スウエーデンの面白いものたち


by nyfiken
カレンダー
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ストックホルムのブックセール。

23日から26日まで限定のスウェーデン語で書かれた本が40パーセント引きの本セールが始まったのは、STUREPLANの本屋さん。英書も安くなってはいるが、大手の本屋さんも、特別セールが始まり、春まだ来ない北の国では、今の季節せっせと本を読む。Nyfikenが心が惹かれたのは、数冊あるけれど、じっくりと吟味して一冊に絞った。75クローネ。一冊1000円少しは悪くはない。
英書が決して安くはないので、この機会にどうしても手に入れて読みたいものは、セールに買うのがお買い得。スウェーデンの漫画も面白い。特に、DAGANS NYHETERに掲載されている漫画はなんとも味がある。さて選んだ一冊は、これ。
The WISDOM OF CROWDS By JAMES SUROWIECKI
書評。A HYMN OF PRAISE TO THE JUDGEMENT OFTHE MANY.BY THE ECONOMIST
FANTASTICALLY STYLISH BY GQなどなど。

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.

The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts
The book relates to diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals, rather than crowd psychology as traditionally understood. Its central thesis, that a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts, draws many parallels with statistical sampling, but there is little overt discussion of statistics in the book.

Its title is an allusion to Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841.


Surowiecki asserts that what happens when the decision making environment is not set up to accept the crowd, is that the benefits of individual judgments and private information are lost and that the crowd can only do as well as its smartest member, rather than perform better (as he shows is otherwise possible). Detailed case histories of such failures include:


Homogeneity Surowiecki stresses the need for diversity within a crowd to ensure enough variance in approach, thought process, and private information.
Centralization The Columbia shuttle disaster, which he blames on a hierarchical NASA management bureaucracy that was totally closed to the wisdom of low-level engineers.
Division :The United States Intelligence Community, the 9/11 Commission Report claims, failed to prevent the 11 September 2001 attacks partly because information held by one subdivision was not accessible by another. Surowiecki's argument is that crowds (of intelligence analysts in this case) work best when they choose for themselves what to work on and what information they need. (He cites the SARS-virus isolation as an example in which the free flow of data enabled laboratories around the world to coordinate research without a central point of control.)
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA have created a Wikipedia-style information sharing network called Intellipedia that will help the free flow of information to prevent such failures again.

Imitation :Where choices are visible and made in sequence, an "information cascade"[2] can form in which only the first few decision makers gain anything by contemplating the choices available: once past decisions have become sufficiently informative, it pays for later decision makers to simply copy those around them. This can lead to fragile social outcomes.
Emotionality :Emotional factors, such as a feeling of belonging, can lead to peer pressure, herd instinct, and in extreme cases collective hysteria.








ついでに本屋でかわいいカードを見つけ一枚買う。うさぎさんだが、なんともいえない表情がある。EMMA VIRKE。外は冬。まだ寒い2月。さて、雪の下でじっと冬眠している動物たち。なんという自然の営みなのだろう。寒い日が続くと不思議に冬に慣れてくるが、雪が白いのは、寒い世界を明るくしてくれる。色の世界にとても惹かれる。本屋で立ち読みした、世界の国ごとの建物の色の写真集があって、面白かった。インド、グアテマラ、イギリス、日本、アメリカのブルックリンやイラク、それぞれの国の家のペイントされる色や窓枠の色のトーン。アフリカの土壁の色。もう一冊興味があった本はスウェーデンの田舎の家の人を30年前と今を同じ場所で同じ人を写真にとったもの。いかにもスウェーデンの田舎で、家の中も決してかたずいているというわけではなかったり、ユーモラスで楽しい。若かった青年がおじさんになったり、おじさんがおじいさんになっている。2つの写真が見開きにあって、昔の例えばキッチンにたつ若いときのおにいさんが、同じキッチンにたっているおじさんになったりと。時間がたつのは、早いものだが、30年前の自分の写真を見てみるとあのころはわかかったと思うし、また両親の写真を見てもそう思うものだ。
by nyfiken | 2011-02-25 06:29