There are passive investors, and there are active investors. I prefer to be the latter. It definitely takes more time and effort, but it's far more profitable too. One of the main reasons I got into Real Estate Investing was that I wanted to control my own investments from beginning to end.
With that said, there's nothing wrong with investing passively and leaving the bulk of the work and decisions in someone else's hands as long as you're sufficiently educated and informed on the details of how the funds will be invested, how profits will be distributed, etc.
Before I would invest, I would also want to have personally known the principal(s) in the syndicate for a long time. If that's not practical for the opportunity you're considering now, instead of referring you back to the first paragraph of my reply, I'll just say that you shouldn't invest any more than you're willing to lose.