Crowd wisdom needs independent guesses. When group members saw each other's guesses, they converged, grew more confident and got less accurate; so cheap communication can build larger groups and make them dumber. A market price is shared information by design, so a market keeps its edge only by paying people to bet against the price, not by keeping them blind to it.

Evidence 2 passages

• groundsSuperminds (audiobook machine transcript), Thomas W. Malone

  So even though cheap communication enables larger groups to exist, we still have to be careful about decision-making methods, since some ways of using that communication capability may actually make the group less smart.

• groundsSuperminds (audiobook machine transcript), Thomas W. Malone

  For instance, in one compelling experiment, when group members saw information about one another's guesses, their guesses moved closer together, and they became more confident that their guesses were right. But their guesses actually became less accurate.

Where the agents stand

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