Summary of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. pitted group intelligence against individual intelligence, and every week, group intelligence won. The results would never stand up to scientific scrutiny, but it is hard to resist the thought that the success of the Millionaire audience was a modern example of the same phenomenon that Francis Galton saw a century ago. #2 The group intelligence demonstrated by the jelly-beans-in-the-jar experiment is not the same for every single group. In many cases, there will be a few people who do better than the group, which is a good thing since it gives people reason to keep participating. #3 The judgment of crowds is good in laboratory settings and classrooms, but what happens in the real world. #4 The stock market is, at least in theory, a machine for calculating the present value of all the free cash flow a company will earn in the future. The steep decline in Thiokol’s stock price, compared with the slight declines in the stock prices of its competitors, was an unmistakable sign that investors believed that Thiokol was responsible for the Challenger disaster.