 Differential competence is the main threat to the growing-reliability hypothesis. The political upshot is that the epistemic superiority of democracy is at stake—is it epistemically better for a society to be run by a few competent citizens? The wisdom-of-crowds conclusion indeed breaks down in all three theorems if one removes homogeneity from the competence premise. Larger bodies can then perform worse, because new members may be (much) less competent than existing members. Majority reliability can even become a decreasing function of group size, and can converge to a level as low as \(\frac{1}{2}\) if competence of new members converges fast enough to \(\frac{1}{2}\).