Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge | Cass R. Sunstein

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge | Cass R. Sunstein | Like The Wisdom of Crowds without the hype

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Infotopia: How Man...

	Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge Cass R. Sunstein Oxford University Press, USA, 2006 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The rise of the "information society" offers not only considerable peril but also great promise. Beset from all sides by a never-ending barrage of media, how can we ensure that the most accurate information emerges and is heeded? In this book, Cass R. Sunstein develops a deeply optimistic understanding of the human potential to pool information, and to use that knowledge to improve our lives.
In an age of information overload, it is easy to fall back on our own prejudices and insulate ourselves with comforting opinions that reaffirm our core beliefs. Crowds quickly become mobs. The justification for the Iraq war, the collapse of Enron, the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia--all of these resulted from decisions made by leaders and groups trapped in "information cocoons," shielded from information at odds with their preconceptions. How can leaders and ordinary people challenge insular decision making and gain access to the sum of human knowledge?
Stunning new ways to share and aggregate information, many Internet-based, are helping companies, schools, governments, and individuals not only to acquire, but also to create, ever-growing bodies of accurate knowledge. Through a ceaseless flurry of self-correcting exchanges, wikis, covering everything from politics and business plans to sports and science fiction subcultures, amass--and refine--information. Open-source software enables large numbers of people to participate in technological development. Prediction markets aggregate information in a way that allows companies, ranging from computer manufacturers to Hollywood studios, to make better decisions about product launches and office openings. Sunstein shows how people can assimilate aggregated information without succumbing to the dangers of the herd mentality--and when and why the new aggregation techniques are so astoundingly accurate.
In a world where opinion and anecdote increasingly compete on equal footing with hard evidence, the on-line effort of many minds coming together might well provide the best path to infotopia.

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Very Enlightening!

The book provides an excellent overview of various methods for knowledge aggregation and group collaboration, particularly statistical averaging, deliberation, prediction markets, wikis, open source projects, and blogs.

Sunstein provides a penetrating and balanced analysis of both the potential benefits and risks of each form of aggregation/collaboration, thus giving us some guidance on when to use (and not use) each method, and how to do it more effectively. I wish the book had provided clear summaries of that guidance, but it's still clear enough as is.

Sunstein is definitely a great writer. The result is a book which is easy and enjoyable to read, and the pages tend to fly by despite much of the material being a bit technical.

This book has started me thinking in new ways about some important issues, and it's not often that a book comes along which can do that. This is truly a book for our times, and is on the cutting edge on several fronts.

Very highly recommended for anyone who needs to, or wants to, deal with other people in order to get things done - in other words, everyone!

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Like The Wisdom of Crowds without the hype

There's a lot of overlap between James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds and Infotopia, but Infotopia is a good deal more balanced and careful to avoid exaggeration. This makes Infotopia less exciting but more likely to convince a thoughtful reader. It devotes a good deal of attention to conditions which make groups less wise than individuals as well as conditions where groups outperform the best individuals.
Infotopia is directed at people who know little about this subject. I found hardly any new insights in it, and few ideas that I disagreed with. Some of its comments will seem too obvious to be worth mentioning to anyone who uses the web much. It's slightly better than Wisdom of Crowds, but if you've already read Wisdom of Crowds you'll get little out of Infotopia.

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very useful little book

thought provoking useful book with wide application. i am very interested in social media & how to use vehicles such as blogs & wikis.

also, very insightful and counterintuitive info about group processes, decision-making ect

written in a simple clear way

Mind opening

After reading Linked, and Freakonomics, this is helping me chase down yet more ideas about how the underlying networks on which society functions work. Or don't work.

Read the 1/5 about deliberation, leave the rest.

In the 1960's, legal scholars discovered what the rest of us always knew: that pure legal scholarship is really, really boring. Law and economics demonstrated that a multidisciplinary approach could breath fresh life into the corpse of law. Then, suddenly, all the rock star law professors were interdisciplinarians. And along with this devaluation of pure legal thought came a general loss of intellectual rigor. By the 1990's, celebrity law professors were becoming like journalists with really good grades, each writing outside of his or her area of competence with an astonishing self-confidence. Richard Posner, who was on relatively solid ground in economics, crowned himself an expert on military intelligence. Lawrence Lessig wrote a whole series of books without any thesis or logical argument. And this new breed of scholar seemed to be in a race to publish as much as possible as quickly as possible, without regard for quality.

I have always thought that Cass Sunstein epitomizes the worst of this trend. He seems to rush a book into print every six months, and with each new work drifts further and further away from "law." But after hearing him on Russ Roberts' fantastic EconTalk podcast, I was genuinely dying to read this book. The topics chosen are all fascinating, and no one has really treated them all under one roof before.

The problem is that, once again, Sunstein has given short shrift to these topics. All of them, with the exception of group deliberation, has been covered better elsewhere. Where Sunstein is not stealing the limelight from people like Robin Hanson (prediction markets) he is rehashing the pop science books of people like James Surowieki (statistical group judgments).

The reason this book gets three stars instead of zero is that the material on bias in group deliberation is genuinely insightful and original. In brief: deliberative bodies make very poor decisions, due to a whole slew of biases and feedback loops. When Sunstein suggests that we reform deliberative bodies, generally, to incorporate anonymous voting and minority voices, he is offering something genuinely useful. (Interestingly, at one point in the podcast mentioned above, Sunstein all but admits that this was initiated as a book about deliberation and that the project was changed to incorporate the other topics in media res. This explains a lot.) Read it for the bits on deliberation, but be prepared to be bored and underwhelmed by large portions.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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