Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

by Cass R. Sunstein

The rise of the "information society" offers not only considerable peril but also great promise. Beset from all sides by a never-ending barrage of media, how can we ensure that the most accurate information emerges and is heeded? In this book, Cass R. Sunstein develops a deeply optimistic understanding of the human potential to pool information, and to use that knowledge to improve our lives.

In an age of information overload, it is easy to fall back on our own prejudices and insulate ourselves with comforting opinions that reaffirm our core beliefs. Crowds quickly become mobs. The justification for the Iraq war, the collapse of Enron, the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia--all of these resulted from decisions made by leaders and groups trapped in "information cocoons," shielded from information at odds with their preconceptions. How can leaders and ordinary people challenge insular decision making and gain access to the sum of human knowledge?

Stunning new ways to share and aggregate information, many Internet-based, are helping companies, schools, governments, and individuals not only to acquire, but also to create, ever-growing bodies of accurate knowledge. Through a ceaseless flurry of self-correcting exchanges, wikis, covering everything from politics and business plans to sports and science fiction subcultures, amass--and refine--information. Open-source software enables large numbers of people to participate in technological development. Prediction markets aggregate information in a way that allows companies, ranging from computer manufacturers to Hollywood studios, to make better decisions about product launches and office openings. Sunstein shows how people can assimilate aggregated information without succumbing to the dangers of the herd mentality--and when and why the new aggregation techniques are so astoundingly accurate.

In a world where opinion and anecdote increasingly compete on equal footing with hard evidence, the on-line effort of many minds coming together might well provide the best path to infotopia.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Business, Technology, Science, Sociology, Academic

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Cass R. Sunstein is an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics, who currently is the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. For 27 years, Sunstein taught at the University of Chicago Law School, where he continues to teach as the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor. Sunstein is currently Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he is on leave while working in the Obama administration.

Reviews

[Kirk Battle · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of this stuff is now severely outdated or woefully wrong. I'll just summarize the most useful part:

Condorcet Jury Theorem: the probability of a correct answer by a majority of the group increases toward 100 percent as the size of the group increased. They key point is that groups will do better than individuals, and big groups better than littles ones, so long as two conditions are met: Majority rule is used, and each person is more likely than not to be correct. Some fun caveats to this stuff:

1) Group don’t generally arrive at the truth unless the correct view has a lot of support within the group before people start to talk. If this is not the case, the group will arrive at the truth only on questions for which the correct answer, once announced, is clearly right, and appears clearly right to everyone.

2) Many minds often fail to aggregate information. Relevant knowledge is often ignored or downplayed, above all because information known in advance by all or most group members has a far greater role than information that is known only by one or a few group members.

3) In tasks where the right answer cannot easily be shown to be correct, groups tend to be more biased than individuals – except when the individual bias is very weak, or so strong that it cannot be further amplified!

The other day I saw this video about Gabe Newell telling some kid in Australia his mod sucked and he explains that at Valve, experienced players are problematic for playtesting. They tend to be able to work around your game design flaws. New users are preferred because they will struggle a lot more with fundamental issues in the level like lighting, where to go, visual clues, etc.

It's a funny overlap to me because while the theorum has a lot of limited uses in real life, in game design you can just rig it up so there is a right answer and make that very clear to people. Which raises the question of whether or not you can call what you're producing a "correct" answer when everything is artificial. The theorum is about market efficiencies and guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar, that kind of shit. As I play Dark Souls and watch the ghosts of various players dick around in often lethal ways, I wonder if the flaw in Valve's design process is not in the validity, but the obsession with having player's win at all.

[Bruce · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here is Cass R. Sunstein in a Wired spirit bloviating about five different models of decision-making or intelligence (as in fact-finding and analysis): statistical treatment of poll data, deliberation (your basic committee), wikis, blogs, and prediction markets. He offers a variety of examples of each, cites study results analyzing their respective success rates and failure conditions, and concludes by rehashing his conclusions for the nth time. Only a law professor could turn 6 pages of content into a book without providing the additional material necessary to fill out the pages.

Fortunately, the paperback version (which I read) begins with these 6 pages. So read the preface. It's terrific. Makes you think. Great stuff. It's why I give this book 2 stars... pity the preface short-changes his later consideration of prediction markets, but since he never explains how the 15% of traders who drive markets' accuracy succeed in correctly monetizing their information or identifies the limits of such markets' applicability perhaps it's just as well. You might as well stop at the table of contents, though. Continuing with the book proper is like spending a week listening to a record skipping.

[Qwelian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread this as a supplement to an article I’m doing on the maturity of the web. The first time I read this I got fields experts are the best at acting on information in their field. So much so that even marginally (+51%) informed groups will achieve correctness. But groups are likely to be motivated by group knowledge so it’s hard to move out of the condercet jury theory pitfalls, see CJT and sampling competence.

