The wisdom (or lack of) crowds
James Surowieki giving an interesting presentation on group behaviour - how and why we behave the way we do - and why groups of mixed ability can actually outperform those of consistently high ability: ‘Even if the less intelligent ones know less, what they know is different. So diversity is really central, and therefore, some measure of randomness is useful.’
On exposure to huge swathes of information vs having seclusion and space to think: ‘whether it’s isolation or cacophony - both things are good. The key thing to avoid is this extensively, tightly networked model’.

December 17th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
Excellent podcast, thanks for the heads up