Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 

Decision-makers today have unprecedented access to information.  Information is crucial to informed decision-making, but it is also possible to sift through copious volumes of unfiltered information to find evidence that appears to affirm prejudices.  In his new book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, Professor Cass Sunstein presents an optimistic account of the human potential to aggregate information without resorting to prejudice and preconceptions. The Internet is often the means by which this information is shared:  individuals amass and refine knowledge through self-correcting exchanges; open-source software enables its users to build on new technologies; and prediction markets improve decisionmaking by companies and policymakers. While hard evidence increasingly competes for attention with opinions presented as fact, we are beginning to find new ways of separating truth from prejudice and are gradually finding reliable ways to tap the sum of human knowledge.  These advances hold the promise of more rigorous and better-informed decision-making in all segments of society.


AGENDA

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. 
Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

1:00 P.M. Registration
1:15 P.M. Welcome:
ROBERT HAHN, AEI-Brookings Joint Center
1:30 P.M. Presentation:
CASS SUNSTEIN, University of Chicago
Discussants:
TYLER COWEN, George Mason University 
ROBIN HANSON, George Mason University  
3:00 P.M. Adjournment

For more information, please contact Molly Wells at 202.862.5903 or [email protected].

Biographies

Tyler Cowen is Holbert C. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University.  He is author of numerous books, including In Praise of Commercial Culture, What Price Fame?, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures, Markets and Cultural Voices, and Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding.  He is also Director of the Mercatus Center and he co-writes a blog at www.marginalrevolution.com. 


Robert Hahn is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center and a resident scholar at AEI.  Previously, he worked for the Council of Economic Advisers.  He also has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University.  Dr. Hahn frequently contributes to leading scholarly journals and general-interest periodicals, including The American Economic Review, The Yale Law Journal, Science, and The New York Times.  He is the author of Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective (AEI-Brookings Joint Center, 2000) and In Defense of the Economic Analysis of Regulation (AEI-Brookings Joint Center, 2005).  In addition, Dr. Hahn is Co-Founder of the Community Preparatory School, an inner-city middle school in Providence, Rhode Island, that provides opportunities for disadvantaged youth to achieve their full potential.


Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. Professor Hanson has pioneered idea futures, also known as prediction/information markets, since 1988. He was a principal architect of the Foresight Exchange and of DARPA's Policy Analysis Market, and created the first internal corporate markets at Xanadu in 1990. He has written, spoken, and consulted widely on the application of idea futures to business and policy.  Professor Hanson has over 60 publications, including articles in Applied Optics, Business Week, CATO Journal, Communications of the ACM, Economics Letters, Econometrica, Economics of Governance, Extropy, Foundations of Physics, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Journal of Public Economics, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Public Choice, Social Epistemology, Social Philosophy and Policy, Theory and Decision, and Wired. 


Cass Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence in the School of Law and Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Mr. Sunstein is a former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall and was the attorney-advisor in the Department of Justice. He is the author of many books, including After the Rights Revolution (1990), Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (1993), and Free Markets and Social Justice (1997). His edited books include Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy (1998) (with Stephen Breyer, Richard Stewart, and Matthew Spitzer). He has testified before congressional committees on many topics in regulation and administrative law and has participated in constitution-making and law reform activities in many nations, including Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, Poland, and China.