> If I have a pain in my lower right abdomen and I poll the human population, I'm going to get a better answer than a doctor? You could. It is why people prefe

> If I have a pain in my lower right abdomen and I poll the human population, I'm going to get a better answer than a doctor? You could. It is why people prefer a second opinion even when dealing with an expert. There are programs where everyone can join and try to diagnose disease. See CrowdMed (https://crowdmed.com https://crowdmed.com) -- a YC company (http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/16/yc-startup-bets-crowdsourcing-can-diagnose-diseases-better-than-doctors/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/16/yc-startup-bets-crowdsourc...) > If I poll the human population about a physics problem, I'm going to get a better answer than a physicist? I think it was Newton who said that anyone could be as successful as him, but they just didn't think hard enough. But 10 smart physicists could probably think "as hard" as a single Newton. This means there is no need to chase the expert. This removes inaccuracies, since groups have more variance in opinion than individuals. It is harder for groups to be all wrong. Group intelligence benefits science. > Conspire? Undermine the wisdom? Wow... See it as game theory with possibly adversarial agents going against the group consensus. If there is no incentive to go against the grain, or if there is damage possible to your reputation (and thus energy), people will not disagree with top management or thought leaders. All errors trickle down into the group without filters. This is dangerous as it mimics group intelligence, but is really the opinion of a single individual inside a group of yes-men. This contributes to economic crashes and hype-y bubbles. Blood-letting is a good example of variant group behavior. We need people "insane" enough to try that. We need to be wrong many times, for someone to say: "this is not right." and help fix it. Blood-letting may have benefits though -- being a nearly 3000 year old practice it would be rare to be completely without merit and survive. > When it's wrong, somebody conspired, when it's right, oh, well, don't mention that it's the exact same process. You want to label a spam dataset. You can use one person for this, or a room with a hundred people. When the one person is wrong, it may be because he has a different/quirky opinion on what it means to be spam. When the whole room is wrong, you start to wonder if the e-mail was really ham to begin with. One person can only be wrong or right. A hundred people can (and preferably should) disagree, while still converging to a better solution than any individual in that group could have thought of. Groups remove arguments from authority.