judgement

Be careful to judge without first understanding.

I love the notion now of what's considered as free/ Like taking the thought of a forest/ then just taking the trees/

"Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. "

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

Since you are somewhat special, you'll have to be very careful and work very hard to learn how to press yourself into the existence of others.  Stand in the shoes of others, wear their clothes, enter their heads, imagine their anxieties, their clouded thoughts, their superstitons, their untutored responses and unthinking and dumb inclusions.  Recall before you dismiss all the stupidities of mankind, that even in ignorance there are some words of wisdom.  That even in hysteria there has got to be a glint of reason.  That even in stubborn and recalcitrant opinion there is a sensitivity of true thoughtfulness.  And if you do press yourself into the existence of others and their minds, you have periods of grave doubt and concern and skepticism, and if you really get into the skin of another human being and become immersed in his or her own nerve shoots, you will say, I'm wrong, they're right.  You might even say, the heck with them all, alright.  And if you go either way it's going to be the same thing because you're going to be experiencing the dark night of soul and maybe a lot of failure which is the next greatest professor you're going to have in life.

If you should judge your neighbour than you too shall be judged on the same level that you judged your brother .

Nothing indicates the soundness of a man's judgment so much as knowing how to choose between two disadvantages.

In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.

Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. Errors in individual judgement won't wreck the group's collective judgement as long as those errors aren't systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people's judgements systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information. Second, independent individuals are more likely to have a new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.

Bubbles and crashes are textbook examples of collective decision making gone wrong. In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent -- independence, diversity, private judgement--disappear.