Diversity of opinions is helpful for risk management, specifically the risk that you commit all your resources to the single idea that turns out to be wrong. This is commonly known as "don't put all your eggs into one basket". Risk management is not only about money.
if you don't know how to determine a correct answer, there's not much to think about until you do.
I strongly disagree. In fact, figuring out how would you recognize a correct answer if it happens to bite you on the ass is the major thing to think about for many problems.
The benefit I mentioned above of diversity (higher chance of getting the right answer) is the same thing as what you're talking about then, not like you said :"That, too, but there are other issues as well". If you can recognize the correct answer when you see it, then the use of diversity is to increase your chances of getting the right answer.
So are we down to the only correct use of the original quote is when people aren't sure how to recognize a correct answer?
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: