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" The canonical example of this phenomenon is an experiment run by the British scientist Francis Galton. In 1906, Galton collected data from a group of people at a country fair who were trying to guess the weight of a fat ox. Of the roughly eight hundred people who wagered a guess, most were wide of the mark. However, the average of all their guesses was nearly perfect. This experiment would later be repeated many times. Oddly, researchers learned that the key to the experiment was that each person needed to judge the weight of the ox independently, without sharing their guesses with one another. In similar experiments where people were given access to one another’s answers, the collective intelligence of the group worsened. Often, the early guesses provoked a false consensus to form, a vicious circle that caused the later guesses to hurtle toward ever-greater error. “The more influence a group’s members exert on each other,” wrote Surowiecki, “the less likely it is that the group’s decisions will be wise ones. "
― Robert Moor , On Trails: An Exploration
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" You can tell the story without ever going to Mount Mitchell, it’s still an entertaining story. But when you go up on top of that mountain and you see that landform, you’re like ‘Oh, this is what they’re describing.’ It’s amazing.” “Almost every prominent rock and mountain, every deep bend in the river, in the old Cherokee country has its accompanying legend,” noted the ethnographer James Mooney. “It may be a little story that can be told in a paragraph, to account for some natural feature, or it may be one chapter of a myth that has its sequel in a mountain a hundred miles away.” This phenomenon, Mooney wrote, extended well beyond the Cherokee. In the storytelling traditions of virtually every indigenous culture, stories don’t unfold abstractly, like Little Red Riding Hood skipping through unnamed woods; they take place. The stories of the Inuit, for example, always specify a real setting where the story (often, a depiction of a journey) unfolds; many stories even include details about the direction of the prevailing wind. "
― Robert Moor , On Trails: An Exploration
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" Apache oral narratives were vivid, fluid; they shifted subtly with each telling, in accordance with the whims of the speaker and the disposition of the listener. Apache stories may not have been strictly accurate by academic standards, but they were wise, witty, and most important, they worked. To teach someone a lesson, Apache elders would often tell that person a story about a specific place. For example, a careless boy might be told the story of the canyon where a girl took a shortcut against her mother’s instructions and ended up getting bitten by a snake. That way, every time the careless boy passed by or even heard mention of that canyon, he would be reminded of the lesson. It was, therefore, no exaggeration when Apaches said that a place “stalks” them, or that the land “makes the people live right. "
― Robert Moor , On Trails: An Exploration