The Importance of Contrarianism

Eric Liu: I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that what I was saying can't really be countered because it's analytically correct but it wasn't politically smart. The other kind of lesson in that anecdote is that the smartest among us are not immune to this mode of thinking no we're all in fact maybe we're even more prone to it than others. He says there are domains in which crowds are collectively rational and then there are other domains in which Crowds are collectively irrational. "I'm thinking about things like memetic desire informational cascades and conformity," he said.