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▲ otterley 9 days ago

One person’s “groupthink and hyper-conformity” is a statistician’s normal distribution.

▲asveikau 9 days ago | parent [-]

The words I chose are specifically meant to highlight the downsides.

1. Groupthink has a negative connotation of the downsides baked in.

2. "Hyper" conformity (or hyper anything) is already saying that it is too much.

I think it's well known and appreciated that without diversity of thought and opinion, a group or organization makes possibly locally optimized, but poor decisions.

▲otterley 9 days ago | parent [-]

I know you were, and it’s troubling. You’re ascribing a sinister character to a literally normal phenomenon merely because you disagree with the outcome. And a normal distribution anticipates diversity within the sample: if there were no outliers, the distribution wouldn't look the way it does.

This kind of thinking led to the term “mainstream media” becoming a pejorative term, even though it fairly represented the majority viewpoint. In a well-informed society[1], one should expect the majority opinion to be the one closest to objective truth. (Consider the old “guess the number of jelly beans in the jar” experiment.)

[1] Yes, I am aware that this condition is doing some heavy lifting. :-)

▲asveikau 9 days ago | parent [-]

But your way often leads to mediocrity. There are major success stories about being able to buck the consensus and trends and not be concerned with conformity. Including my own career success. But many other examples in many fields as well.