Ignoring the Wisdom of Crowds

Crowd wisdom works when a question has an objective answer and individual mistakes offset one another. The article uses jelly beans and audience polling on Who Wants to be a Millionaire to show that a group average or vote can outperform most individuals.

That same mechanism does not help creative work. In product and menu choices, votes act like vetoes, removing the edges that some people dislike and leaving only safe, average options. For startups, that means a crowd can be useful for clear factual questions, but it can flatten the kind of difference that makes a product stand out.

Reading notes

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• In jelly bean estimates, individual guesses were far off, but the group average was very close to the actual number.
• The audience poll on Who Wants to be a Millionaire was correct much more often than the “phone a friend” lifeline.
• A small informed minority can win a vote when uninformed voters guess randomly and their errors cancel out.
• In creative decisions, voting tends to remove disliked options rather than identify a truly good one.
• Holiday meal planning is used as an example of how trying to please everyone can lead to bland food like chicken and rice.
• The article says startups need a niche, not a gray middle ground created by committee compromise.