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.









