Wisdom of Crowds Quotes

A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel Durant: Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

The 'wisdom of the crowds' is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb.

We can be more clever than one, but not more clever than all.

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

The crowd has a way of being right.

Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.

Public opinion is not always mistaken; sometimes even it chooses the right man.

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.

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

During the Arab Spring, I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldn't necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds.

There's no doubt that in the last two to three decades, American democracy has been hacked. It was based on the regular harvesting of the wisdom of crowds, but now big sources of special interest money are able to prevent the passage of almost any meaningful reform that's aimed at the public interest.

The wisdom of the crowds has peaked. Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0 - the wisdom of the crowds - and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.

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.

Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.

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

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.

The democratic system is premised on trust in the masses' wisdom. We believe that the collective is wiser than its parts and that, at the end of the day, it shall make the right choices and take the right decisions.

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

This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have.