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Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge | 
| Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $10.85
You Save: $5.10 (32%)
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 17456
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0195340671
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9780195340679
Publication Date: July 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
As the dire history of planned economies highlights, small well-informed groups of people will often make far worse decisions than large numbers of people, acting independently, would make. In Infotopia, Cass Sunstein looks at the "wisdom of the many"--particularly as seen on today's Internet--illuminating many new ways of collecting and evaluating information and making effective decisions.
Sunstein shows how the on-line efforts of many people coming together help companies, schools, governments, and individuals to amass ever-growing bodies of accurate knowledge. He describes for instance how Wikipedia, through an endless flurry of self-correcting exchanges, collects information on everything from politics and business to science fiction. Open-source software--which licenses programmers to use, change, and improve the software--taps the power of large numbers of people to spur technological development. And prediction markets--such as the famous Iowa Electronic Market, where people bet real money on the outcome of local and national elections--collect information in a way that allows companies, ranging from computer makers to Hollywood studios, to make better decisions about the future. Sunstein reveals why these revolutionary new methods are so astoundingly accurate and he also shows how people can take advantage of "the wisdom of the many" without succumbing to the dangers of herd mentality.
"Sunstein, one of the biggest of America's internet big thinkers, has written an intriguing new book in which he argues that Hayek's insights about the genius of markets are equally true of the internet."
--Patti Waldmeir, Financial Times
"This extraordinary work synthesizes the latest in how we know, with the latest in what the web has become, to map more compellingly than any other book the promise and risk of the information society."
--Lawrence Lessig, author of Free Culture and The Future of Ideas
"Vivid, readable, and informativea show-me-the-money guide to what soars and what stumbles from the stable of Internet dreams."
--Jedediah Purdy, American Prospect
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
Complements Wikinomics, Solid but Incomplete January 17, 2007
35 out of 37 found this review helpful
I was initially disappointed, but adjusted my expectations when I reminded myself that the author is at root a lawyer. The bottom line on this book is that it provided a very educated and well-footnoted discourse the nature and prospects for group deliberation, but there are three *huge* missing pieces:
1) Education as the necessary continuous foundation for deliberation
2) Collective Intelligence as an emerging discipline (see the Innovators spread sheet at Earth Intelligence Network); and
3) No reference to Serious Games/Games for Change or budgets as a foundation for planning the future rather than predicting it.
In the general overview the author discusses information cocoons (self-segregation and myopia) and information influences/social pressures that can repress free thinking and sharing.
The four big problems that he finds in the history of deliberation are amplifying errors; hidden profiles & favoring common or "familiar" knowledge; cascades & polarization; and negative reinforements from being within a narrow group.
Today I am missing a meeting on Predictive Markets in DC (AEI-Brookings) and while I regret that, I have thoroughly enjoyed the author's deep look at Prediction Markets, with special reference to Google and Microsoft use of these internally. This book, at a minimum, provides the very best overview of prediction markets that I have come across. At the end of the book is an appendix listing 18 specific predictions markets with their URLs.
The author goes on to provide an overview of the Wiki world, and is generally very kind to Jimbo Wales and Wikipedia, and less focused on the many altneratives and enhancements of the open Wiki. It would have been helpful here to have some insights for the general reader on Doug Englebart's Open Hypertextdocument System (OHS) and Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language (IEML), both of which may well leave the mob-like open wiki's in the dust.
Worthy of note: Soar Technology is quoted as saying that Wikis cut project development time in half.
The book draws to a close with further discussion of the challenges of self-segregation, the options for aggregating views and knowledge and for encouraging feedback, and the urgency of finding incentives to induce full disclosure and full participation from all who have something to contribute.
This book excels in its own narrowly-chosen domain, but it is isolated from the larger scheme of things including needed educational changes, the importance of belief systems as the objective of Intelligence and Information Operations (I2O), the role of Serious Games/Games for Change, and the considerable work that has been done by Collective Intelligence pioneers, who just held their first convergence conference call on 15 January 2007.
Final note: the author uses NASA and the Columbia disaster, and CIA and the Iraq disaster, as examples, but does not adequately discuss the pathologies of bureaucracy and the politicization of intelligence and space. As a former CIA employee who also reads a great deal, I can assert with confidence that CIA has no trouble aggregating all that it knew, including the reports of the 30 line crossers who went in and then came back to report there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction. CIA has two problems: 1) Dick Cheney refused to listen; and 2) George Tenet lacked the integrity to go public and go to Congress to challenge Dick Cheney's malicious and impeachable offenses against America (see my reviews of "VICE" and of "One Percent Doctrine" on Cheney, and my many reviews on the mistakes leading up to and within the Iraq war). See also my reviews of "Fog Facts" and "Lost History" and Gaddis' "The Landscape of History."
