James Surowiecki Quotes

Crowds of minds can be wise, but crowds of bodies just aren't.

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.

The problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds.

For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools.

The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality, though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.

Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

Nobody is as smart as everybody.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

The views of several individuals are assuredly preferable to one man, even as the power of a number of men is of course greater than the power of one man.

“The Wisdom of Crowds” suggests that if enough bumbling people act in concert, they’ll find their way to a less bumbling place.

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man

I quite like the idea - just as an abstract idea - of 12 people's collective life experience and wisdom being this formidable thing. People say juries can be led - I think 12 people from different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different ages, it's hard to hoodwink.

When a species wants to tap the collective intelligence of a population, they don't take a poll; they don't take a vote. They form a real-time system.

A poll finds the average opinion of a group. It takes the temperature of a crowd. A swarm focuses a group together, in real time, and has them work together as a system to answer a question instead.

We developed a technology called artificial swarm intelligence, which is all about tapping the inherent knowledge, wisdom, intuition of groups.

The most impersonal seeming audiences eventually just say such intimate, smart, wise, amazing, totally surprising, funny things. It's empowering, in the sense of feeling like you're a part of something really important.

No one is as smart as all of us.

The crowd has a way of being right.

The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert's. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are.

When there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise,--so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.

No one person, no one alliance, no one nation, no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.

The smartest person in the room is never as smart as all the people in the room.

The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters.