MIT Looks to Give Group Think a Good Name

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?""

Comments

text is a insufficient medium for this

[chriss]

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 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 said about creating CC licensed rich flash content also is. But starting another wiki style pseudo book is not.

Re:text is a insufficient medium for this

[TubeSteak]

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.

How Stuff Works is a great example of how to mix text & pictures/media

Re:text is a insufficient medium for this

[blahplusplus]

"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."

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 a single person months and many aspects towards a lifetime to come up with by themselves or not at all.

IMHO I've advanced my learning by leaps and bounds by absorbing other peoples understanding or realizations of the mechanics of how something works and/or reading about their own strategies in active forums. Wikipedia is not perfect, but go to any dedicated website for many professional topics or even just hardcore amateurs gathered around their favorite past-time or subject, like say video games, you will see how quick one persons learning filters down into other peoples own strategies. It's essentially network learning.

Re:text is a insufficient medium for this

[chriss]

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 whole process of the discussion, although you are only interested in the subject.

For efficiency reasons it would be nice if someone would take the thread, extract the main information and turn it into a wiki with references to the original forum. That would allow people to get to the information with less effort and also enable updates of the content. There are attempts at combined forums and wikis, but they fail partly due to the character of written text. It simply is not enough to recombine the posts from the forum discussion, usually someone will basically have to rewrite the whole thing. This is due to text being intended to be read in a consecutive order, you cannot simply swap sentences.

To make this more flexible, one would need parts of the posts to be identified by subjects, like automatically creating a table of content in a word processor from headers. The semantic web idea goes into that direction and is actually a step beyond pure text, but even this fails to appeal to the masses so far. Ideally you could rearrange information parts by reorganizing the table of content, moving the structure of the subject on a higher level of abstraction. This would be a first step from forums as blackboard to forums as knowledge containers and managers.

Re:text is a insufficient medium for this

[Firehed]

What about MySpace?

Re:text is a insufficient medium for this

[Shaper_pmp]

You make a valid point, but I don't know if I agree that text is inherently inferior.

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:

1. The most versatile - you can use it to describe literally anything, even if that description runs to pages and pages of dense prose and isn't easy to parse out.
2. The most accessible (easy scanning, paging and random-access).
3. Easiest to translate into other forms (although "a picture's worth a thousand words", ever tried to tell a thousand-word short story in a single picture?)
4. Easiest to parse for machine learning (machines can extract meaning from text a hell of a lot easier than they can extract meaning from pictures or video)
5. Extensible - even if there's no inherent emotional "channel" in the communication, elements like emoticons, faux-HTML tags and simple statements like "Of course, I'm being sarcastic here" serve to transmit the same meaning, albeit a little more baldly and verbosely

In contrast, all "richer" media are somehow limited or limiting - we've already touched on the difficulty of telling a thousand-word story in a single picture, but how about accurately communicating a tune as a simulation, or a simulation as a picture? Every other (richer) medium loses something in the translation, often needing to be accompanied by text to explain the bits the "primary" medium can't communicate. Think about it - when was the last time you saw a diagram explaining a complicated concept without any accompanying text to explain it? And how often do you see text descriptions without any accompanying video, diagram, picture or simulation?

Text is like XML - basic, verbose but complete, and capable of describing anything the human mind can conceive.

Other media are more like subsets of XML (say, MathML or SVG), or binary alternatives (I dunno, COM or similar) - very useful and efficient for their domain (try describing a complex differential equation, or all the processing and simulation of a business object, in XML!), but in no way a "general" solution.

To summarise, I'd argue that the fact that Wikipedia is basically "a book with a few pictures" is probably exactly why it's been so successful - the most accessible medium, and one which can represent any concept we could ever wish to discuss. And the fact that simulations/diagrams/video/etc are so good at representing certain types of information is what inherently limits them to a "niche" application.

Like it or loathe it, text is (and always will be) our primary and "best" method of communication.

Re:text is a insufficient medium for this

[somersault]

I hope that was a joke

Re:text is a insufficient medium for this

[Firehed]

I'd hoped it was obvious. Though then again, it seems to be what people like seeing in their navigation of the tubes.

