Much has been made, in recent years, of the so-called “Wisdom of Crowds.” That is, that a diverse group of people with differing opinions and ideologies can produce some surprisingly accurate results in certain situations – with even crowds of non-experts being able to produce a combined result that exceeds the accuracy of individual experts.

Heck, that should not come as much of a surprise, really. Ballots and polling are based around that very principle, even before we were able to concisely articulate it, or demonstrate it with research.

There’s one important condition, though that breaks the whole idea down.

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