Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Shermer

Shermer is making the quiet case for humility by way of arithmetic. The line sounds bloodless, but it’s really a cultural argument about how knowledge gets made: not by lone geniuses having flawless thoughts, but by messy collectives whose imperfections statistically wash out. He’s invoking the logic behind the “wisdom of crowds” and, more broadly, the skeptical tradition he’s known for: trust processes that punish self-deception, not personalities that perform certainty.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Individual errors” treats mistakes as normal, distributed, almost mechanical - not moral failures. That’s a rebuke to the contemporary obsession with being “right” in public. Shermer’s subtext is that we should prefer systems where wrongness is expected and absorbed: peer review, prediction markets, transparent datasets, adversarial debate. The ideal group here isn’t a vibe-y consensus; it’s a properly structured crowd where biases aren’t correlated. Because if everyone shares the same blind spot, errors don’t cancel - they compound.

Context matters: Shermer has spent decades arguing against pseudoscience and conspiracy thinking, where the seduction is exactly the opposite of this quote. Those communities prize the solitary “seer” who claims access to hidden truth, insulated from correction. Shermer’s sentence is a pressure-release valve: reality is hard, so outsource some of your certainty to a method, a sample size, a room full of disagreeing people. It’s not romantic. It’s how we avoid fooling ourselves.