The visionary debunker of lone visionaries thinks collective
intelligence can take on global crises, but not Platonic truth
Emily Gordon interviews The New Yorker's James Surowiecki, author of "The Wisdom of Crowds"
I met James Surowiecki in the late 1990s, when he was a freelance writer contributing to a diversity of publications, including Newsday's book section, where I was his editor. He now writes The New Yorker's weekly business column, "The Financial Page," which ranges widely over national and international business news and consumer trends and provides analysis of all of the above. His book "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations" (Random House, 2004) was a best seller; perhaps even more relevantly, the title phrase -- a play on Charles Mackay's 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" -- has become a familiar part of the lexicon.
Emily Gordon: Popular blogs, in theory, represent the will of the people, no matter how individually flavored they may be, and as we know, mass media, television and movie studios, and politicians are paying more and more attention to them. Does this represent a welcome acknowledgment of the wisdom of crowds, or are we simply creating and validating more "experts" who may or may not be true embodiments of the idea that the human sum is greater than its parts?
James Surowiecki: I'm glad that people in positions of power are paying more attention to what audiences, voters, etc., are really saying, and I think the boom in the number and quality of blogs is unquestionably a good thing. But I think it's important to distinguish between the rise to prominence of individual bloggers and the wisdom of crowds. You only get real collective wisdom when you have some way of aggregating lots of different individual opinions to produce a collective judgment -- the way at the race track all of the bets individual bettors make are put together to set the odds, or the way a voting system works. So while having some new voices get attention (the way the most famous bloggers do) is nice, it's a long way from realizing the full potential of the Net. We need more ways to put together the opinions of the blogosphere to get a picture of what people really think.