To end on an upbeat note, what I see in this book, and "Wikinomics" and "Collective Intelligence" and "Tao of Democracy" and my own "The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political," is a desperate need for Amazon to take on the task of aggregating books and building out from books to create social communities where all these books can be "seen" and "read" and "understood" as a whole. We remain fragmented in the production and dissemination of information, and consequently, in our own mind-sets and world-views. Time to change that, perhaps with Wiki-books that lock-down the original and then give free license to apply OHS linkages at the paragraph level, and unlimited wike build-outs. That's what I am in Seattle to discuss this week.
 Read the 1/5 about deliberation, leave the rest. June 13, 2007
17 out of 20 found this review helpful
In the 1960's, legal scholars discovered what the rest of us always knew: that pure legal scholarship is really, really boring. Law and economics demonstrated that a multidisciplinary approach could breath fresh life into the corpse of law. Then, suddenly, all the rock star law professors were interdisciplinarians. And along with this devaluation of pure legal thought came a general loss of intellectual rigor. By the 1990's, celebrity law professors were becoming like journalists with really good grades, each writing outside of his or her area of competence with an astonishing self-confidence. Richard Posner, who was on relatively solid ground in economics, crowned himself an expert on military intelligence. Lawrence Lessig wrote a whole series of books without any thesis or logical argument. And this new breed of scholar seemed to be in a race to publish as much as possible as quickly as possible, without regard for quality.
I have always thought that Cass Sunstein epitomizes the worst of this trend. He seems to rush a book into print every six months, and with each new work drifts further and further away from "law." But after hearing him on Russ Roberts' fantastic EconTalk podcast, I was genuinely dying to read this book. The topics chosen are all fascinating, and no one has really treated them all under one roof before.
The problem is that, once again, Sunstein has given short shrift to these topics. All of them, with the exception of group deliberation, has been covered better elsewhere. Where Sunstein is not stealing the limelight from people like Robin Hanson (prediction markets) he is rehashing the pop science books of people like James Surowieki (statistical group judgments).
The reason this book gets three stars instead of zero is that the material on bias in group deliberation is genuinely insightful and original. In brief: deliberative bodies make very poor decisions, due to a whole slew of biases and feedback loops. When Sunstein suggests that we reform deliberative bodies, generally, to incorporate anonymous voting and minority voices, he is offering something genuinely useful. (Interestingly, at one point in the podcast mentioned above, Sunstein all but admits that this was initiated as a book about deliberation and that the project was changed to incorporate the other topics in media res. This explains a lot.) Read it for the bits on deliberation, but be prepared to be bored and underwhelmed by large portions.
Like The Wisdom of Crowds without the hype July 18, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
There's a lot of overlap between James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds and Infotopia, but Infotopia is a good deal more balanced and careful to avoid exaggeration. This makes Infotopia less exciting but more likely to convince a thoughtful reader. It devotes a good deal of attention to conditions which make groups less wise than individuals as well as conditions where groups outperform the best individuals.
Infotopia is directed at people who know little about this subject. I found hardly any new insights in it, and few ideas that I disagreed with. Some of its comments will seem too obvious to be worth mentioning to anyone who uses the web much. It's slightly better than Wisdom of Crowds, but if you've already read Wisdom of Crowds you'll get little out of Infotopia.
 A thoughtful consideration May 24, 2007
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Of when and why these techniques (polling, prediction markets, blogs, wiki, FOSS) work -- and when they don't.
Despite the title this isn't a collection of breathless prose, but a thinking through of the underlying principles e.g., prediction markets don't work for supreme court justice picks because real information about the choice is highly concentrated.
Which is exactly the type of thought process that is necessary if you want to put one of these techniques to use.
Infotopia - January 9, 2007
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I have an interest in development of creative ideas and themes by small groups. I read this book to expand my knowledge.
On the high side, I was fascinated with the Jury Theorem and outcomes of statistical groups. I derived the formula on page 234 and played with different probabilties and group sizes to understand sensitivities. Lots of fun. I can see why political strategists would want to identify and slant a campaign to a (probably) small percentage of people to sway an election.
I was a little disappointed in the chapters about deliberations and problems in groups which seemed to apply to larger group sizes. Much seemed to be common sense not worthy of a lot of theoretical research - my personal interest is different. In my own career, I found that understanding personalities and agendas was extremely important because my arguments could then be tailored so others could best hear.
I played a prediction market game (MIT Technology Futures) for a while, but drifted away because I had no vested interest. Winning a TV set didn't turn me on. It seems to me that the prediction market must have real significance to succeed and be useful. If the emotions aren't there or are negative (eg. DOD predicting wars), it may not draw a large and informed crowd.
I am a casual user of Wikis and find Wikipedia useful especially in math and science. The soft stuff takes me a lot of time to understand writers' viewpoints, true also for blogs that I occasionally run across. That certainly stretches my critical thinking, but sometimes I don't want to think - I just want the answer or an answer from someone I trust.
Regarding the author's bottom line, I certainly agree that markets and democracy rest on the belief that many minds can be trusted. I would like to see the author make the jump from his theoretical world to that of real people working in small groups.
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