On average more competence means better decision making. Throw in some moderation and some blogs and we got the internet hive mind soon to be backed by some federated decision making process that can use open source mmri exchanges to pick out idk. Whatever doctors might pick out from that. Did the liberals make medical red tape???


That part is all I really got from the second read. It’s nice. He spends a good bit of time discussing CJT, open source technology, blogs, and prediction markets. I’m not sure if it got anywhere. Like yeah, something something PMs and collective decision making bc CJT and blogs and open source make knowledge actionable.

I guess that’s somewhere. Idk maybe post GPT4 this seems underwhelming. I do think a topologically based networking system would be more actionable than the one we have and so does TimBl. So yeah clearly this is good but does the book really get anywhere?? Ehhh. Not really.

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is great for understanding group psychology and how it applies to communication and collaboration such as predictive markets, deliberation, wikis, open-source software, blogs, et al.

The cons of such collaboration being groupthink, polarization, hidden profiles, and information cocoons. The pros being Condorcet Jury theorem, Hayek theorem, and information aggregation.

[Adrian Halpert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was quite a good analysis of how information is produced, understood and acted upon in various types of group settings. It's really interesting to think that the degree which we produce and understand new information in influenced by our social settings; that a highly group oriented environment can stifle and distort knowledge while much looser social settings can potentially produce more, and more accurate, information. This was written in 2006, in the early days of the internet and I really enjoyed how he applied this analysis to online production of information, which in theory gives individuals an opportunity to make themselves heard, unrestricted by group dynamics.
Looking back on this thesis in 2020, it's interesting to see how this has been playing out, with people being able to access and coordinate information in ways they never could before in human history on one hand, but also the explosion of misinformation and trolling on the other. It would be really interesting to see a second part to this study.
Definitely worth a read, but it does get a bit repetitive about mid-way through.
4/5 Stars

[Cold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Infotopia aka against deliberation.

The book's starting assumption goes "civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess" (Hayek). Sunstein then identifies and evaluates different ways to aggregate information. The founding fathers believed in deliberation but dispersed information is ignored due to informational influences and social pressures. Instead, we might look to prediction markets and open source projects (e.g wikis and software). The blogosphere stuff feels dated.

[Lorenzo Barberis Canonico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sunstein has been cited by Barack Obama as a major influence in how he sees government, so I am going through his books because they offer an alternative take to the binary political literature we see these days. This book in particular deals with collective intelligence, so it obviously speaks to me because of my research, by he frames everything from a political science perspective which is why it was interesting. It’s easy to get carried away with high-level and abstract conversations about prediction markets and lose sight of the many valuable insights collective intelligence can give us on how to build a healthy political discourse.

[Gökhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contained some really helpful insights in how groups come to right or wrong answers and make right or wrong decisions. Although some parts like the blogs might feel outdated, the theories are still valid in our current time.

The platforms we engage in deliberation change but we are still able to make the same mistakes in groups which prevent us from achieving the truth and right decisions. This book will help you understand how many minds produce knowledge but also which circumstances and decisions lead to that particular knowledge.

[John Ohno · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, if dense, survey of mechanisms of group consensus-seeking. My only major complaint is that Sunstein comes off as overly rosy on markets & fails to mention their biggest (and seemingly most obvious) problems as predictive mechanisms, even as many of the synthetic prediction markets he describes avoid these problems (often as ways of side-stepping anti-gambling laws).

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.americanprogress.org/issue...

Have you had your tonsils removed? Did you ever eat an order of freedom fries? Has your government ever invaded a country on the mistaken impression that it had weapons of mass destruction? If you answered yes, you may have fallen victim to one of the dozens of follies Cass Sunstein says can emerge in group decision-making. In his new book Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, Sunstein explores how people can gather accurate information from groups, censuring traditional means of gathering information for their failures and viewing new methods—wikis, open source methods, prediction markets, and blogs—with cautious optimism. In the end, he comes to a few questionable conclusions, especially about blogs, but it’s a valuable read for people interested in the future of politics and business.

For a lesson in the flaws of group decision-making, take tonsillectomy. Sunstein cites a New England Journal of Medicine article exploring “bandwagon diseases,” in which doctors become convinced that certain symptoms ought to be interpreted and treated in a particular way. The tonsillectomy (and the ensuing ice cream diet) seems “to have been adopted initially based on weak information,” the article notes. And Sunstein thinks he’s found the culprit: “information cascades”—the effect, something like a vicious rumor, of a fact or factoid that makes its rounds and gains outsized influence over groups. If only doctors had all of the information available when the tonsil procedure was catching on, they might not have subjected so many children to possibly unnecessary surgery.

It’s the folly of group decision-making with partial information that drives Sunstein to look for new solutions. You might think that simply taking a vote could get all the information in the right place. This might have worked for medical researchers and tonsillectomy, but there’s a catch. Sunstein, a law professor at University of Chicago, turns to something called the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which states in part that in a jury, the probability that the right decision will be reached increases with the size of the jury, but only if the average juror is more likely than not to come up with the right decision on his or her own. If members of a jury are individually less than 50 percent likely get the right answer, then their deliberation magnifies the problem. Groups like these are wrong, Sunstein says, because of prejudices (freedom fries, anyone?), confusion, and incompetence.

