MIT Looks to Give Group Think a Good Name 167
netbuzz writes "With Friday's opening of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, researchers there hope to address this central question: "How can people and computers be connected so that — collectively — they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?""
text is a insufficient medium for this (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll give them the benefit of trying to start a realistic project without any fancy, not-yet existing technology, and therefore accept that their attempt for collective intelligence is writing a business book [wearesmarter.com] in what they call Wikipedia-style, so far with 300 participants. But I believe that books or the written word in general is not the right tool for collective intelligence and in fact right now stopping us from making some advances e.g. in education.
We've all grown up in a culture dominated by information transfer via text and been trained by our educational system to be producers of text ourselves. I'm currently doing it on slashdot, everybody is communicating via email and IM, because that's what we've learned.
But there has been a lot of research showing that richer media (not flash, but visualization and simulation) are often much more appropriate to describe complex subjects. There has been a trend for a long time to stuff text books with more graphics, diagrams, pictures, and educational software with videos, animations and so on. A picture can say more than a thousand words if placed in the right context.
Unfortunately we are not yet trained to use more than a basic hypertext processor for media creation. How many teachers can even draw a diagram? How many websites have useful graphics? If you look at wikipedia, it's basically a large book with a few photos and even fewer good diagrams, no simulations or whatever. So when reading e.g. wikipedia it is up to the reader again to create an internal visualization and hope to match the image intended by the authors.
I believe to make progress in collective intelligence we have to move our media production to match the mental capabilities of humans. Text was very useful when it was the only technical viable solution, but today there are many more and better media types, only our culture of media creation is behind the possibilities by some decades. YouTube may be a nice step in the right direction and what Lawrence Lessing [lessig.org] said about creating CC licensed rich flash content also is. But starting another wiki style pseudo book is not.
It's a people problem, not a technical one (Score:5, Insightful)
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Rock, Papers, Scissors, Shoot!
(I throw Scissors)
(Real scissors when experts disagree with me)
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True those things must be dealt with (and are probably the majority of the problem), but the ability to index, search, and automatically extract collective knowledge is important - this is one of the reasons that text is so successful on the web. Besides open formats ensure our kids will have access to o
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Don't forget the process of identifying and evaluating experts in the first place. This is psychologically challenging due to the significant tendency of people assigned to judge expertise to not be objective, plus the redundant requirement that they themselves must usually be experts to do the job well.
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Wikipedia is another effort with good, but not good enough mechanisms.
One doesn't know what the limitations of this kind of approach are. Merely that the current mechanisms aren't "good enough".
For that matter, consider scientific publications. That is an approach with a LOT going for it, but it's not perfect. Some people get too attached to their own name being successful. (A
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Wikipedia is another effort with good, but not good enough mechanisms.
Despite appearances, they're two of the most successful collaborative tools in human history.
I'm sure you're right that they will be overshadowed by better designed tools in the future, but don't get your knickers in a twist because they're not perfect now. I know this is the era of instant gratification, b
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I doubt many things will ever be 'perfect'. Comment moderation is not, and Wikipedia moderation is not. The grandparent poster wasn't trying to say that
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How Stuff Works is a great example of how to mix text & pictures/media
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I don't agree that text is useless, sure it's not the best for every situation, but it is a companion to other styles of rendering and communicating information. This is where I believe FORUMS actually enhance "group think" there are LOTS of gold nuggets particular section of some topic in many peoples minds that would take
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I didn't mean to say that text is useless, just insufficient. Forums are actually a good example for this: They work because all the participants are able to create text and the forum itself provides a minimal structure by displaying the discussion thread. But after the discussion has ended, there remains a lot of redundant information. It is often ways more efficient to find and follow a former discussion about the subject you are researching than rethinking it yourself, but it requires you to rethink the
Easy way to make true AI (Score:3, Insightful)
For example you have if you're a Republican or a Democrat.
Democrats mod stuff down Republicans may mod up. So they should each have their own scoring section.
There are a LOT of groups people can be a part of. Even social cliques if you so desire.
Eventually people who's articles that get modded up a lot will start with a degree of moderation to them.
Or you can search on your favorite authors.
I hate t
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Certainly rich media are useful for communicating complex concepts, but the richer the media gets, the more inherently limiting it becomes. Think of it as necessarily increasing "specialisation" with "richness".
