"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)
"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." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)
"Errors in individual judgment won’t wreck the group’s collective judgment as long as those errors aren’t systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people’s judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)
"The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert's. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)
"The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)
"[...] under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)
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