Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users has written a clear and pithy piece that captures something of the circumstances when crowds are wise and when they’re not. I’ve extracted a couple of her comparisons and put them in table form:
| Collective intelligence | Dumbness of Crowds |
| A pile of people writing Amazon book reviews | A pile of people collaborating on a wiki to collectively author a book |
| Getting input and ideas from many different people and perspectives | Blindly averaging the input of many different people, and expecting a breakthrough. (It’s not always the averaging that’s the problem it’s the blindly part) |
I couldn’t have put it better myself (I know that to be true because, in a less clear and pithy way, I tried to). Several of the comments are worth reading too. [Discovered via Jay Cross’s Informal Learning blog.]