William Binney Quotes

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.

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

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

We're dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people - and, now, other machines.

I never liked group work in school.

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

What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.

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

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.

As you get larger, it is harder to have focused discussions. Because one of the things I've learned about Congress over the past four years that I've been in is there's no shortage of opinions about how things should be done on any particular subject.

When you have a group of 30 people together, there's going to be people who don't like each other. That's just simple facts.

To get important work done, most leaders organize people into teams. They believe that when people collaborate toward a common goal, great things can happen. Yet in reality, the whole is often much less than the sum of the parts.

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!

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

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

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

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things.

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

Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.

But I always say, one's company, two's a crowd, and three's a party

With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.