Gareth Cliff

Media, TV, Radio, Podcasting, Writing. Host of #TheGarethCliffShow.

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

Excellent summary of his unassailable theory by @GadSaad - help your friends understand. Their survival depends on it.

[Joe Emilio @Joe_Emilio_]

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[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

Well done to our swimmers

[Leah Potgieter MP @LeahK28]

South African swimmers have now won 16 Commonwealth Games medals despite inadequate funding.

Federations are still waiting for grants already due while parents pay to send athletes abroad.

Yet Gayton McKenzie found R31m for his World Cup spectacle. You do the math...

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

(3)

Everyone thinks they’d be brave enough, if they were in Nazi Germany, to cry out “This is wrong!”. Everyone thinks they’d stand up to a bully if they were magically transported back to school. Everyone thinks they’d be virtuous, skeptical and courageous. But they wouldn’t. They’d do what almost everyone did in 2020: They’d join the herd.

I did a mushroom 'journey' with a friend a few years ago and might’ve figured out why mobs terrify me. It’s purely anecdotal and in no way supports the argument I’ve made so far, but I experienced what I assume to be some kind of regression or fantasy of a past life - and in it, a mob decided to kill me. The details are sketchy, and I don’t know what I might’ve done to provoke them, but they cut my head off. In this life, for better or worse, I’m deeply suspicious of any large group of people - especially if they’re animated by certitude and righteousness. Mobs have done infinitely more damage to civilisation than they have good, and anyone who believes in the wisdom of the crowd needs to be given a wide berth.

Herd mentality, collective responsibility, the abdication of individual agency, prioritizing feelings of security and the desire to be liked sit together at one end of human nature. Honest curiosity, an appetite for risk, personal accountability, individual spirit and consent to consequence are at the other. That’s where character is formed. That’s where adventure begins. That’s where genius might appear. Every great story from history is about someone who swam upstream, who refused to bow, who said no when everyone else said yes. Evolution and our genes have bestowed on us an irresistible need to belong, but being alive in this century privileges us in ways our primitive ancestors could never have imagined.

Consensus has never impressed me. Courage always does.

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

(2)

Research on the “hidden-profile” problem finds that groups disproportionately discuss information already shared by most members. Unique information - the very information that could correct the group - is mentioned less often and carries less influence. A meta-analysis covering 65 studies and 3,189 groups found that groups discussed substantially more common information than unique information. This produces an absurd result: the group may collectively possess enough information to reach the right answer, yet they still choose the wrong one because it rewards familiarity rather than discovery.

Group-polarisation research shows that when like-minded people discuss an issue, their average position generally moves further in the direction they already favoured. Cautious groups become more cautious; risk-seeking groups become riskier; politically agitated groups become more zealous. Discussion therefore does not automatically moderate bad ideas. Among people with similar assumptions, it can refine the arguments, strengthen identity and remove remaining doubts, but a room full of people who are only slightly wrong can leave the room unanimously and spectacularly wrong.

Information-cascade theory explains how people rationally abandon their private information after observing what others have chosen. Once a few early decisions point in one direction, later participants infer that the earlier people must know something. They imitate them, creating further “evidence” for the next person. The result can be mass behaviour that is simultaneously widespread, fragile and poorly informed. This explains fashions, speculative bubbles, corporate fads, political slogans and moral panics: A million people can repeat an idea whose evidential ancestry leads back to one confident fool.

People routinely infer expertise from certainty, repetition, status and consensus. None of those things guarantees truth. A statement repeated ten thousand times does not acquire ten thousand pieces of evidence. It acquires familiarity, and familiarity masquerades as plausibility. This is one of the reasons that propaganda works. Its first purpose isn’t to convince you something is true. It’s to make disagreement feel abnormal.

Truth competes against narratives with superior marketing - but crowds can only be wise when a system protects independence. Crowds become foolish when the system rewards conformity.

John Stuart Mill understood that nonconformity has social value independent of whether every eccentric is correct: “The mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.” H. L. Mencken offered the more acid formulation: “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” Tocqueville’s concern was not merely that the majority could pass bad laws. It was that majority opinion could exercise an intellectual despotism, making independent thought socially intolerable. His work describes democratic conformity as a threat to individuality and vigour - and democracy.

Crowds do not eliminate individual stupidity. They can coordinate it - and crowds are least trustworthy when they’re the most certain.

So let’s go back to COVID, Fauci and the millions of people all over the world who stopped sense-checking the wisdom of the crowd. The people who just conformed to new dictates, who believed everything they saw on the news, social media and what the “experts” told them. Some of them did all that, despite knowing how stupid it was to force toddlers to wear masks. Those people are still among us, pretending it never happened. Those people were the ones persecuting their own neighbours. Those people told the rest of us we were putting grandma at risk - and they’ll do it again.

