Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
Infotopia is an excellent read on topics concerning the role of Wikis, Prediction Markets, Blogs, and Open Source Software in societal-scale collective intelligence.
Personally, the most interesting aspect of the book is the author’s review of the Condorcet’s Jury Theorem.
“The Jury Theorem’s importance lies in its demonstration that groups are likely to do better than individuals, and large groups better than small ones, if majority rule is used and if each person is more likely than not to be correct.”
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
However, the dark side of the Jury Theorem is that if the individual members have a less than a fifty-percent chance of arriving at the correct decision individually, then as the voting population increases, the probability of the group arriving at the correct decision approaches 0.
Mini-Review by Marko A. Rodriguez
