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So I ask the HN crowd today, how can so many brains be wrong? How can millions of brains seeing the same problem come up with the wrong answer? If a million brains failed, would a billion or a trillion brains come up with the right answer?
(That said, I do appreciate the disagreement I often receive from other participants on HN as a reality check on my own thinking.)
Meanwhile, we evolved to sift through information rapidly towards self-preservation. This has obvious drawbacks like any other broad algorithm would. Let's not get proud of whatever cohort we identify with; logical fallacies are the norm at any level of intelligence.
Many of our truths conflict with other societal and even personal truths. You can want children with a loving wife and still find pleasure in extramarital affairs. Both have sound biological and psychological rewards that carry paradoxically self-sabotaging complications.
Add to that cultural and technological shifts, disparities in wealth and power, the weakness of language, and many other complications which won't fit into the box I'm typing in.
Truth is complicated and dynamic enough as a philosophical concept, let alone with the innate irrationality we all share.
Crowds don't actually have wisdom. All they really have is consensus.
As such, if a problem is the kind of thing that one person usually gets wrong, then it's also the kind of thing that the majority of a million-person crowd will also get wrong.
Given that success is a combination of problem, solution and another variables, the probability of someone finding the correct combination is very small. This is why the fly-or-die model startups like to choose is so cruel. Sometimes it looks like a startup is a lottery ticket and VCs are buying as many tickets as they can to secure the prize.
The probability of 1 zillion or just one person finding the right number is the same for each individual. What you could do is to become multiple tickets by pivoting or getting together with another individuals.