Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
More perspectives, closer to ground truth
Curative's Covid push forced people from very different backgrounds to work together. It hired a bunch of former military people who were incredible at deployment but spoke a different language from the scientists. It also hired Silicon Valley developers. All of them were trying to solve the same problem, and each came at it from a completely different perspective.
Fred Turner used to approach things from one scientific viewpoint, and sometimes people would tell him to take a step back and think about the problem more broadly. Often he wouldn't have considered the points of view the others brought. The more perspectives he gathered on a problem, the closer to ground truth he got.
Why do mixed groups solve problems better?
In a 2004 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lu Hong and Scott Page showed mathematically that under certain conditions a diverse group of good problem solvers can outperform a group of the very best. Different people use different mental tools and search different parts of a problem. A mixed group covers more ground before getting stuck. The result is known as the diversity trumps ability theorem.
What does the ox-weight guessing contest show?
In 1907 the statistician Francis Galton published results from a livestock fair in Plymouth, where about 800 people guessed the weight of an ox. The median guess was 1,207 pounds, and the ox's actual weight was 1,198 pounds. Galton reported the finding in the journal Nature. The result is often cited as an example of how averaging many views can beat single estimates.