For example, classic "text" (as in "written words") is undoubtedly the most basic communication mechanism - atonal, no inflection, no unambiguous emotional indicators, etc.
However, it's also:
Borg (Score:3, Insightful)
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And Deb and Ian have a rodent named Iceweasel.
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Slashdot (Score:2)
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simplish (Score:1)
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When you put computers and people together, kittens should be very worried indeed.
I'm sorry, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is collective intelligence possible? (Score:2)
Then there is the less obvious issue that intelligence is not uniformly good or bad. What makes sense in one situation (problem, country, culture, etc) does not
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Yes, it already exists. (Score:2)
Yes, and it's called Wiki.
-Rick
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First there's the obvious issue of "negative intelligence" where plugging stupid people into a system has a detramental effect.
Especially when those morons can't spell.
Look out, it's coming! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because God Knows there haven't [myspace.com] been [secondlife.com] any [slashdot.org] going [wikipedia.com] on [fark.com] so [perlmonks.org] far [youtube.com]...
Yeah, but... (Score:3, Funny)
computers not intelligent (Score:1)
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Computers might not be intelligent, but your argument for this is complete crap. All you have to do is add a true random number generator (eg. using radioactive decay) and they no longer "do exactly as they are told by you or someone else".
And even if your argument were sound, I'd have to completely disagree with you anyway. If I had a machine that did exactly what I told it do do, I think it'd be a
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I don't get what you're saying. If I build such a random number generator into the computer it's part of the computer. What you're doing is like saying that no car can travel faster than 30mph. When I find a car that travels faster you simply say "that's a weird kind of engine, I don't consider that engine to be truly part of the car". That's just plain silly. I'm claimin
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define intelligent
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Chess isn't a game of "intelligence" so much as "mathematics". Despite what chess loons would like you to think of it, winning at chess does not involve complex creativity, but rather successful calculation and identification of the most numerically advantageous path on a finite decision tree. This is why Kasparov was so pissed off when he lost to Deep Blue. No master chess player wants to have it pushed in their face that they're not so
cluster (Score:2, Insightful)
I know where they should start. (Score:2, Funny)
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Yeah, but in the wrong direction.
UCSC has done similar research (Score:3, Interesting)
We not as think as you dumb you are (Score:1)
The opposite is true (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:The opposite is true (Score:4, Insightful)
You are oversimplifying. There are cases of collective intelligence, and examples of good work coming from groups.
For example, the group that produced the King James Bible, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, GIMPS (not GNU Image Manipulation Program, but the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search - OK, it probably doesn't belong in this list, as it's less "intelligence" and more brute force throwing processing power at a fairly simple but time-consuming problem).
I'm sure there are other good examples people could give. Those are just ones that quickly come to my mind. Some have suggested that the human brain is itself a form of collective intelligence. Lots of little "subroutines" working together to form a "sum greater than the parts", or something like that. It's been awhile but I've read a couple of the references cited here: http://ericrollins.home.mindspring.com/evoCellACM
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What often time group thinkers fail to realize is that breakthrough ideas can not be parallelized. Imagine Albert Einstein consulting on General Relativity. You might get something ridiculous like string theory.
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What often time group thinkers fail to realize is that breakthrough ideas can not be parallelized. Imagine Albert Einstein consulting on General Relativity. You might get something ridiculous like string theory.
That's incorrect in practice. General Relativity was the product of a number of scientists and required work in Riemannian geometry going back half a century. Most scientific progress involves an intense exchange of ideas.Re: (Score:2)
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I personally think of it as an older version of Aesop's fables, but in no way a product of Group Intelligence.
Why? Seems like a great example to me.Re: (Score:2)
This argument is seductive and almost, but not quite, true.
The optimum result comes from a system in which an intelligent benign decision-maker obtains and considers input from a small group of equally intelligent people. It's not even hard to prove this mathematically. The trick in real life is that this configuration tends not to be stable: the decision
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The problem of group think can be a matter of everyone agreeing on principles, so no other courses can seem reasonable, which is just as prevalent in groups of "smart" people; it takes a mixed group to question assumptions (if people dare speak up against all the "experts").
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Tron (n/t) (Score:1)
It's all about effeciency (Score:5, Funny)
Think of how much more rapidly Congress could create worthless legislation and shameful scandals with the assistance of sophisticated Artificial Stupidity algorithms. There's probably also a Beowulf cluster joke in here, somewhere.