Re:text is a insufficient medium for this

[PopeJM]

if you've ever used Rosetta Stone, you understand how inspiring it can be to learn using mediums other than text.

Borg

[FhnuZoag]

Come on, it's freaking obvious. What else can it be?

Re:Borg

[FhnuZoag]

Er, oops. Just read the submission title and took it literally.

Re:Borg

[dreadclown]

Frank's a nice name. Robin Day's got a hedgehog named Frank.

Re:Borg

[Tackhead]

> Frank's a nice name. Robin Day's got a hedgehog named Frank.

And Deb and Ian have a rodent named Iceweasel.

Re:Borg

[Philip K Dickhead]

I am partial to "Spiny Norman" as a hedgehog name.

Re:Borg

[StikyPad]

Well I'd say Slashdot, but it's already taken.

simplish

[prettything]

by taking responsibility for the computer and doing the thinking bit. kittens dont worry, why should i

Re:simplish

[BiggerIsBetter]

kittens dont worry, why should i

When you put computers and people together, kittens should be very worried indeed.

Re:simplish

[prettything]

its all mu to kittens!

I'm sorry, but...

[susano_otter]

... I think it's going to take something more than MIT smarty men, to make committees useful.

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[fithmo]

How about a committee of MIT smarty men?

Is collective intelligence possible?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

First there's the obvious issue of "negative intelligence" where plugging stupid people into a system has a detramental effect. How the hell will a system onf connected people filter out good input from stupid input? Plugging together more people just seems to make things worse. Decsisions by committees are generally worse than those by individuals.

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 necessarily make sense in another. Globbing together intelligence strips away the judgement.

Re:Is collective intelligence possible?

[the_humeister]

Consider a brain. an individual neuron doesn't really have much intelligence to speak of. But collectively, it's able to give rise to "intelligence." Whether or not we need to give up our individuality for such an endeavor remains to be seen. The borg come to mind of course, but then there's Gaia and Galaxia from the Foundation series of books.

Re:Is collective intelligence possible?

[Lemmy Caution]

See Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild," a study of navigation practices on a Naval vessel, for an answer to your question. I am willing to bet that very little of your own "intelligent" behavior is coherent or meaningful outside of a broader system, and that you rely on the cognitive capabilities of many others in order to operate yourself. What distinguishes "good input" from "stupid input" for human activities is usually something which is distributed across minds.

Re:Is collective intelligence possible?

[ButHed]

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.

Re:Is collective intelligence possible?

[TapeCutter]

Another example is an ant nest (or beehive). The nest as a whole behaves as an intelligent and highly resilient organisim, the individual insects are little more than automotons.

Re:Is collective intelligence possible?

[somersault]

But they're all well programmed, and as you say are just 'automotons'. Humans generally have a lot more to worry about than ants, and sometimes want to stand out from the crowd (well, some Ants do too if you believe DreamWorks..). You're right that a larger system can achieve a purpose without the individual elements being aware of it, though in the cases of committees, I wouldn't always call the results 'intelligent'.

intelligence and crowds

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck. There seems to be an inverse relationship between intelligence and crowds. :)

Look out, it's coming!

[FordPrfct]

"I believe that many people will be doing lots of 'natural experiments' with collective intelligence in the next few years -- with or without us,"

Because God Knows there haven't been any going on so far...

Re:Look out, it's coming!

[Anonymous Coward]

"How can people and computers be connected so that -- collectively -- they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?"

If myspace, youtube, digg, fark, etc are any example, it can't be done. Like a previous poster said, it's not a technology problem, it's a people problem. There are lots of examples of small groups of smart people accomplishing things or coming up with ideas that no single individual group member could have done on their own. The problem is that that effect generally does not extend very well to large groups, because large groups tend to be dominated by the lowest common denominator of the group.

