Robyn Hitchcock Quotes

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

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

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

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

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

Natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activity.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

I never liked group work in school.

However, we couldn't focus on the films much during the series because we're dumb. Individually we're smart guys, but together we're one big dumb guy, and couldn't concentrate on two things at once.

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.

The reason that fish form schools, birds form flocks, and bees form swarms is that they are smarter together than they would be apart. They don't take a vote; they don't take a poll: they form a system. They are all interactive and make a decision together in real time.

Any group that can be livened up by Mensa must be pretty much dead!

Beyond individual intelligence, nature has also cultivated intelligence through swarms. For example, bees, birds and fish act in a more intelligent way when acting together as a swarm, flock or school.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

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

The crowd has a way of being right.

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.

I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.

People are a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for being.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.

Don’t think that intelligence stops with allies.

Intelligence is capital.

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.