Re mod parent up (Score:1)
Just a name change? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is there more to this than groupware-on-steroids? Would like to hear the possible downside to this approach, since analog people don't mesh seamlessly with digital technology...
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*blink* *blink*
I'm trying to figure out what that means, when any kid playing Super Mario will tell you that they mesh just fine.
As other mention, I think it's more of a question of "how can we set up social order so we have thousands of people working closely together, but so we don't have decision-by-mob or decision-by-committee?"
Okay, that's a question that real-life companiesand organizations have been asking themselves for at least a
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If you get it right, you own the world (Score:2)
- Experts on a subject in a large group tend to be minority, not majority
- If you pick a group entirely of experts, thens til the best experts on a problem will be a minority
- The "stupid" majority silences the "smart" minority
- Groupthink without some totally innovative mechanism is this: random noise + averaging. Hardly making the end product smarter
- Groupthink reduces the chances of factual errors (few agents discovering a factual error will
Yea, except this is MIT. (Score:2)
"
- Experts on a subject in a large group tend to be minority, not majority
- If you pick a group entirely of experts, thens til the best experts on a problem will be a minority
- The "stupid" majority silences the "smart" minority
- Groupthink without some totally innovative mechanism is this: random noise + averaging. Hardly making the end product smarter
- Groupthink reduces the chances of factual errors (few agent
Collective Intelligence (Score:1)
"Group think: The process that brought you the Iraq Quagmire"
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Singularity?!? (Score:1)
collective intelligence should figure this out (Score:1)
The Trap of Gargantius (Score:1, Funny)
Another path to the Singularity (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore, the participants in this network wouldn't necessarily have to be aware of each other, nor would they need to be aware that they were part of a collective intelligence. People tend to cooperate more easily when they don't realize they're doing it.
We humans have a lot of core competencies, but neither managing group efforts nor making decisions by committe belong to this category. Machines, on the other hand, are fantastic at administrative minutiae. Machines also are much better at number crunching in general, something we already rely on them heavily for. The merging of human and machine cultures seems like a logical progression to me, and I don't believe I am drinking Kurzweil's Kool-Aid.
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It's good to see that you quoted precisely and left this part:
Otherwise I would be compeled to disagree with you. :)
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Another poster mentioned middle management, but my first thought is that
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Yea. That's pretty much what I was saying. One thing though to keep in mind is that some "human" foibles are really conflicts of interest that any sentient being would have, if it were in the same role.
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Professor Vinge is very Libertarian, and it
First rule: No communication between group members (Score:2)
2 Examples of Collective Intelligence (Score:2)
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4. A development team.
5. A band of musicians.
6. A hunting party (intelligence distributed across species, often)
7. A film crew.
The most interesting human activities nowadays are those in which no single human being could possibly understand the masteries and fluences that constitute it. The anthropologist Emile Durkheim considered it a feature of the modern age: unlike our pre-modern ancestors, who often knew as individuals all the skills and methods by which they maintained their lives (ev
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They obviously don't read Pratchett (Score:2)
The problem with groupthink... (Score:2)
The most innovative results actually comes from dictatorships where the few most visionary risk-takers have enough authority to overrule the closed-minded majority.
It ain't going to work (Score:3, Funny)
Not new (Score:2)
Nutshell. (Score:2)
Modern communication methods do not reduce the effective coordination cost, because while they provide much more information, the quality of the information is worse. (Spam, Interruptions, Distractions)
The more people you have in a group, the more complex the possible set of relationships is, and the higher the chance there will be a conflict.
Answer: (Score:2)
Contrary to Popular Belief (Score:2)
Re:But haven't we all seen a "good" group in actio (Score:2)
Publications? (Score:2)
Ayn Rand? (Score:2, Funny)
I do believe that she's rolling in her grave over this.
PhDs (Score:2)
2c
Wiki is like parallel computing? (Score:2)
That is to say, there are common, routine problems for which "collective wisdom" is dumb as a sack of rocks, and only a smart individual stands a chance of making headway.
I know it's been said (Score:2)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
-- Albert Einstein
or, if you need it in a handy reminder, there's a nice little poster [despair.com] that expresses approximately the same sentiment.