Just look at digg.com. The theory was that it was going to revolutionize the way news gets reported. No longer would we have to be spoon-fed whatever the journalistic establishment thought was important. WE would now get to decide. That sounds great, but in practice, digg has degraded to the point where 80 to 90 percent of the stories that reach the front page are crap. Why? Because the digg crowd, taken as a whole, isn't nearly as smart, savvy, and insightful as everyone thought it would be. And really, that's unavoidable. Any large group that's (essentially) randomly chosen is just going to reflect the average IQ of its parent population. What else could you honestly expect? Unfortunately, no amount of technology is going to make that kind of group be anything more than the sum of its parts.

computers not intelligent

[Raptoer]

Computers arn't intelligent, they do exactly as they are told by you or someone else, never more or less, which if they were human would make them lemmings, never being able to invent anything on their own or think on their own.

Re:computers not intelligent

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet they own your "intelligent" mind at chess and almost any game.

Re:computers not intelligent

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Computers arn't intelligent, they do exactly as they are told by you or someone else, never more or less

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 lot smarter than you or me. "Computer, prove Riemann's Hypothesis".

Re:computers not intelligent

[chriss]

define intelligent

Re:computers not intelligent

[IlliniECE]

'never being able to invent'.. this is simply not true. Sure, we can argue of the semantics of a word like 'invent', but the fact is applications such as Genetic Programming have already DEMONSTRATED that computers can synthesize work that would, in a human, be seen as creative.

Re:computers not intelligent

[Al Dimond]

If you have a random number generator that uses radioactive decay, the atoms just decay, right? You tell a computer to measure them somehow and generate a seed or number using some algorithm (I don't know exactly how this works). The non-deterministic parts, the atoms that decay, aren't really part of the computer, they're a phenomenon that the computer measures. Well, sometimes there are errors because of solar flares. So then we're talking about an ideal computer that can only be defined in theory and then, of course, our

When GP, or anyone else, says that computers do exactly as they're told, it's usually implied that they must be told to do so in their own special language. No computer I've heard of has a "Prove Riemann's Hypothesis" (PRH) opcode (though an HCF opcode might sufficeintly emulate all human attempts thus far), so to tell a computer to prove Riemann's Hypothesis you'd need to first generate an algorithm to prove the hypothesis. I think some people did essentially that a while back with the four-color theorem.

Re:computers not intelligent

[Lazerf4rt]

Almost any game, except tennis, basketball, hackey sack, charades, Pictionary, Balderdash, Jenga, 20 Questions, paintball, the Tour de France, dueling banjos, battle rap, programming competitions, golf, frisbee, who can pick up the hottest woman, or who can get the most +5 posts on Slashdot.

Re:computers not intelligent

[TapeCutter]

Lemmings don't jump they are pushed by other lemmings, large crowds of humans frequently display the same behavior. Human intelligence is no more than a bunch of neurons acting like Lemmings.

Re:computers not intelligent

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

they do exactly as they are told by you or someone else, never more or less

That explains a lot. Yesterday I told my computer to "go to hell" and this morning it was gone. I only wish it would have used the front door instead of jumping through the window glass.

Re:computers not intelligent

[ggvaidya]

Lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs. I wish I had time for a longer response/discussion, but I'm dead sleepy =P. Sorry.

Re:computers not intelligent

[Gablar]

What if you had human powered computers? or harness, using computer as a medium, human intelligence? we have been doing this for years , This research just wants to make a reproducible sistem out of it.

Re:computers not intelligent

[TapeCutter]

Your right, I probably oversimpified the human mind a bit, how about: The human mind is really like one of those massive domino setups, except it's recursive.

Re:computers not intelligent

[Jasper__unique_dammi]

That's about the same as saying: humans aren't intelligent, what they do is just a consequence of the evolution of the universe, never more or less. So there is nothing intelligent in the entire universe. In another sense, its like saying deterministic systems can't be intelligent. (another, because the universe isn't(maybe) deterministic) I don't believe that either. As another reply said, what is intelligent?

Re:computers not intelligent

[Dun Malg]

And yet they own your "intelligent" mind at chess and almost any game.

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 much a creative genius as a borderline "idiot-savant" with a knack for chess math.

Re:computers not intelligent

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

The non-deterministic parts, the atoms that decay, aren't really part of the computer, they're a phenomenon that the computer measures.

