As specializations grow, they eventually create a separate [social class] of individuals who essentially do nothing to actually [create], but instead control others who actually create things, and they become a type of "ruling class" of bureaucrats

The rise of the network allows us to exploit the fact of human labor that long predates the Internet. The ability to divvy up an overwhelming task - such as the writing of an exhaustive encyclopedia - into small enough chunks that completing it becomes not only feasible, but fun.

Decentralization : power does not fully reside in one central location, and many of the important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing planner.

It fosters and is fed by specialization.

The closer a person is to a problem, the more likely he or she is to have a good solution to it.

Decentralization's great weakness is that there's no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the system will find its way through the rest of the system. Sometimes valuable information never gets disseminated.

A decentralized system can only produce genuinely intelligent results if there's a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system.
- THIS IS A DIFFERENT KIND OF SPECIALIZATION ALTOGETHER

In America, the people whom inequality bothers most are the rich. Americans are far more likely to believe that wealth is the result of initiative and skill, while Europeans are more likely to attribute it to luck.

Decentralized markets work exceptionally well because the people and companies in those markets are getting constant feedback from customers. Companies that aren't doing a good job or are spending too much learn to adjust or else they go out of business.

The anonymity of the markets and the fact that they yield a relatively clear solution, while giving individuals an unmistakable incentive to uncover and act on good information, means that their potential value is genuinely hard to overestimate.

Even brilliant experts have biases and blind spots, so they can make mistakes. What's troubling is that, in general, they don't know when they're making those mistakes. Experts don't know when they don't know something.

That's why it's worthwhile to cast a wider net and why relying on a crowd of decision makers improves (though doesn't guarantee) your chances of reaching a good decision.

Be careful to keep the group diverse, and careful to prevent people from influencing one another too much.

The crowd's judgement is going to give us the best chance of making the right decision, and in the face of that knowledge, traditional notions of power and leadership should begin to pale. I am cautiously hopeful that they will, allowing us to begin to trust individual leaders less and ourselves more.

The right person with the right combination of talent, willingness, and a few spare hours will take on the job. (Context - Wikipedia - who would write each of the 2.2 million entries on the portal)

The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies. (Book released in 2007)
- The Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem - Given certain conditions, a randomly selected collection of problem solvers outperforms a collection of the best individual problem solvers.

Collective intelligence works better in practice than it does in theory.

The odds of a solver's success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise. The farther the problem was from their specialized knowledge, the more likely it was to be solved.

IDEA: the reality of specialization is that it only persists for so long
- eventually, it devolves into the [technical idiot]
- the only way to have specialization maintain any quality is through [understanding] of completely unrelated things to give a domain of expertise that rounds out a person
- this is why people who live [the good life] are more qualified to run things than bureaucrats or other "experts"

((about scribes:)) Instead of mass professionalization, the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateurization. The term "scribe" didn't get extended to everyone who could read and write. Instead, it simply disappeared, as it no longer denoted a professional class.
- THE [PROFESSIONAL] BECOMES SCOPED AS LOWER IMPORTANCE AS THE [TREND] TAKES HOLD

Have no assistant. The mere presence of an assistant suspends your natural filtering. Its absence forces you to do only things you enjoy, and progressively steer your life that way.
(By assistant here I exclude someone hired for a specific task, such as grading papers, helping with accounting, or watering plants; just some guardian angel overseeing all your activities.)

To "explain" to an assistant how to do things requires more mental effort than doing the thing itself.
- THIS IS WHY [TECHNOLOGY] MAKES US WEAK: WE OUTSOURCE AND THEREFORE MAKE THINGS COMPLICATED TO DO LITTLE THINGS

Having an assistant (except for the strictly necessary) removes your soul from the game.

When a patient shows up with a headache, it is much better to give him aspirin or recommend a good night's sleep than do brain surgery, although the latter appears to be more scientific.

People without skin in the game seek the complicated and centralized, and avoid the simple like the plague.
Practitioners, on the other hand, have opposite instincts, looking for the simplest heuristics.
- THAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A [PROFESSIONAL] AND A [TECHNICAL IDIOT]

Real gyms don't look like gyms.

The rich start using "experts" and "consultants." An entire industry meant to swindle you will swindle you: financial consultants, diet advisors, exercise experts, lifestyle engineers, sleeping councilors, breathing specialists, etc.

Industrialism brought hospitals and CD players and the Egg McMuffin. What could be bad about that? The change in culture went further than most expected. We have changed the very nature of our dreams.

Before the revolution: Virtually all musicians aren't picked by a label and are invisible nonentities. Of those who are picked, 98 percent fail in the marketplace. Of the remaining 2 percent, less than half a percent ever receive a single royalty check as a result of their recorded music. Ever. So we have a world where the odds of being signed are close to zero and the odds of getting a check as a result of your sales, even if you are signed, is even closer to zero. After the revolution: A musician who sells two (two!) copies of a song on iTunes makes more money than she would have earned from a record label for selling an entire CD for seventeen dollars. There are more musicians making more music being heard by more people and earning more money than ever before.

Now, multiply what happened to music by a million.
Multiply it by consulting, coaching, and design.
Multiply it by manufacturing, speaking, and nonprofits.
Multiply it by whatever it is you care enough to do.
That's what after looks like.

When she makes her own art on her own terms, two things happen:
She unlocks her ability to make an impact, removing all the excuses between her current place and the art she wants to make.
And she exposes herself, because now it's her decision to perform, not the casting director's.
It's her repertoire that's being judged, not the dramaturge's.

A society with plenty of [technology] will always naturally select a subset of its population
- they'll either [specialize] into an extreme niche or will move to somewhere with more opportunities