Tuesday

The Wisdom of Crowds

I'm really digging a particular Amazon Kindle feature that I never thought I'd use: the popular highlight.

If you're not acquainted with electronic readers, most of them allow you to highlight passages. It's similar to the old highlighter (the default color is fluorescent yellow), except you click and drag the area you want to highlight. That's pretty cool.

But Amazon then collects all the highlightings of all users and tallies the results. You can then click on "popular hightlights" and see what other people like.

When I first saw this feature, I thought, "What do I care what other people found interesting?" As I started using Kindle, however, I discovered that the things I find most interesting were also highlighted by many others. This went on for about a year, until I found myself jumping straight to the "popular highlights" before reading the book.

It shouldn't have surprised me. I say this for two reasons: (1) Although the average American might be, in terms of culture and religion and learning, a moron, the average American doesn't buy the kind of books I buy, so when Kindle presents the popular highlights, they're most likely the highlights by people who share my proclivities. (2) Hayek and the problem of knowledge.

It's the second point that interests me the most. The idea that a large audience does better at distilling essentials than a lone reader is very Hayekian, who pointed out that "the masses" do a better job of organizing information than a few individuals. It's the genius behind Wikipedia (which, studies have shown, contains as few or fewer errors than conventional encyclopedias) and the Internet in general.

If you haven't tried this little piece of Hayekian organization, I high(light) recommend it.