You could try to explicitly model how correlated your friends are. Do they all talk to each other and reach consensus? Then from 10 friends you’re not getting 10 opinions, it could be more like 2 (or could even be <1, if they’re not keeping track of who is confident based on what evidence, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade ). Do most of them use mostly the same strategies for evaluating something (same strategies to search for information, to find counterarguments, to think of ways they made unhelpful assumptions, etc. etc.)? Then you’ve got correlated error, and you might be able to help them and yourself by trying to notice when other groups of people do useful work where your friends are failing to do useful work (though the other group may have their own systematic errors).
You could try to explicitly model how correlated your friends are. Do they all talk to each other and reach consensus? Then from 10 friends you’re not getting 10 opinions, it could be more like 2 (or could even be <1, if they’re not keeping track of who is confident based on what evidence, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade ). Do most of them use mostly the same strategies for evaluating something (same strategies to search for information, to find counterarguments, to think of ways they made unhelpful assumptions, etc. etc.)? Then you’ve got correlated error, and you might be able to help them and yourself by trying to notice when other groups of people do useful work where your friends are failing to do useful work (though the other group may have their own systematic errors).