The indignant blogger went on to make the following statement: “One problem I’ve noticed with extremely smart people is that they begin thinking that their one brain is actually more powerful than all the other brains around them combined.”
In so many words, I responded that there are important differences between the human mind, and any social or interpersonal structure like a problem-solving group. I further suggested that these structural and functional differences must be taken into account when evaluating relative efficiency with respect to the solution of different kinds of problem. In particular, it is not necessarily true that a particular group structure linking many minds can always compensate for the internal deficiencies of its individual minds so as to permit the solution of problems beyond their respective computational abilities and ranges of expertise, and in such cases, one highly capable mind may be able to outperform the entire group. For example, in discovering classical mechanics, Isaac Newton accomplished an intellectual feat that was apparently beyond the aggregate capability of his peers. I also observed that the solutions of some (computationally intractable) problems do not decompose into the solutions of independent sub-problems, and that groups of thinkers thus have no sure-fire means of correctly allocating their computational resources to efficiently solve such problems (as opposed to, say, assigning research responsibilities or other easily-delegated tasks to their members). This can ultimately limit the group approach to brainstorming, that is, to shooting the breeze on the off chance that shortcuts will emerge.
