human-meaning

Why Groups Can Be Smarter Than Experts—And Why They Usually Aren't In 1906, Francis Galton went to a county fair and discovered something that should have been impossible. A crowd of 800 people guessed the weight of an ox. Individually, their guesses were all over the map—

We've now traveled through 10,000 years of institutional history. We've seen that the standard story—the straight line from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states—is wrong. We've seen egalitarian cities, seasonal hierarchies, temples before farms, and people who actively chose to

For most of human history, there were no states. Then, in a handful of places around the world, states appeared. Mesopotamia. Egypt. The Indus Valley. China. Mesoamerica. The Andes. Independently, in each of these regions, the apparatus we recognize as "the state" emerged. How? Why? And why so

In July 2024, a week before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Polymarket showed his chances of being the Democratic nominee at 30%. Pundits were still debating whether he'd stay in. Party officials were publicly supportive. But the money knew. When real stakes are on the

In 2003, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed something that seemed insane: a futures market for terrorism. You could bet real money on the likelihood of assassinations, coups, and attacks. The idea was that such a market would aggregate intelligence better than any CIA analysis. The backlash was

In 1906, the British statistician Francis Galton attended a livestock fair in Plymouth. He was there to observe a contest: guess the weight of an ox after it had been slaughtered and dressed. About 800 people submitted estimates—farmers, butchers, and random fairgoers with no expertise whatsoever. Galton expected the