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Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge | 
 enlarge | Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $4.71
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Rating:  14 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: annotated edition
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 0195189280
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4833
EAN: 9780195189285
Publication Date: August 24, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The rise of the "information society" offers not only considerable peril but also great promise. Beset from all sides by a never-ending barrage of media, how can we ensure that the most accurate information emerges and is heeded? In this book, Cass R. Sunstein develops a deeply optimistic understanding of the human potential to pool information, and to use that knowledge to improve our lives.
In an age of information overload, it is easy to fall back on our own prejudices and insulate ourselves with comforting opinions that reaffirm our core beliefs. Crowds quickly become mobs. The justification for the Iraq war, the collapse of Enron, the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia--all of these resulted from decisions made by leaders and groups trapped in "information cocoons," shielded from information at odds with their preconceptions. How can leaders and ordinary people challenge insular decision making and gain access to the sum of human knowledge?
Stunning new ways to share and aggregate information, many Internet-based, are helping companies, schools, governments, and individuals not only to acquire, but also to create, ever-growing bodies of accurate knowledge. Through a ceaseless flurry of self-correcting exchanges, wikis, covering everything from politics and business plans to sports and science fiction subcultures, amass--and refine--information. Open-source software enables large numbers of people to participate in technological development. Prediction markets aggregate information in a way that allows companies, ranging from computer manufacturers to Hollywood studios, to make better decisions about product launches and office openings. Sunstein shows how people can assimilate aggregated information without succumbing to the dangers of the herd mentality--and when and why the new aggregation techniques are so astoundingly accurate.
In a world where opinion and anecdote increasingly compete on equal footing with hard evidence, the on-line effort of many minds coming together might well provide the best path to infotopia.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
 "Kluge" for groups January 13, 2010
Matthew Sullivan (Portland, ME)
this book, as its subtitle indicates, is about the production of knowledge by many minds. but the book is less about the fact that many minds produce knowledge than about the ways in which information that is dispersed among many minds can be accessed and the conditions under which those varying methods work best. under discussion are surveys/polls, deliberation, markets, wikis, open source software, and blogs.
so, for instance, he starts off the book talking about the surprising ways in which large groups of people can outperform individuals when answers are averaged out. often the average answer -- when guessing the weight of some object, when trying to correlate body weight with gender -- is not only better than the best individual answer, but also better than what a supposed expert can offer. to be sure, aggregating information like this only works under specific conditions, say, when it is reasonable to presume that people might have a general idea about something. it would be useless to rely on the statistical responses of people for information not privy to most people, say, the year of some lesser known historical event or the name of someone's pet (unless that someone is famous, maybe).
the reason that this works, Sunstein explains, is due to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which states that the probability of arriving at a correct answer increases as the size of the group increases provided that there is greater than a 50% chance that people will arrive at a correct answer. the more people you have, the closer you approach to 100%. this is the reason why "ask the audience" usually works well in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? -- because there's a decent chance that some people know the answer, or at least can correctly rule out false answers. in these types of situations, it is beneficial to rely on the responses of a large group of people (as large as possible, in fact) to increase the chances of arriving at the correct answer.
the flip side of this math, however, is that if people have less than a 50% chance of knowing the correct answer -- again, when asking about information not widely disseminated -- the probability of arriving at the correct responses approaches 0% as the group increases. so clearly this isn't always (or even often) the best way of arriving at the truth.
the second method under review is deliberation. Sunsstein is open about giving deliberation a bad rap here not because it is entirely inefficient, but because it is so often assumed to be the ideal way of accessing dispersed information and thus the truth. deliberation lies at the heart of many practices in this country, from trials by jury to our deliberative democracy. the problem with deliberation, in short, is that it doesn't work very well. Sunstein offers a number of reasons for this, owing to some of the natural shortcomings of the human mind (some familiar terrain after reading Kluge) and to particular behavioral phenomena in group settings, such as the general "groupthink" idea, along with informational cascades (when people factor into their responses the likelihood that other people, who may hold a different opinion, would be wrong and so answer or vote not purely on the basis of information but on what everyone else appears to know as well) and the many pressures on individuals to preserve group harmony (or their own status) by not offering information they may have that goes against the conventional group wisdom. in experiments, people also tend to accord more authority to people in higher positions (including class, gender, and race -- even if those social statuses are irrelevant to the immediate context) and to ignore others, regardless of the value of the information.
in one particularly illuminating example, the author discusses an experiment in which individuals of a group are asked to vote for candidates in an imaginary election. the experiment is set up in such a way that Candidate A is clearly the most fit choice for the position. when group members are all given about 2/3 of the relevant information for the candidates, the deliberation usually results in the correct choice of Candidate A (a statistical improvement over the initial poll of individuals -- so here, deliberation helped). however, when the members are all given 2/3 of the information about the other candidates, and the information about Candidate A is dispersed among individual members (even if the total information is more than in the previous scenario), the groups fail to access the relevant information contained by some of its members. as a result, they end up choosing one of the demonstrably inferior candidates. moreover, the percentage of votes for Candidate A fell after deliberation. why? because the information favoring the wrong candidate is that which is held by all the members -- a phenomenon aptly called "the common knowledge effect."