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 claiming that a computer with a random number generator built into it doesn't simply follow instructions because it's behaviour can be unpredictable.

it's usually implied that they must be told to do so in their own special language.

My point was only that you need to be precise about what you mean by "tell". But my bigger point is that even though you might tell a machine what to do, it can still produce interesting and surprising results that even with today's rudimentary technology can look like creative acts.

Re:computers not intelligent

[ggvaidya]

Hehe - nice! I'll have to remember that one ...

Recursive domino setups would also be crazy cool!

gestalt: the sum of its parts

[Anonymous Coward]

gestalt: a configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts.

cluster

[brenddie]

Sometimes is hard for a group of "smart" people to agree on something,I rather have them experiment with a cluster of idiots (available in large quantities,they usually agree on anything as long as is stupid) and have the system do the oposite of what they choose.

Re:cluster

[Anonymous Coward]

"I rather have them experiment with a cluster of idiots"

Welcome to /. where we cater to your experimental needs.

I know where they should start.

[andy314159pi]

The group think on Slashdot is unsurpassed in so many areas...

Re:I know where they should start.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"The group think on Slashdot is unsurpassed in so many areas..."

Yeah, but in the wrong direction.

Re:I know where they should start.

[timboc007]

This is not the group think you're looking for... move along!

It's a people problem, not a technical one

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Put any discussion like this in a technical/Geek forum and the debate becomes about what kind of technology will make this all work. Sorry folks, even with a perfect UI or whatever, this is fundamentally a people problem. The major limitations are not how to deal with html, flash, IRC or whatever, but about how to deal with clashing egos, language & cultural barriers etc and how to arbitrate when experts disagree etc.

Re:It's a people problem, not a technical one

[TubeSteak]

The major limitations are not how to deal with html, flash, IRC or whatever, but ... how to arbitrate when experts disagree etc.

Best of three
Rock, Papers, Scissors, Shoot!

(I throw Scissors)
(Real scissors when experts disagree with me)

Re:It's a people problem, not a technical one

[enjahova]

Well, we could figure that out after we figure out the UI... we will be collectively intelligent then.

Re:It's a people problem, not a technical one

[Anonymous Coward]

And there is a difference between intelligence and knowlege. A stupid person with all the knowlege of the internet could potentially be desasterous.

Re:It's a people problem, not a technical one

[QuantumFTL]

The major limitations are not how to deal with html, flash, IRC or whatever, but about how to deal with clashing egos, language & cultural barriers etc and how to arbitrate when experts disagree etc.

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 our goodies too.

Re:It's a people problem, not a technical one

[MooUK]

Paper!

Oh... damn. I lose.

Re:It's a people problem, not a technical one

[name*censored*]

Jeez, don't you know, rock always wins!! How can paper beat rock??

Re:It's a people problem, not a technical one

[somersault]

very true, like that kid who built a nuclear reactor in his back yard and irradiated everyone in a couple of blocks' radius (don't have a reference but I remember it happening). It is difficult to combine intelligence in the same way that you combine knowledge, in the same way that it's awkward trying to parallelise some computing tasks.

Re:It's a people problem, not a technical one

[zCyl]

how to arbitrate when experts disagree etc.

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.

Re:It's a people problem, not a technical one

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what collaborative systems are all about...setting rules for how people interact, implemented by code. The slashdot rating system is one example.

UCSC has done similar research

[Yonkeltron]

Folks at UCSC have done similar research with this paper found on the arXiv....I remembered reading it when it first came out and it's still a pretty neat concept.

We not as think as you dumb you are

[andy314159pi]

EOM

The opposite is true

[Chemisor]

We all know that when you get lots of people together, the result is less intelligence than the sum of individual intelligences, not more. It is called "groupthink". It is why meetings never result in anything useful. It is why every collectively designed standard is a piece of garbage. Decisions require a decider, period. If the decider is intelligent, you get good decisions. If the decider is stupid, you get stupid decisions. If the decider is the president, well... I'll pass on that one. The point is, there is no such thing as a "collective intelligence"; group members hinder each other, not help, due to each individual following his own agenda.

