Does anyone else feel like 90% of the population is stupid?
To clarify here, I don't feel like I'm significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying "facts."
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There's an old proverb I like about this: a person is smart but people are dumb.
People en masse tend to be dumber than they are apart. I think you're comparing yourself to the faceless masses. It's much more humbling to try comparing yourself to someone you respect (but don't do it as a "I'm not as good as them" thing, only do it as a "goals to maybe achieve one day" thing to avoid accidentally trashing your self esteem)
Side note: old proverb here means I think my dad said it once but I have no idea where it actually came from
Tommy Lee Jones says this in Men in Black, no idea if it was coined before that though.
I choose to believe Agent K came up with it.
"The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters." (attributed to Terry Pratchett)
None of us is as dumb as all of us.
Whoever says that pretty much qualifies as dumb in my book.
Collective deision-making is superior.
It depends. Group psychology like mass delusion is well known. Collective decision making works in specific circumstances where the majority have some idea about what the problem is.
So you're saying that the only obstacle to effective collective decision-making is the withholdiing of relevant information?
I think you meant "the ability to learn" because you're not getting better answers from groups of non-physicists about the geometries of black holes than from individual experts regardless of how much information you give them
Sooooo... are you suggesting that individual physicists would be better off working in isolation? That must be what you are suggesting... since nothing that I have said suggested anything about groups of people making collective decisions about matters that are completely arbitrary.
Just linking to an article about collective decision making isn't really that helpful without quoting the article for your points.
So that article you posted talks about animal behavior, and that an economic view on collective decision making is a good approach for animal behavior.
Nowhere did they make the conclusion that collecting decision making is superior, especially in the context of humans.
Were you not aware that humans are animals?