James Surowiecki Quotes

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

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.

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

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

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

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

I don't like the five-person group dynamic. I just never have. It doesn't make sense to me that six people would just sit in a circle and say, 'Now I want approval,' 'Now I want approval,' 'Now I want approval.' 'I have something funny to say,' 'No, I have something funny to say, me!' It's hard to make plans.

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

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.

Any time people come together in a meeting, we're not necessarily getting the best ideas; we're just getting the ideas of the best talkers.

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.

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

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.

Group discussion is very valuable; group drafting is less productive.

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

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.

So you [Romans] when you have got together in a body, let yourselves be guided by those whom singly you would never think of being advised by.

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

How does nature amplify the intelligence of groups? It forms swarms.

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.

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.

I'm really interested in working with groups. It's a very simple thing for me, and if I'm given the option to work with two people or 10 or 20 people, I'm going to take 10 or 20. I just think there's so much more I can do with that.

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