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The per capita rate of violent death has fallen dramatically across human history — from hunter-gatherer societies to the present. That trend is real and documented. Why it happened, whether it will continue, and what threatens to reverse it remain genuinely open questions.

Most group decisions fail not because the individuals are dumb but because the structure is wrong. This synthesis maps the design principles that turn crowds into cognitive machines.

Condorcet proved something startling: if each voter is just slightly more likely to be correct than wrong, majority voting reliably converges on the right answer. Democracy as knowledge aggregation, not just preference aggregation.

No ant understands the colony. Yet colonies find optimal paths, regulate temperature, and manage resource allocation with startling efficiency. Swarm intelligence is what happens when local rules produce global wisdom.

The Bay of Pigs. The Challenger disaster. The smartest people in the room, making the worst possible call. Irving Janis named the pattern: groupthink, where cohesion kills critical thinking.

Most expert predictions are barely better than chance. But Tetlock found rare individuals who consistently outperform — even beating intelligence analysts with classified data. The traits separating them from the rest have nothing to do with IQ.

Polls ask what people think. Prediction markets ask what people are willing to bet. That difference in skin-in-the-game consistently produces better forecasts — for elections, policy outcomes, and corporate events. Here's the mechanism, the track record, and the limits.