Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Notes

¹James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

²“What Des‐Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking ye colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants,” Isaac Newton, February 5, 1676. He used his famous phrase in a letter to a rival, Robert Hooke, who was a dwarf.

³Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also the review of the book (Louis Menand, “Everybody's an Expert,” New Yorker, December 5, 2005): Rats were put in a T‐shaped maze, with food placed in either the left or the right transept of the T in a random sequence. Over the long run, the food was in the left transept more often. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rats were told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rats ended up doing better than the students—who were at Yale.

⁴Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment.

⁵Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, translated, L. M. Palmer (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), Chapter One, II, 52. See also Lila Rajiva, “Minding the Crowd,” Dissident Voice, December 30, 2006.

⁶Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translation of the third edition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University ...