Re:The opposite is true

[Quaoar]

I think the difference is time: It takes a while for a group of people to reach a good consensus on an issue. The question is: How much time is required before the group consensus is better than the individual ideas? Perhaps if a group just hacked at an idea for a longer period of time, they would produce more positive results.

Re:The opposite is true

[treeves]

There is such a thing as groupthink and committees can make stupid decisions and meetings do seem to reduce one's intelligence, but. . .
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/ index.html and they suggest that idea.

Re:The opposite is true

[N7DR]

there is no such thing as a "collective intelligence"; group members hinder each other, not help, due to each individual following his own agenda.

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 maker tends to turn into a dictator. There are several ways to discourage this from happening, but the obvious really efficient one (pay the underlings more than the decision maker) seems never to be used in practice. Instead we have things like voting systems (which tend to become corrupt) or limitations for the duration for which an individual can be responsible for the decisions (which sort-of worked for the Romans when they chose dictators in times of emergency, but has never really worked since).

Re:The opposite is true

[edbarbar]

All the things you site are projects. Of course people can work on projects or separate things and come up with good ideas.

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.

Re:The opposite is true

[nostriluu]

I know it's fun to think in stereotypes (certainly makes things simpler), but try reading the book "the wisdom of crowds" for a few good examples of how mixed crowds can be smarter than the smartest people, consistently.

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").

Re:The opposite is true

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know that when you get lots of people together, the result is less intelligence than the sum of individual intelligences, not more.

Not necessarily. It may depend on the framework used to combine the individual inputs into a collective decision. From a human emotion point of view, mob rule doesn't work very well (innocent people get lynched, for example) but democracy in the proper framework (that is, rule of law) works quite a bit better than monarchies or dictatorships (less human suffering and all that).

More broadly, though, we really don't even know that much about individual decision making. Our current understanding of science is that everything happens because of either the fundamental laws of physics or random chance (actually random chance is a fundamental part of the modern laws of physics). Anyway, unless we find a way to change the fundamental laws of physics or control random chance (impossible by definition) then we need to be taking a long hard look at this thing we call free will.

When we don't even really know what it means to "make a decision", we need to be a bit careful in our assessment of what it means to make "good" decisions and even more careful in our assessments of whether groups or individuals make better decisions.

Re:The opposite is true

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

Depending on who you ask, the KJV Bible is either not a group effort, but a group hackjob, or the work of a single supreme deity working through mortal man.

I personally think of it as an older version of Aesop's fables, but in no way a product of Group Intelligence.

I'll go along with the others though. The Geneva Convention stuff might fit there as well.

Re:The opposite is true

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

Sorry. Need to be more specific. NEWER than Aesop's fables as far as the new testament goes. Older for the rest.

Re:The opposite is true

[I don't want to spen]

Hence why democracy has never been used for anything significant ...

Re:The opposite is true

[daigu]

Meetings do result in useful things - like agreement. The problem is that most people don't know when they are necessary, who to invite, what work to do beforehand (and have others do), how to run them and how to follow-up. This is the reason why there are so many meetings and more than 90% are a waste of time - or worse, counter-productive.

If you want to see a meeting run well, try going to a Quaker Meeting for Business run by a competent clerk. I have and it completely changed my perspective on what meetings could do and how they should work. Check out the Wikipedia page on the Religious Society of Friends under Decision making among Friends for a brief description.

Re:The opposite is true

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is not true. It is very context-dependent. There has been a study recently which gave various sized groups of undergraduates at northwestern U. a bunch of problems. the study found that the optimal group size for solving these problems was btween 3 - 5 people. Thus, small groups can be very effective. Large groups can disintegrate. It all depends on where the power is distributed, and the level of education of each of the members towards the task at hand, etc.

Re:The opposite is true

[khallow]

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:The opposite is true

[khallow]

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:The opposite is true

[edbarbar]

You miss the point. I'm not saying things are not built on other things, I'm saying that new breakthroughs are not parallelizable.

Tron (n/t)

[batbertus]

No text, seriously.

It's all about effeciency

[Spasmodeus]

Given how stupidly people behave in groups, it only makes sense to use computers to help them think stupider more quickly.