the major concern here is that deliberation groups often fail to access the relevant information held by some of its members because of the tendency to favor (and focus on) information shared by all rather than on individual perspectives, even when there was no evident (or stronger than usual) "status" issues or instances of social pressure on conforming to group opinion (indeed, there was no group opinion until the hypothetical information was given out). in other experiments, the success of deliberation groups was also dependent on whether the group members were "primed" to think that arriving at the correct answer was important, as opposed to priming them for getting along. this is cold comfort when thinking of juries and governmental deliberation.
this is not to say, however, that deliberation never works -- obviously it worked in the first part of the experiment. indeed, deliberation groups can perform as well as their best member, and sometimes they can even outperform their best member when pieces of relevant information are dispersed and the information, together, helps the group arrive at the correct answer. but deliberation is best limited to instances when an answer is readily available (like problem solving) or "eureka" problems -- when the correct answer can be identified by all as soon as it is made apparent. on more ambiguous matter -- say on social or moral issues, or anything involving ideology of whatever sort -- deliberation groups are fairly terrible, often resulting in the amplification of previous biases (a well-documented event, familiar to anyone who's ever been in a chat room or on a message board -- or even among a group of like-minded friends, really).
Sunstein then moves on to markets -- prediction markets, more specifically. on the general level, the author discusses why online review sites (of movies, restaurants, products, etc.) have worked so well on the principle of a market and the establishing of a "price" of a particular commodity. but what is most interesting is his discussion of more recent developments of prediction markets in which people place value (and trade stock) on the likelihood of a certain outcome -- say, the winners of Oscars or the results of a political election. surprisingly, these "markets" have often (but not always) outperformed even the best experts in their predictions. the reasons why these markets work is that they provide an incentive for people with good information to put their money where their mouth is, resulting in predictions made by people who, in theory at least, have relevant information. if you are concerned, as the author is, with how we most efficiently go about accessing widely dispersed information in society, then markets are often an excellent way of bypassing some of the social pressures and dynamics of deliberation groups. these don't always have to be (indeed, they often aren't) open to the public and so can limit the predictions and trading to the relevant individuals. so far, these types of markets have proved excellent within individual companies (e.g., Google and HP) at predicting what products will be the most successful or when a new product or program will be ready for distribution. this new approach undermines conventional wisdom of a board of big wigs -- who couldn't possibly have access to all of the relevant information possessed by all the employees -- making the decision from the top down.
to keep the rest of this brief(er), Sunstein then moves on to the various Web 2.0 developments in social media and information aggregation -- including wikis, open source software, and blogs -- and discusses their relative merits, as well as causes for concern. as it turns out, unmediated forums for the sharing and refining of information have proved more effective than many feared. that is not to say there are not problems with, say, wikis -- indeed, Wikipedia is far better on some topics than others, and even then usually as a general guide, not the end-all authority -- or blogs -- here we can find some pretty terrible groupthink behavior, along with more than generous helpings of rubbish -- but overall, they are very effective in ensuring that dispersed information sees the figurative light of day. in fact, Sunstein discusses a few instances where information shared online by bloggers helped to correct statements made by political candidates (leading to apologies) or to debunk a phony document (leading Dan Rather to apologize and retire).
the book ends with a few discussions about the situations in which the various methods work best and a few suggestions about how groups and organizations can best make use of them.
overall, this is a very interesting book and fascinating information. unfortunately, for even such a short book (225 pages), it was more repetitive than necessary and could have benefited from more individual case studies. also, while I am tempted to say that this book is to groups what Gary Marcus' Kluge is for the individual mind, this book is not nearly as entertaining and engaging as Marcus', which is unfortunate because it certainly had the potential to be as captivating and perhaps even more relevant.
 Wonderful Discussion about Discussions December 27, 2009
Shi-jen Feng
The author explained how conclusions are generated in different discussion situations. It tells the readers that conclusions are not always the thoughts of the majority. Mass intelligence is not always trust-worthy. This book is a must for people interested in cyber psychology, management, marketing, and media.
 This Book was a waste of money November 29, 2009
ironside99 (Chicago, Illinois United States)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I understand why colleges make you buy this leftist stuff, but come on the book is dull boring and content well not my style or the class we attended. Why do publishers agree to publish this kind of stuff?
reverse query April 28, 2009
L. Appleton (Moon Base: Foxtrot)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I think a better question than "how many minds produce knowledge" is "how many knowledge produce minds"? If we use knowledge to create minds we'd all be better off because we'd have cyborgs to do our laundry and we wouldn't have to pay people to clean our yards. and if these cyborgs ran off fusion powered reactors we could charge them up for weeks with spit or urine. so you'd really be killing several birds with one kidney stone. (putting to the side for the moment the ethical issues of having humanoid cyborgs see you naked in all your pallid glory.)
Discussion of information sharing and collective thought March 16, 2009
Rolf Dobelli (Switzerland)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In this delightful book, Cass R. Sunstein offers a cogent, compact and gently witty discussion of information sharing. His explanations of how different knowledge-aggregation processes work are extremely useful. They range from the theoretical (laying out the philosophical structures underpinning deliberation) to the practical (offering focused and specific suggestions for improvement). This certainly isn't the first book on how groups create knowledge - thinkers have rushed to make sense of the new possibilities that information technology presents. It is, however, one of the more quietly critical approaches, one that debunks extreme claims, points out the dangers that balance the often-trumpeted benefits and shares first-hand experiences. Sunstein is an enthusiast for certain types of collective information processing, but he is far from naïve. getAbstract recommends this book to managers interested in improving organizational decision making.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
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