The Fight, Episode 2: Why 800 Strangers Beat a Room of Experts
Shakib Hammad · 2026-09-27 · 15 min
The second episode of The Fight. A crowd of strangers can be smarter than the people in it, and a room of intelligent people can agree on something none of them wanted. Both have evidence behind them, and the episode finds the one condition that decides which of the two your next meeting turns into.
I made this one because the decisions that shape a company are usually made by a group, the hire, the budget, the price, the launch date, and every one of them is a prediction about the future. Whether that group behaves like a crowd or like a room decides how good those predictions turn out to be.
I am not neutral on it either. When we were setting up one of my companies, I pushed hard to register it in the Dubai International Financial Centre, the fanciest address a company can have in Dubai, and priced like it, because I thought it would make investors take us seriously. I made that case before anyone else had said a word, and everyone nodded along. It turned out to be a waste of money: nobody cared where we were registered, and all they asked about was traction. Nobody pushed back at the time, and I still do not know whether that was because they agreed or because I had already made it clear what I wanted. I spoke first, and after that I could not tell agreement from politeness.
Two groups. In 1906 about eight hundred people at a livestock show in Plymouth guessed the weight of an ox, each on their own card, and the average of their guesses came within a pound. In 1961 the new president and his closest advisers approved the Bay of Pigs invasion, which collapsed within days, and several of them had doubted it and never said so. See the wisdom of crowds and Kennedy's ExComm.
The case for the crowd. Independent errors cancel: some guesses run high and some low, and as long as nobody copies anybody, they pull against each other. A 2017 study at the University of Pennsylvania found that talking can even make a crowd more accurate, as long as nobody sits at the centre of the network. And Asch's conformity experiment, usually told as proof that people cave, also showed that one honest ally cut conformity by about eighty per cent. See the Asch experiments.
The case against the room. Six ways a room of smart people agrees on something none of them would choose alone: pressure out loud, the Abilene paradox, information cascades, the minority rule, deference, which the episode shows through Everest in 1996, and groupthink, which is all of them at once.
The condition. Independence: a group is wise when each person forms their view before they know anybody else's. The music lab experiment, with over fourteen thousand people split into nine separate groups, showed the same songs becoming hits in one group and flops in another once people could see each other's downloads. See the music lab.
How Kennedy fixed the room. Eighteen months after the Bay of Pigs, during the Cuban missile crisis, the same president split his advisers into teams, encouraged junior people to challenge senior ones, and sometimes left the room, so that people formed their views before they knew what he thought.
Two moves. Before any decision that matters, everyone writes down their answer and their reason before anybody speaks. And the most senior person speaks last, or leaves. If they cannot leave, one person gets the job of arguing against the answer the room is heading towards.
Several of these stories are simpler in the telling than in the record. The one-pound Galton result is the plain average, which he reported a week after his article, and his own preferred measure, the middle guess, was nine pounds out. Groupthink has been seriously challenged: in 1998 Roderick Kramer went back through the documents released since Janis wrote, and concluded that Kennedy's political calculations did more to push the invasion through than the group did. The Abilene paradox is one family's afternoon, told by one of them. The minority rule's three to four per cent threshold is Taleb's own estimate. The account of Everest most people know comes from one climber's book, which a guide on the mountain that day disputed in a book of his own. And the Cuban missile crisis ended well for more reasons than the way the room was run, including a secret promise to withdraw American missiles from Turkey, and a Soviet submarine officer who refused to agree to launch a nuclear torpedo.
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