Ah. Another book arrived in the mail today. This one goes straight to the top of the Pile:
Posted by DeLong at June 11, 2004 10:25 AM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postJames Surowiecki (2004), The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday: 0385503865).
Listening to all the Reagan worship going on right now I just pulled off the shelf that other book about crowds:
Extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds by Charles McKay .
hey, maybe james will post! hi james! quit lurking!
Posted by: c. on June 11, 2004 11:10 AM"Piling" on? Maybe. But:
I don't THINK so...
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WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTROUS DECISIONS?: JARED DIAMOND
Education is supposed to be about teachers imparting knowledge to students. As every teacher knows, though, if you have a good group of students, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their supposed teachers and challenging their assumptions. That's an experience that I've been through in the last couple of months, when for the first time in my academic career I gave a course to undergraduates, highly motivated UCLA undergraduates, on collapses of societies. Why is it that some societies in the past have collapsed while others have not? I was discussing famous collapses such as those of the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest, Classic Maya civilization in the Yucatan, Easter Island society in the Pacific, Angkor Wat in southeast Asia, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Fertile Crescent societies, and Harappan Indus Valley societies. These are all societies that we've realized, from archaeological discoveries in the last 20 years, hammered away at their own environments and destroyed themselves in part by undermining the environmental resources on which they depended....
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge114.html
Posted by: Mike on June 11, 2004 11:28 AMI look forward to reading this also, but haven't yet.
But here is my prediction (hey, comments are worth what you pay for them). Surowiecki recognizes that crowds work best when the individuals in them make decisions independently (to avoid herding and other externalities). By publishing his book, Surowiecki is encouraging people to watch crowds, thereby breaking down exactly that quality of independence that gives them their "wisdom". A self-unfulfilling prophecy.
Posted by: Tom Slee on June 11, 2004 11:49 AMI refuse as a matter of principle to read a book which doesn't have an index.
Posted by: Fabio Lanzoni on June 11, 2004 12:00 PMI refuse as a matter of principle to read a book (or argue with a person) which doesn't have an appendix.
Posted by: The Real Brian on June 11, 2004 12:06 PMSounds like a great book. Surowiecki's New Yorker columns are uniformly excellent and enlightening, and he manages to be absolutely scathing about Bush without sounding like Paul Krugman.
Posted by: Tom Hilton on June 11, 2004 12:45 PMNew discipline: Social semantics.
Take Arrow's impossibility theorem, change it word for word so that:
(a) Instead of social alternatives one has propositions (facts, opinions, theorems, etc)
(b) Instead of a preference ordering for social alternatives, one has an implication structure (or weaker still a probability structure)
The assumptions of arrow's theorem seem to hold (I guess -- I haven't carefully thought about what Pareto optimality means). Does that mean that we need a dictator to dictate the truth?
Posted by: CSTAR on June 11, 2004 02:01 PM"The assumptions of arrow's theorem seem to hold":
No, they donīt. Goodman and Markowitz wrote in 1952: "(...) we argue that the Arrow postulates are not as plausible as they at first appear. (...) Suppose you intended to serve refreshments to two friends. You could serve them either coffee or tea but not both; A preferred coffee, B preferred tea. It seems clear that a symmetric ("democratic") welfare function would rank coffee and tea equally. (...)"
Sen discussed that paper in "Collective choice and social welfare", but didnīt really do justice to it. Ultimately, someone will raise the issue again and show how awkward the assumption of the "independence of irrelevant alternatives" is.
Notice that I was referring only to the implication structure (or lattice structure) of individual beiliefs. Some of those lattice structures may be logically inconsistent. What you argue is that the domain of the social semantic function should be smaller. That is another question entirely.
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