OCDQ Blog

I highly recommend this excellent book. Before reading it, I admit that I believed crowds were incapable of wisdom and that the best decisions are based on the expert advice of carefully selected individuals.

However, this book wonderfully elucidates the folly of "chasing the expert" and explains the four conditions that characterize wise crowds: diversity of opinion, independent thinking, decentralization and aggregation.

The book is also balanced by examining the conditions (e.g. confirmation bias and groupthink) that can commonly undermine the wisdom of crowds. All and all, it is a wonderful discourse on both collective intelligence and collective ignorance with practical advice on how to achieve the former and avoid the latter.

I highly recommend this book. It explains that decision making is not a battle between rational analysis and irrational emotions.

Good decision making requires the flexibility to know when to rely on rationality and when to rely on emotions - and to always think about how you're thinking.

The book advocates paying attention to your inner disagreements, becoming a student of your own errors, and avoiding the trap of certainty.

You can never achieve perfection in your decision making, however with vigilance, you can avoid those mistakes that can be avoided.

Don't be discouraged by this book's title. This is an excellent book that you certainly shouldn't fear. It is a very interesting and thought provoking study that covers many scientific topics in an entirely approachable and occasionally entertaining way that helps bridge the gap between academics and daily life.

This is a great book for math geeks, especially lovers of statistics and probabilities. However, it is also a very approachable and entertaining book for non-geeks as well. Don't worry - it is NOT loaded with equations and formulas. It is a thought provoking and often extremely funny book.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It can be challenging at times, but in a good way. It contains very useful material on the important concepts of confirmation bias and narrative fallacy.

It offers excellent explanations about how our general tendency to oversimplify complexity and our lack of appreciation for the role that randomness plays in our lives, combines to makes us so poor at making predictions.