When smart people fail together
In every financial crisis, billions are lost not by crooks, but by smart people doing honest work, usually inside a committee.
We assume that adding high-IQ people to a room increases the group’s intelligence. Often, it merely amplifies the noise. A committee is not a social gathering; it is a signal processing unit. Its output depends entirely on its architecture. If the logic gates are faulty, more input just creates more error.
In systems theory, "Groupthink" isn't just people agreeing with each other; it is correlated error. When five people make the same mistake for the same reason, you don't have five data points. You have one data point, five times louder. A healthy system requires uncorrelated error. You want diverse pairs of eyes on the same truth, so that individual biases cancel each other out rather than compound.
This requires a shared epistemology. Most groups fail because they are arguing over the output (the decision) without agreeing on the source code (the method).
How much evidence is “enough”?
What is the logic of the tie-break: empiricism or first principles?
What is the protocol for falsification?
Without a shared operating system, collaboration becomes friction. You get "consensus," but consensus is rarely truth. Consensus is just the point where everyone’s fatigue exceeds their conviction.
Consensus should exist only at the level of the protocol. Beyond that, the goal is not agreement; it is accuracy.
We treat cognitive biases (anchoring, sunk cost, scarcity) as personal failings. They are not. They are recurring bugs in the human firmware. You cannot "train" them out of individuals, any more than you can train a computer to stop doing exactly what its code says. You can only build a system that traps them. You need a "Garbage Collector" for logic. A structural step in the process that specifically hunts for false equivalence, cherry-picking, and inertia.
The goal isn’t perfect rationality. That is impossible. The goal is consistent calibration.
A good team is a machine that ingests noise and emits signal.