Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge | 
 enlarge | Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 24904
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
ASIN: 0195340671
Publication Date: July 7, 2008
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| Editorial Reviews:
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...
 Very Enlightening! October 13, 2008
The book provides an excellent overview of various methods for knowledge aggregation and group collaboration, particularly statistical averaging, deliberation, prediction markets, wikis, open source projects, and blogs.
Sunstein provides a penetrating and balanced analysis of both the potential benefits and risks of each form of aggregation/collaboration, thus giving us some guidance on when to use (and not use) each method, and how to do it more effectively. I wish the book had provided clear summaries of that guidance, but it's still clear enough as is.
Sunstein is definitely a great writer. The result is a book which is easy and enjoyable to read, and the pages tend to fly by despite much of the material being a bit technical.
This book has started me thinking in new ways about some important issues, and it's not often that a book comes along which can do that. This is truly a book for our times, and is on the cutting edge on several fronts.
Very highly recommended for anyone who needs to, or wants to, deal with other people in order to get things done - in other words, everyone!
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.
Mind opening December 1, 2007
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
After reading Linked, and Freakonomics, this is helping me chase down yet more ideas about how the underlying networks on which society functions work. Or don't work.
very useful little book November 15, 2007
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
thought provoking useful book with wide application. i am very interested in social media & how to use vehicles such as blogs & wikis.
also, very insightful and counterintuitive info about group processes, decision-making ect
written in a simple clear way
 Read the 1/5 about deliberation, leave the rest. June 13, 2007
18 out of 21 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.
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