The punchline, from the abstract: "We find that when selecting a problem-solving team from a diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of randomly select

The punchline, from the abstract: "We find that when selecting a problem-solving team from a diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of randomly selected agents outperforms a team comprised of the best-performing agents. This result relies on the intuition that, as the initial pool of problem solvers becomes large, the best-performing agents necessarily become similar in the space of problem solvers. Their relatively greater ability is more than offset by their lack of problem-solving diversity." It's not always true, of course, that a randomly selected group will outperform a group of top performers. But the result does suggest that it's worth thinking hard about the tradeoff between diversity and ability, and that sometimes the former is more important than the latter.