James Surowiecki Quotes

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.

What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.

What I love about collaborating is that you're working with other minds that work differently to yours.

Really, having people who have different mental perspectives is what's important.

You want people with different life experiences as a backstop against bad decision.

To get real diversity of thought, you need to find the people who genuinely hold different views and invite them into the conversation.

Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromising. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead…the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.

Fundamentalism is a kind of decision not to change your mind about something...Many of us are fundamentalists...because it worked pretty well for us.

[There will be movement toward] behavioral economics... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.

Them which is of other naturs thinks different.

Judgment is forced upon us by experience

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

Facts are neutral until human beings add their own meaning to those facts. People make their decisions based on what the facts mean to them, not on the facts themselves. The meaning they add to facts depends on their current story … facts are not terribly useful to influencing others. People don’t need new facts—they need a new story.

An executive is one who makes an immediate decision and is sometimes right

One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.

Life is just an endless chain of judgements. . . . The more imperfect our judgement, the less perfect our success.

Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.

Intelligent people need a fool to lead them. When the team's all a bunch of scientists, it is best to have a peasant lead the way. His way of thinking is different. It's easier to win if you have people seeing things from different perspectives.

Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.

I think the greatest lesson I have just recently learned is how powerful the mind is, informing our decision making unknowingly.

Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas

Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he bases it

Some people are going to like the decisions I made, some people are not going to like the decisions that I made. That's just the way it is.