Both in my academic and industry work, I work a lot on crowdsourcing answers, as multiple sources of information are inevitably going to lead to better conclusions.   The key to good crowdsourcing is not the volume of people, but the diversity of people in any dataset (e.g. this paper).  David Blankenhorn, of the Better Angels initiative, applies this same logic to improving policy through diversity of political thought.

From the article:

“Diversity,” like so much else these days, divides us….diversity, properly understood, might be our last best hope of repairing our broken politics and depolarizing our society. Consider three factual propositions.

Diverse groups make better decisions. If you’re an investor seeking an accurate prediction of next year’s inflation rate, should you go with your own best analysis, depend on a famous expert whose judgment you trust, or put your faith in the mathematical average of 50 predictions made by experts holding widely divergent views on inflation? Research suggests that the third strategy is consistently more likely to produce the most accurate prediction. Diverse groups are smart.

Like-minded groups make us individually dumber. I like to imagine that my political opinions come from evaluating evidence and sorting through facts, but I’ve learned from the research that it just ain’t so. Like you and nearly everyone, my political stances are largely shaped by ordinary human needs to belong, to maintain cherished relationships, and to protect or try to enhance my status within the groups that matter to me.

….

Groups shaping our political views have become less diverse. Both of our main political parties increasingly consist of like-minded people. It’s hard today to find a liberal Republican or a conservative Democrat. Our residential communities are also increasingly politically like-minded. In 1976, about one in four Americans lived in a county in which presidential candidate won by a landslide. Today that number is one in two. Increasingly, the news sources we use today tell us only what we already think. Finally, friendship circles today are increasingly politically defined, with liberals befriending other liberals and conservatives rarely inviting a liberal to lunch. (Where would they go — Cracker Barrel or Au Bon Pain?) So many of us today are nearly fully enveloped in political similarity. The main results are dumbed-down thinking and increasing polarization.

Creating a more civil political environment is not just beneficial for our relationships in our communities…it also leads to better, smarter policy.

– Ravi Iyer