The Wisdom of Crowds

To guide good arguments and see things in a plural way, we also need diversity. Crowds can make better predictions than individuals. But research has also explored what kinds of groups show signs of wisdom in the sense of superior problem-solving, pointing to the importance of combining diversity, sophistication and integration.

Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection. So if we want to build environments that generate good ideas—whether those environments are in schools or corporations or governments or our own personal lives—we need to keep that history in mind, and not fall back on the easy assu

The result is an invaluable collective wisdom impossible to replicate elsewhere.

As James Surowiecki explained in his best-selling The Wisdom of Crowds, this is the kind of task in which individuals do very poorly, but pools of individual judgments do remarkably well.