On teams or in organizations, by contrast, cognitive diversity needs to be actively selected, and it’s important to do so because in small groups it’s easy for a few biased individuals to exert undue influence and skew the group’s collective decision.

The fundamental problem with an information cascade is that after a certain point it becomes rational for people to stop paying attention to their own knowledge—their private information—and to start looking instead at the actions of others and imitate them. (If everyone has the same likelihood of making the right choice, and everyone before you

The variety of possible funding sources encouraged a variety of technological approaches.

So who picks the sweetest-smelling one? Ideally, the crowd would. But here’s where striking a balance between the local and the global is essential: a decentralized system can only produce genuinely intelligent results if there’s a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system. Without such a means, there’s no reason to think that

One key to this approach is a system that encourages, and funds, speculative ideas even though they have only slim possibilities of success. Even more important, though, is diversity—not in a sociological sense, but rather in a conceptual and cognitive sense. You want diversity among the entrepreneurs who are coming up with the ideas, so you end up

More important, there’s no real evidence that one can become expert in something as broad as “decision making” or “policy” or “strategy.” Auto repair, piloting, skiing, perhaps even management: these are skills that yield to application, hard work, and native talent. But forecasting an uncertain future and deciding the best course of action in the

This seems like an eccentric conclusion, and it is. It just happens to be true. The legendary organizational theorist James G. March, in fact, put it like this: “The development of knowledge may depend on maintaining an influx of the naïve and the ignorant, and . . . competitive victory does not reliably go to the properly educated.” The reason,

In other words, if most decisions to adopt new technologies or social norms are driven by cascades, there is no reason to think that the decisions we make are, on average, good ones. Collective decisions are most likely to be good ones when they’re made by people with diverse opinions reaching independent conclusions, relying primarily on their

If a group of autonomous individuals tries to solve a problem without any means of putting their judgments together, then the best solution they can hope for is the solution that the smartest person in the group produces, and there’s no guarantee they’ll get that. If that same group, though, has a means of aggregating all those different opinions,