Crowds Need Independence for Wisdom

More evidence that crowds need to retain independence to maintain the 'outlier canceling' effect that can make them useful to solve problems. Obvious, but important to remember. Our own experience was that it was easy to have influential individuals skew the results. Influential could mean many things, including well spoken, being well known or unknown, management role or apparent group role. Bottom line, anonymous worked better. Avoid even clarifying discussions.