Group Think

A recurring failure mode across Kyle’s reading: the tendency of people — even brilliant, expert people — to converge on a shared opinion because it is the shared opinion, not because it is correct. The Death of Expertise invokes Bertrand Russell’s warning that “even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.” No Apology supplies Mitt Romney’s diagnosis of media and institutional elites: “It’s hard to think independently once you have heard the opinion of the institutional elite” — bias matters, but so does group think, the echo among elites that crowds out in-depth, data-grounded reporting.

Charlie Munger’s Philanthropy Roundtable talk gives the concept its sharpest formulation: “crowd folly,” the human tendency to “resemble lemmings,” and the observation that “each institutional investor apparently fears most of all that its investment practices will be different from practices of the rest of the crowd.” Across all three sources the antidote is the same posture — independent, Contrarian thinking that is willing to diverge from the consensus of the crowd or the experts.

Context: “Groupthink” was coined by psychologist Irving Janis (1972) to describe a mode of decision-making in cohesive groups where the drive for consensus overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives.

Where this appears

• The Death of Expertise — Bertrand Russell: experts in agreement can still be collectively wrong.
• No Apology — Romney on institutional elites echoing each other instead of doing original reporting.
• Charlie Munger: Philanthropy Roundtable — “crowd folly,” lemmings, and institutional investors fearing most that their practices differ from the crowd.