I think you are pretty close with this. I too am a big fan of the wisdom of the crowd, but like you say, it looks very easily skewed, and is being skewed. You describe that as corporate pressure, but I would say it is more specifically the actions of profit.

What I see more and more is folk coming to think that everything can be decided by debate, when this isn't true, not for everything. There are some things beyond debate.

The weight of the famous ox was pretty accurately guessed by the crowd, but they would probably never be able to guess how many bones it has in its body. Yet that is a more deterministic fact about the ox, that only an expert who knows the construction of the ox, and has counted the bones would know, like Da Vinci used to do with human cadavers, only he really knew the anatomy of a human, and only he could draw the pictures he drew.

Further, the conseequence of getting the structure of the ox wrong, compared with getting its weight wrong, are far more consequential, if we were trying to recreate an ox, for example.

I see problems like this happening in the "Debate" going on around the climate problem, which is actually only a symptom of something much deeper and more consequential, it is actually a global energy problem.

We are running out of the useable energy of Earth, and conventional science is missing some vital construction details about the energy system, which is fundamental, it will never be worked out by the wisdom of the crowd, though we might be instinctively "Feeling" the truth, only the expertise gained by actually traversing through the system can provide the knowledge needed.

Hence the problem I have trying to get this known, having done the traversing as a long practicing systems Engineer, the problem ironically seems to be that the conclusions we come to look religious.

Things like profit being actually an energy con, where energy is stolen from Earth, without us really being aware of it, what we do at profit has to end with energy stolen from Earth in the form of things that mostly end up as heat, rather than the non-heat form that they were, and this translates directly to temperature rise, its the first temperature rise before we consider multipliers like C02, whch are symptoms of the core problem of energy theft from Earth. Saying it bluntly: Profit is destruction. We are monetising destruction, thinking it is creation. Money issued as debt is a requisition for energy to be stolen from Earth. I could go on and on, its a huge system, but the more we look, the more we realise religion, at least religion not perverted by profit, was right all along, all the crimes identified by religion are actually energy crimes. There is such a thing as good and evil, good is the emergent propoerty that emerges from multitudes of things created by mathematically positive energy (The energy of the sun), and evil is what emerges from multitudes of things created by negative energy (Energy extracted from Earth), because in the creation of anything from the energy of Earth, had to be destroyed far more than was "Created". Evil does have a motive, it is to destroy all of life, to end it all. It is literally suicidal in its mission to do this, and most of us have no idea this is how we've lived for thousands of years.

But it can be changed, again something apparent from knowing the energy system.

I write about that, many stories in Medium, even now also publishing e-books about it. But still the crowd doesn't really see it.

Hey-ho.