(Continued)

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

(1) Herd Immunity

Apart from Fox News, some of the people I follow on X, and one or two Instagram reels, nobody, it seems, is very interested in Dr. Fauci’s latest appearance before Rand Paul’s committee in Congress. If you’re not interested, I can’t say I blame you. Most of us just want to forget COVID, masks, lockdowns, vaccines and that whole disgraceful episode in our recent history. But stay with me for a second, and I’ll tell you why you should:

The disastrous decisions made by elected and unelected officials; the destruction of public trust in experts, medicine and the media; and, most importantly, the damage done to children, businesses, families, and society should not so easily be memory-holed just because we’re embarrassed about the whole affair. In fact, unless we face up to how badly the world handled that pandemic, we will find ourselves dangerously unprepared for any crisis of that scale in the future.

A post-mortem is long overdue. Fauci is only the most megalomaniacal and self-serving manifestation of a worldview that set humanity back more than any disease should have. That worldview is one that many still live by - the government is right and will save us; trust the experts; believe what people say not what they do; force people to comply if they won’t; silence criticism and outlaw offense; follow the herd.

That last bit of received, perceived wisdom is precisely why so much of the human race is so utterly disappointing.

As we enter an era where billions of people already use artificial intelligence to do everything from answering their emails to writing laws - the ability to think for yourself, to function as the world changes around you and to apply your mind in the moment (whether you end up being right or wrong) - is the best weapon we have to create a future that is better than our past.

Modern public opinion - especially online - usually violates every condition required for wisdom and reason. People want to knowkiolp99 what others think before deciding what they think. Algorithms amplify the fashionable opinion. Social opprobrium discourages sincere dissent. Straightforward, obvious axioms are overridden by moral, political and emotional posturing.

A major 2011 experiment by Jan Lorenz and Heiko Rauhaut asked people to make factual estimates, then exposed them to other participants’ answers. Even modest social influence caused estimates to converge without making them more accurate. Worse, the narrowing range of answers created greater confidence in the group’s conclusion. The researchers called this the social-influence effect: diversity declines, confidence rises, but they don’t get any closer to the truth.

Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments gave participants an extremely simple visual task: matching lines of equal length. Alone, people were correct almost all the time. When surrounded by actors unanimously giving an obviously wrong answer, participants adopted the wrong answer on roughly a third of the critical trials. The question was not difficult. The social situation was uncomfortable. The most revealing variation was what happened when only one person dissented. Once unanimity was broken, conformity fell dramatically. The dissenter did not even always need to be correct; his existence showed that disagreement was socially possible. People do not need permission to believe something. They need permission to say it…. (Continued)

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

😉👍🏼

[Kanthan Pillay 🇿🇦 @KanthanPillay]

Winning 10 years and counting @GarethCliff

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

The political left will always reveal, given enough time, just how much they crave and aspire to the violence they’re always accusing the rest of us of. Give them power, and they’ll act out every macabre fantasy without conscience:

[Newsday @NewsdayZA]

Political analyst and author Moeletsi Mbeki said that the Democratic Alliance is taking a dangerous gamble to keep the ANC in power and prolong its failed policies.
https://t.co/57iuiFfuh5

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

Turns out, according to his own diary, that Anthony Fauci was an egomaniacal little grey man - and that some of his motivations in the COVID-era were downright evil. I’m sure we can find a list of all the idiots who thought he was some kind of messiah. Many who didn’t are owed apologies

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

@Jonathan_Witt @KanthanPillay @dailymaverick Yup

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Use your critical thinking. Do not sacrifice our civilization in order to stroke your luxuriant hair in the Mirror of Moral Preening.

Have a great week.

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

Trump was right. Looks like a shithole. A once great city that looks like absolute hell. Amandla!

[Our City News @OurCityNews]

A view of Johannesburg from the train as Walk the Talk participants travelled between Ellis Park and Park Station on July 26, 2026. The journey offered a glimpse of the city from a different perspective.
#702WTT #JoziMyJozi #LetsWalkTheTalk #702WalkTheTalk

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

I love how an organization that builds nothing has the temerity to publish gotcha articles about one that serves its community in tangible, positive and constructive ways. The people who run Afriforum deserve every cent they get. And I’ll bet their donors agree

[News24 🇿🇦 @News24]

Inside AfriForum’s money machine: How lobby group splurges on salaries, marketing
https://t.co/PaGDhY2aOK

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This has my full support.

Jensen is right.

[David Ansara @DavidAnsara]

RW Johnson in His Own Words

Selected passages from the books of one of South Africa's great political writers. R.I.P.

A thread 📚

[Richard Wilkinson @wilkinsoncape]

At the height of the Pretoria Girls scandal, this tweet was retweeted 3,000 times and got 2.2 million views.

Now widely accepted that the "racism report" referred to below is completely discredited.

Never forget how the media (News24) just amplified whatever Lesufi fed them.

[eNCA @eNCA]

Former Statistician-General Pali Lehohla says South Africa's economic problems come from a government that is both corrupt and does not understand economic models of growth. Lehohla says he is also worried about the country's increasing reliance on borrowing. Tune in to #eNCA, channel #DStv403.

[Gareth Cliff @GarethCliff]

Good read for anyone who still thinks “the news” is a real thing…

[Kanthan Pillay 🇿🇦 @KanthanPillay]

@Mish_K_ @MattiFriedman @Mr_Andrew_Fox @JakeWSimons @The_Brink_ Here’s some useful information https://t.co/gv9pMxhtkR