Bill Flores Quotes

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

Groupthink can become a serious issue - old ideas stay around after they're useful, and new ideas too often don't get a fair hearing.

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

UNU provides a continuous feedback loop of the group's preference for a choice, as well as its conviction. People are adjusting their levels of conviction based on the completeness of their own knowledge on the subject.

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot.

When you have more than two people working together, it gets a bit unfocused as an idea.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

People's intelligence tends to be in inverse proportion to their number. People don't tend to get smarter as they get into bigger groups.

Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.

I never liked group work in school.

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

Deliberation is the work of many men. Action of one alone.

If three come together let them pick a leader.

Whenever we had a serious question to decide, we had a conference with the groups involved.

The problem with a group is, the more people you add, the lower the average IQ.

There's a momentum to being committed to a group that you think is good, and there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to make your choice a good choice.

When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.