CW is still described today as if it were a shadowy government agency covertly imposing itself on popular opinion. But, all things considered, it's a relatively wise and benign one. The argument for CW stems from the broader argument in favor of consensus as the most effective means of uncovering and defining truth. In the end, he concluded, truth is what competent people eventually come to agree it is. Peirce's defense of consensus is not as facile as it sounds.
Groups are simply better than individuals at ferreting out truth.
In one classic social science experiment, a professor asked students to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. Invariably each individual's guess was way off. But an average of all the predictions almost always landed near the target. As The New Yorker 's James Surowiecki recently described, Los Alamos physicist Norman Johnson has conducted a similar but more intricate study. Johnson asked his subjects to navigate a computer-simulated maze.