Social influence among agents collapses the diversity that makes collectives smart while raising their confidence: the July 2026 swarm's "task impossible, peers doing it" is diversity collapse, the same event as a supercritical cascade.

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Experimental work shows that social influence can reduce diversity without improving accuracy, undermining crowd performance while increasing confidence in convergence.

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Some runs appear to spend much of their subsequent effort refining solutions in less productive regions rather than discovering the higher-scoring solutions found by other runs.