Group Intelligence Quotes

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.

People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.

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.

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.

No one knows everything. But together, we know a whole lot.

Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is - so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

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

I think Jews are the smartest people in the world.

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.

There is one person that is wiser than anybody, and that is everybody.

The power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.

One should guard against believing the great masses to be more stupid than they actually are.

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.

Bubbles and crashes are textbook examples of collective decision making gone wrong. In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent - independence, diversity, private judgement-disappear.

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.

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

No man is wise enough by himself.

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.

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

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

There are no wise few.

To assess the intelligence of a committee, divide the IQ of its stupidest member by the number of members.

A brilliant mind was never as clever as three average minds sniffing after something of interest.

Judgment of the people is often wiser than the wisest men.