Quote

While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.

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.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other. In other words, you need people to be thinking for themselves, rather than following the lead of those around them.

Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.

Wisdom stands at the turn in the road and calls upon us publicly, but we consider it false and despise its adherents.

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

It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.

Crowds are the most difficult thing for me these days because I have to walk with my head down and my eyes averted. There's still that part of me that wants to hold my head up, make eye contact and smile.