The Herd. And You.

Being agreeable and getting along are wonderful traits, but as with everything in life, you can have too much of a good thing. Coming from a guy who celebrates consensus and collaboration, you might think that that’s a bit of heresy, so bear with me.

Going with the flow has been bred into us for millennia, and most of the time it’s a time saver and oftimes even a life saver. If we stop to re-invent the wheel at every turn, life would become very inefficient. See a new food at the grocery store? Better feed it to the cat first to see if it’s safe. Get on an airplane for the first time? No, I want to see the safety studies first. Cross the Confederation Bridge to PEI? I think I’ll send a drone over, first, just to inspect it.

The truth is that doing what everyone else does saves us the inefficiency of personally safety-checking every new experience or product. If other people are flying in airplanes or eating sushi or crossing the 13km bridge, then we just do what they’re doing. Almost all the time it works, and saves a lot of time and money.

The flipside is also true. If the crowd is avoiding something it’s probably wise not to go rushing in without a bit of consideration. There’s a reason most of us don’t keep pet vipers.

But while there are all kinds of reasons to go with the flow and follow the “wisdom of crowds”*, there are downsides. Take the Dot Com Bubble of the late ‘90s. Everybody had a hot tip, even parking lot attendants were getting rich buying speculative stock because all their buddies were getting rich buying speculative stock. “Speculative” became code for “magic”. And we know how that all ended.

There’s a healthy space for personal verification, for skeptics, and for contrarians. This is particularly so in the professions where we actually pay people to be finicky. Take engineers, for example.

The reason I will drive across the eight miles of the Confederation Bridge is that I know from long experience that no public structure gets built in Canada unless it has been engineered to death. Every footing, every reinforcement, every specification for concrete has been checked and examined and second-guessed and questioned and re-validated until the cows come home, the public all the while wailing about the exorbitant cost of such expertise. But 999,999,999 times out of a billion, all that finickiness means that I don’t need to personally inspect the bridge.

Similarly, if you get pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and put in a cell on suspicion of murder, you’re going to want to find yourself a lawyer who has a track record of successfully raising doubt about what might otherwise seem obvious. Sure, you did buy rat poison the day before your buddy died, and you did owe him a million dollars, and you and his spouse don’t seem too saddened by his demise, but you can’t convict on hunches. The job of your defense counsel is to raise every reasonable doubt to avoid a conviction.

When and where to exercise personal judgment has much to do with the stakes involved, the actual evidence (as opposed to popular say-so), as well as an understanding of statistics. If you’re retired without a pension, depending solely on your savings and investments, you will understand these concepts. On the other hand, if someone offers me a snack at the county fair, something unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, but which all the locals are wolfing down, I’m far more likely just to “bite”, if you will. But if I’m out in the jungle with the authorities closing in and Jim Jones is asking me to drink Kool Aid, I’m going to pass, no matter what the crowd is doing.

Even when we buck the trend and follow our own counsel on a matter, there’s no need to be disagreeable about it. Taking the high road is a different thing than riding a high horse.

*Recommended reading: James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations