"Infotopia" by Cass R. Sunstein

I just finished "Infotopia" by Cass Sunstein published in 2006, a law professor at the University of Chicago. I enjoyed the book and have the following comments:

• Sunstein starts off with the danger of individuals and organizations surrounding themselves in an "information cocoon" (pg.9) where news sources and commentary are all geared to their specific cognitive bias. I find his solution, adding more blogs from the opposite political spectrum to be a bit simple. Critical thinking and rhetorical skills could be repositioned and replicated in software tools so that cognitive and consistent arguments with supporting empirical evidence would be integrated to the information stream of the individual or organization regardless of the source
• The failure of deliberative groups to reach optimal decision when compared to more automatic methods he mentions of open-source, prediction markets, and random surveys, is the best part of the book for me. I have already seen far too many times in my career when decisions are made by a deliberative body that are clearly sub-optimal in my opinion and later events bear out that assessment. I have been one of those outliers that speak-up but are marginalized by the group-think of the moment. Sunstein's prescriptions for minimizing the failures are good, including supporting diversity of opinion in the group and to supplement the deliberative process with pre-surveys of experts or other automatic mechanisms to extract the group consensus. A better take away for myself was to increase my skepticism of deliberative decisions even more. Ego by individuals and groups shield us from the logical fallacies in the internal arguements and can prevent relevant information and judgements to be adopted as the decision. My hope is that for my current and future groups deliberative decision-making that I encourage diversity for all members by allowing them to feel comfortable speaking, not ignoring or marginalizing feedback and commentary from individuals I may not like, and to look for tools and techniques to supplement the decision-making process.
• I also liked Sunstein's explanation of the Condorcet Jury Theorem that explains both way even if a percentage of a group is more likely to be right, that the overall group's response will more accurate than the individual. The Condorcet Jury Theorem also explains why deliberative group decision making fails if the initial conditions predispose the members to certain positions.

What this book misses is partly a function of when it was written. I would be interested to see how Sunstein evaluates the market failures and current recession in light of the ideas and framework he writes about in "Infotopia". Additionally, Sunstein doesn't include methods of automatic decision making tools and techniques like large-scale system simulations and data mining. The dangers of becoming too reliant on automatic decision-making systems are not as well fleshed out as Daniel Suaraz has raised in a number of places including his novel "Daemon".