Full review at link above.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discussion of information sharing and collective thought

In this delightful book, Cass R. Sunstein offers a cogent, compact and gently witty discussion of information sharing. His explanations of how different knowledge-aggregation processes work are extremely useful. They range from the theoretical (laying out the philosophical structures underpinning deliberation) to the practical (offering focused and specific suggestions for improvement). This certainly isn’t the first book on how groups create knowledge – thinkers have rushed to make sense of the new possibilities that information technology presents. It is, however, one of the more quietly critical approaches, one that debunks extreme claims, points out the dangers that balance the often-trumpeted benefits and shares first-hand experiences. Sunstein is an enthusiast for certain types of collective information processing, but he is far from naïve. getAbstract recommends this book to managers interested in improving organizational decision making.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Infotopia dealt with how groups make decisions and have a collective knowledge. It spoke to a collection of recent changes that in this field: wikis, blogs, predictive markets, and the open source movement. While I am already fairly well versed on these changes I still found this section to be a good overview and fairly interesting.

For me, the most interesting part of the book was the first 75%, which dealt with the common ways groups make decisions and have collective knowledge and the strengths, weaknesses, and pratfalls of each. These ways included panels of experts, discussion groups, and anonymous voting, and taking the average result of a group. Furthermore, the technologies and uses of the internet mentioned above were applied, compared and contrasted to these ways, which made for an interesting take on the movements that are occurring primarily on the internet.

[Lance Cahill · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of how information is aggregated for decision-making purposes. While Sunstein gushes about prediction markets, I have always been skeptical given past experience. They tend to reflect CW and not dispersed information aggregated in imputed probabilities - and the factors which make asset markets possibly information ally inefficient easily applies to prediction markets. At various times Sunstein refers to information cascades in group decision making processes but fails to discuss Bayes' theorem - an unfortunate omission for the reader. Overall, a fun (if at times repetitive) read.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting discussion of how groups make bad decisions. It is a relatively quick read, and you have to skip over some of the Chicago wackiness, but there is a lot there. Highly recommended for the student of information management and the web 2.0 crowd. It should inform all our ideas about the design of systems that allow people to collaborate on decisions, ratings, or the creation of other public goods. Designed poorly, these system will behave badly for reasons Sunstein explores.
The 4 stars are for the ideas, not the writing.

[Hunter Johnson]

Infotopia, by Cass R. Sunstein, has a little dry statistics textbook vibe, but the material is great. How groups make decisions, how sometimes groups make better (or worse) decisions than the average of their members, and how to make it better in the information age: prediction markets, wikis, open source projects, blogs. Psychology, statistics, information technology, good stuff. Now he just needs Stephen Hawking as a ghost writer to de-textbook-ify the prose.

[Hollis Fishelson-holstine · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the topic (ways to aggregate information across multiple people to improve decision making) is interesting and relevant and he does a nice job of outlining the pros and cons of various alternatives, I didn't find it as engaging as Wisdom of Crowds. I ended up just skimming it, and you can get the main points by reading the prologue.

[Gerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very smart book that discusses in a straightforward way the group dynamics behind various forms of knowledge aggregation such as wikis, public opinion polls and the like. Does a nice job of explaining in simple terms "how deliberation works." There are many other treatments of comparable topics, but this is very readable and clear. I'm going to try it with a class next term, in fact.

[Gil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this very insightful, especially since he grounded the discussion in the Jury system -- not in wikipedia. The issues are not new, and they can be understood from multiple perspectives. Sunstein shares his, and I found it fascinating and very helpful.

[Martín · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part is great, especially the insights about biases in deliberative groups, and prediction markets (although it needs a revisit due to the economic crisis). The second part is a little dated, but the examples are still valid.

[Meghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting, and enlightening book. It really opened by eyes to how groups and discussion can impact decisions and what people believe. If you are at all interested in information and knowledge creation, you should read this book.

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surely relevant for some, but kind of feels like a compilation of research on the topic. It was difficult to understand the thesis, the implications, and the 'So what?'. Felt like it would have been clearer if instead of a book, this was a 20 page paper.

[Jilany]

to-read

[Joshua]

my new academic crush?

[Homira]

In the middle of it, not too impressed so far. A bit dated for a cyberworld piece, published in 2006, but explains some central concepts of open source software, crowdsourcing, wikis, etc.

[Dennis]

Good overall review of crowd sourcing - the considerable pros, but the pitfalls as well, and how to mitigate them.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was really interesting, but I dragged, so took me forever to finish it. It could have been an article online, honestly. Worth a read.

[Mkuraishi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pedantic style makes for a slow slog