"For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals"
About this Quote
Shermer’s line flatters democracy while quietly disciplining the lone genius myth. “Surprisingly large and varied” is doing the persuasive heavy lifting: it anticipates your skepticism (surely mobs are dumb) and then widens the claim from trivia-night averages to real-world problem solving. The sentence is built like a rebuttal to the romantic figure of the solitary thinker, and it lands because it takes aim at a culturally sticky story: breakthroughs as the product of one incandescent mind rather than the slow, distributed work of many.
The subtext is methodological. Coming from a science writer and professional skeptic, “crowds” isn’t a kumbaya abstraction; it’s an argument for aggregation, replication, and error-correction. Individuals carry coherent narratives and consistent biases. Groups, when structured well, can cancel those biases out, not because people become wiser, but because their mistakes are less correlated. That’s the implied condition he leaves unstated: crowds are smart when they’re independent, diverse, and incentivized to be honest - and catastrophically dumb when they’re herded.
Context matters because “crowds” has a split-screen reputation in modern life. On one side: Wikipedia, open-source software, prediction markets, peer review - systems where many imperfect inputs converge on something sturdier than any single take. On the other: social-media pile-ons, conspiracy spirals, and collective panic. Shermer is nudging readers toward the first meaning while borrowing the electricity of the second. It’s a pro-social thesis with a skeptic’s edge: trust the crowd, but only after you’ve engineered it not to behave like a mob.
The subtext is methodological. Coming from a science writer and professional skeptic, “crowds” isn’t a kumbaya abstraction; it’s an argument for aggregation, replication, and error-correction. Individuals carry coherent narratives and consistent biases. Groups, when structured well, can cancel those biases out, not because people become wiser, but because their mistakes are less correlated. That’s the implied condition he leaves unstated: crowds are smart when they’re independent, diverse, and incentivized to be honest - and catastrophically dumb when they’re herded.
Context matters because “crowds” has a split-screen reputation in modern life. On one side: Wikipedia, open-source software, prediction markets, peer review - systems where many imperfect inputs converge on something sturdier than any single take. On the other: social-media pile-ons, conspiracy spirals, and collective panic. Shermer is nudging readers toward the first meaning while borrowing the electricity of the second. It’s a pro-social thesis with a skeptic’s edge: trust the crowd, but only after you’ve engineered it not to behave like a mob.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|
More Quotes by Michael
Add to List
