Will Hutton, Obtuse or What?

I realise this won’t come as a shock to most readers but is it possible forthere to be a grandee, one of the Great and the Good, more willfully obtuse than Will Hutton?

His entire intellectual position, his career, has been built on hte idea that the hoi polloi do not know best, that they must be guided by the wise, that what is bought and sold, how it is bought and sold, the hours people work, what they work at, should be guided by those intelligent enough to be in the position of power to force them to do as commanded. Then he reviews the book The Wisdom of Crowds:

The Wisdom of Crowds is studded with similar examples and experiments, from audience advice to contestants on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to asking students to guess the temperature of their classroom to finding a way through a maze. In every case, the crowd's decision turns out not only to be right, but consistently better than any individual's. Surowiecki cites the example an American naval commander used to find a sunken submarine lost at sea. After aggregating a mass of guesses of where it might be and then averaging them, he went on to search the location that the crowd thought the submarine would be. It was right to within some 200 yards and miles better than any individual guess.

To be wise, though, the crowd's judgment has to include everyone's - the expert, the stupid, the allegedly commonsensical, the wild, the analytic, the hunch. It's by comprehending the universe of possible outcomes in all their diversity and then averaging them that the wisdom emerges.

Trouble starts, as Surowiecki readily concedes, when individuals start to adjust their first thoughts and reactions with what they think others are thinking, or when judgments are too little influenced by the diverse views of others. Stock market bubbles, classic exercises in collective irrationality, happen because, as Keynes famously argued, the art of successful stock market investment is to second-guess what the mass of other investors think, so causing prices irrationally to inflate.

And most governmental cock-ups, like Blair deluding himself, parliament and the country that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, are because a few people holding the same views dominate the decision-making process. One of the lessons of The Wisdom of Crowds is that privately generated government 'intelligence' by agencies like the CIA or MI6 has a bias to make mistakes because of the narrowness and lack of diversity of the views that they build upon to make their judgments. To assess the time and place of the next terrorist attack, the Met and the Home Office would be best advised to harness the wisdom of aggregated views, thinks Surowiecki, rather than rely on so-called intelligence.

I’m glad he manages to get the message of the book, that the correct answer is arrived at by individuals applying their own judgement. That rule by the wise at the centre doesn’t actually work. But how can he be so willfully obtuse as to not realise that this challenges his entire worldview? Explodes it in fact? Shouldn’t he, if he’s actually absorbed the lesson of the book, close down The Work Foundation and retire himself?