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:It's all about effeciency

[Pasquina]

pro : progress :: con : _______

Who would think that the SATs could teach you to question authority?

Re mod parent up

[andy314159pi]

>>Given how stupidly people behave in groups, it only makes sense to use computers to help them think stupider more quickly.

Just a name change?

[MollyB]

After reading the article, it seems like old wine in new bottles. They have coined "Collective Intellegence" (formerly the Center for Coordination Science) apparently for public relations purposes, and the information given reveals no new technology. The only project mentioned is a business-oriented book written wikipedia-style.

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...

Re:Just a name change?

[interiot]

analog people don't mesh seamlessly with digital technology

*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 hundred years. But technology actually lets thousands of people work in very close proximity (ala the Linux kernel, or Debian), and perhaps there are ways for technology to mediate and improve the individual interactions somehow.

Re:Just a name change?

[perlchild]

The linux kernel and debian's solution to that is modularity. You get smaller groups, where more motivated individuals can express their own wants. That the smaller groups have something in common, that allows them to agree on things is what brings the larger group together, but the people on say, the network drivers in the kernel, or apache on debian, do not "necessarily" touch the same code as the sysfs bunch, or the xorg package. You might say their solution is not a better groupthink, but a better division of the problem, and application of the divide and conquer rule. P.S. the problem is not individuality, per se, but different definitions of "right" the larger the group gets.

Re:Just a name change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in the context of "collective intelligence" a kid playing Super Mario is not the best example of seamless engagement, at least if something productive is the purpose of the project...

On the other hand, maybe a million kids interconnected to a Super Super Mario game might open a wormhole to paradise?

If you get it right, you own the world

[suv4x4]

The reason you can't get it right, is it's way to damn complex:

- 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 correct it), but if you have too many agents, then there's a pressure to keep "status quo" and corrections might be dismissed.

When in 20-30 years we start linking to our computers directly with our brains (I guess), and new much faster processes emerge for communicating via the Internet using those interfaces, we could facilitate computer technology to build truly better products by groupthink.

Yea I realize: this again relies on some non-existing functionality. But this is reality. The only way to control a group process is by a lot of beurocracy, and then all agents are likely to age and die before anything is completed.

Re:If you get it right, you own the world

[Anonymous Coward]

- The "stupid" majority silences the "smart" minority

sounds lke this is the problem.

I'd say the best way to make groups smarter is to make dumb individuals realise they are dumb quicker.

A beowulf cluster of super-dupercomputers

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear MIT Center for Collective Intelligence,
Could we please, please get a beowulf cluster of massively parallel super-dupercomputers for Bush?? Please, pleasee...

Mob mentality

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, how do we get the mob to not act like a mob...

Collective Intelligence

[andy314159pi]

Here could be their jingle:
"Group think: The process that brought you the Iraq Quagmire"

Re:Collective Intelligence

[kclittle]

Well, the group in question was the Republican administration, and technically it was "group no-think" (which came very naturally to them).

Slashdot

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Slashdot. Oh wait, they wanted a positive connotation.

Singularity?!?

[papaia]

Hasn't anybody ever heard of Singularity ?!?

Re:Singularity?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

barf.

Re:Singularity?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wise and deep - you must be American ;)

Re:Singularity?!?

[Cid Highwind]

Yes I've heard of it, but what does a 3rd rate sci-fi author arriving at outlandish conclusions about the future by extrapolating trends well beyond the area where they are meaningful have to do with anything?

Yea, except this is MIT.

[Ruff_ilb]

I'm not saying that scientists are gods or something, but, breaking what you say point by point:

"
- 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 correct it), but if you have too many agents, then there's a pressure to keep "status quo" and corrections might be dismissed.
"

Well:

- Presumably everyone there is going to be an expert
- Again, MIT can come up with the "best" experts
- If the "stupid" majority knows that the "smart" minority may well be right, it's a different story; they all know what's going on.
- I think it's more about harnessing the combined intelligence of these people, which works better than just random noise + averaging. Consider: if they can do it in such a way as to quickly dismiss any negative random noise, they'll benefit.
- Again, if the pressure to keep the status quo is forcibly removed, there won't be such a problem.

