Instinctively most of us know that an individual will be smarter than a large group of people on average. But it's also clear that this rule of larger groups vs individuals doesn't hold true everywhere in nature.
For example, one neuron is certainly not smarter than a brain. When we consider this we receive a clue to a certain pattern that may reveal the truth.
That pattern is a simple one: intelligence is not necessarily based on the number of individual parts in a system but, rather, is proportional to the number of parts and quality of connection between those parts.
The human brain is smart not because it has so many neurons, but because those neurons are very well organized. People simply do not have the tools to organize on that level yet.
In truth, the only real way to get a brain-quality connection with a very large number of people is to somehow connect those individuals' brains directly.
We're still a ways from such a future, but we are experiencing something like a prototypical stage right now. Small groups can indeed organize in such a way that they are smarter than any individual in them, though this is largely because of the fact that there are many disparate bodies of knowledge and a team of specialists is often required to finish a project.
The middle-man problem that blockchain seeks to solve exists because it was the only way to organize a large group of people, previously. But with the advent of blockchain that is no longer the case. A community like that found on the Hive blockchain is a prime example. On Hive, we as a community decide what content has value, and what content has less value.
It's not perfect, but it's definitely better than anything that came before. I've been saying it since Hive was Steem but I'll say it again: Hive is the future. Something like this will be how people determine value going forward.
Just recently I read a post by 
My first thought after seeing the numbers, which number in the very least in the tens of millions (although, remember, that it's only for Hive.blog specifically, not the other dApps), was that we don't get nearly that much activity on the chain and don't see nearly that amount of posts, comments, and voting. This concern lingered, but 
Lurkers were a big majority on reddit too for the longest time
It's true. We could be on the precipice of a big change. As far as I know, no other community is as perfectly poised as us to initiate change for potentially millions of people.
So with a nod and a wink I congratulate you: those of us interacting on the chain right now can be considered the early birds. I don't mind waiting a little longer for the worm.