Wisdom of Crowds & Carter Racing

The Wisdom of Crowds details a number of ways in which small groups can reach disastrous decisions. The article focuses on the failure of the Columbia mission as a result of the Mission Management Team. One issue is that people make uninformed decisions, assuming that they know best without looking at actual information. Another major issue is that group members stop regarding each other as individuals and instead define themselves by the work they do. In the case of the Columbia mission, the people working on the MMT and DAT may have disregarded important information that showed how dangerous the mission would be because their job is focused on launching space shuttles. The Carter Racing article posed this a little more clearly by stating that the group is together for the purpose of racing. They do not exist as a group to not race, therefore, they should race regardless of whatever information they have, because racing is what they do. They let one aspect of their job define what they do, and disregard reasoning as to why that task should not be performed. Perhaps they view it as a failure to not complete that job, even when the consequences of performing with error are significantly worse.