it20060311 - Saturday

Under the right conditions, large groups can be very intelligent, often more so than the smartest expert in the room.

What do intelligent crowds look like? Look at the racetrack. A crowd at a racetrack can give a near perfect forecast of the future. Crowd is a mix of experts, novices and cranks. Similar is the stock market. Over time it is very difficult for even the best money managers to outperform the stock market. (Or look at newsfutures.com.)

(Lots of stuff here that it would be good to see graphs and examples.)

Aggregation can happen in many different ways.

Diverse crowds are far more likely to be intelligent than non-diverse crowds.

I know most of this already. Time to skip to another panel…

Fried: Obscurity is a good thing. If you can fail in obscurity, you’ll learn a lot more that way without being berrated by the public. Removes the fear of failure.

Less comes for free with a side business — people should be embracing. Conventional wisdom is you need to outdo competitors. “They have five features, so we need six.” Instead deliver products that are small, clear and simple.

Functional specs are political documents about covering your ass, not about creating a good product. Illusions of agreement — everyone interprets it differently.

Three types of less:

Less time is good. The more time you have, the more time you waste on things like overplanning and overthinking. Abstract work isn’t real work (functional specs), etc. More time encourages procrastination. Don’t worry so much about planning, stay small and get at work.

Less money is good. The only thing money really buys these days are salaries. Spending your own money makes you use it more wisely.

Less software. Build less software, build less well. There’s endless time to add later, but you can’t remove after you add. Less software is more manageable. Less things you have, the less that go wrong. Too many people focus on solving co