Customer comments on this selection.
 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.
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.
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
 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.
I added it to my syllabus immediately
I originally bought this book as a birthday present for my brother, a philosopher, and then immediately stole it from him. (I gave it back after I bought my own copy.) The book paints a frightening picture of how group processes can lead us very, very astray. In many ways, it reads as a sequel to his book on Punitive Damages, which documents frightening trends for experimental jury pools to assign harsher damages than the individual jurors planned to assign in pre-deliberation surveys.
I quickly added the chapters on group deliberation failures to the syllabus for my class on psychology and economics. My only trepidation was that I am also assigning sections of Punitive Damages and Laws of Fear, so there's now an entire unit on Cass Sunstein's work. But he does an excellent job of exploring in readable prose the societal consequences of psychological influences on choice. As such, his books offer a very accessible mirror into aspects of bounded rationality or heuristics & biases that we study in economics. I figure the marginal contribution of this book, in terms of class discussion and actual post-exam take-aways, exceed the contribution of a few more technical empirical papers.... At least, I hope that turns out to be the case!
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