are coordination problems. “Coordination problems require members of a group to figure out how to coordinate their behavior with each other, knowing that everyone else is trying to do the same”. The third and final type of problem is known as a cooperation problem. This type of problem is exactly as it sounds- getting individuals who have differences of opinion and interests to work with one another.