The hiding places of the second-handers

Here I am, posting after such a long time. I guess the low frequency is more due to the very nature of this blog. I created this blog in order to poke fun at things I don't like and vilify them. So I have to first codify my hates, because they are manifested in many subtle ways, and it takes time to actually find out what is actually the cause of this dislike.
Like see what happened recently - well, before that, some introduction for the un-initiated. IIT Kanpur, my place of study, has a system called the counselling service, which helps new students adjust into the place. One of the ways they do this is to appoint Student Guides, who are senior students selected by a process. I am one of these Student Guides. The service organizes a workshop, where the guides are "trained".
When I was sitting in these training sessions, which consisted, for a large part, of Group Discussions, I felt bored and irritated. I couldn't believe that I could not sit through mere three hour sessions.
I started thinking why. After a few minutes, I realized why. During the Discussions, the guides and everyone just blabbered inanities. Yes, they just blabbered inanities. I can't think of a more appropriate way to say it.
They went through a whole session with the same, expected, saintly answers, and discussed these dumb things to death. Stereotypical thinking was in full view. Was something wrong with the counselling service? Yes, there was. To put it simply, the workshop was redundant. The counselling service is a sort of pious thing, so go ahead, be pious. Nothing wrong with that. But why discuss the obvious thing to death? So the trouble was in the group discussions. Aha, not just THE group discussion, but all group discussions.
A group discussion is a democratic thing. Yes, everyone has his say. And the mob comes to a conclusion. So like a democracy. But a democratic process is not what great ideas come from. Great ideas are not born by making a couple of dumb people sit and chew cud together for hours. Neither are they by making intelligent people sit for hours and chew cud. The same thing holds for both groups, simply, because a group's ability is constant and infinitesmal, that is, as small as you can think, whatever be the composition of the group. It is not even equal to the least of the abilities of the individual members. It is an oft observed fact that in a group, people just lose their faculties.
In fact, the whole group discussion circus can be described to a very good degree of accuracy by a theory, which I would just call the Pavlovian Theory of Group Discussions, based on Ivan Pavlov's experiments on mental conditioning. In this analogy, the experimenter is the fellow who puts forward the question, who knows the "saintly" and "preferable" outcomes already, just like the real experimenter, who knows that the dog will salivate in the end. The participants are like the dog under testing, continually exposed to the stimulus, that is, the question, until they get "conditioned" to give the right response, i.e the "saintly" response, just like the dog learnt to salivate. At the end, they all agree to give the conditioned response, i.e, the "saintly" response, after which the committee "after deliberations", "arrives" at a "consensus". Who are you trying to fool with all these flowery euphemisms?