This sort of technique, although fundamentally similar to the simple writing by committee, is different when every member of the group is educated, an expert, and knows the shortcomings of the standard committee system. The system here seems to be trying to make it work just like the thought experiment does without any of the real world limitations.

Obviously, there will be limitations. I just think that there will be fewer of them.

collective intelligence should figure this out

[sottitron]

If collective intelligence is so great, why isn't it used to solve this problem?

The Trap of Gargantius

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe Trurl and Klapaucius already established this.

group intelligence

[grilled-cheese]

I believe in the philosophy that the intellegence of a group is inversly proportional to the number of people multiplied by amount of communication (or sometimes the lack thereof).

Hmmmm, groupthink huh?

[Shadowruni]

I'm not so sure that groupthink is a good thing. Coordinated thinking, working as a team, whatever, is ok, but groupthink is sort of dangerous in a way. It's kind of similar to what happens in some AI/Neural Nets sims. A majority of the Automata get going in one direction, BUT the wrong one. Then the entire system follows because of the momentum. Sure there's some that "know" the right thing, but because such emphasis is placed on group cohesion and such, they still follow along. While this is a grossly simplified explanation it shows the point I'm trying to get across. To use more real examples. Germany 1930. As a country, there was genocide. On a typical individual level there were elements looking to stop the murder. What happened? Groupthink. Ala, 1984. Many followed the same "logic" as a delusional leader, and because the weight of his output (to borrow an AI term) was so high it overrode the good logic of many. A good fictional example of this is Ghost in The Shell: Stand Alone Complex - 2ng Gig. Towards the end, everyone was on the path to civil war, and there was a player who knew *JUST* how to nudge and manipulate the public into thinking just the right thing to serve his needs. Too fake? Ok, let's look at the stock market crash of 1930 (I just love that time period). What happened there? Groupthink, but not in the traditional sense. A trend was started, and it caused a loss of confidence in the system so to speak and then what happened. EVERYONE DID THE SAME THING. They all stopped spending money. They saw their neighbor loss his money/job/Marklar, and figured I better hold on to my money in case it happens to me too. Same thing everyone else thought, not incorrect thinking, given their small view of the situation. However at a 10,000 foot view, you could see the train wreck coming. You see that could also be considered stand alone groupthink. All said groupthink has its uses, just not in anything REALLY important. Of course this is just my opinion... I could be wrong. But you all agree right ;)

It's easy...

[Sir Simon]

Just wire up the stupid people so they receive electric shocks whenever they speak.

Yeah, but...

[Foerstner]

the goal of this project is to increase the intelligence of the group

Asked and Answered

[Anonymous Coward]

How can people and computers be connected so that -- collectively -- they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?

Don't let Republicans run the elections. Also, when the United Nations asks to monitor U.S. elections, let them. See, this is simple. For more on this subject, ask Diebold why they don't think voters want paper trails but provide receipts on every single ATM machine they sell. Every single one. But the Republican-run U.S. election business company doesn't want paper trails for U.S. national elections. Why is that? I'd say the answer is the same reason why the collective known as democracy has been failing so spectacularly in the United States.

Another path to the Singularity

[LionMage]

Vernor Vinge has often talked and written about intelligence amplification techniques, such as amplifying the intelligence of an individual or harnessing the power of many minds together. In his latest novel, Rainbows End (yes, the apostrophe is omitted intentionally, a fact the author draws attention to multiple times in the book), Vinge postulates one such mechanism for realizing group intelligence. What if an AI that was only moderately smart built up a social network of "experts" and well-placed non-experts, and found ways to essentially get people to do things for it by promising various inducements? The beauty is, an AI would be very adept at tirelessly managing such a network so that each contributor wasn't just contributing to the AI's primary goal, but also contributing to satisfying the promises made to other contributors.

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.

Re:Another path to the Singularity

[asolipsist]

What if an AI that was only moderately smart built up a social network of "experts" and well-placed non-experts, and found ways to essentially get people to do things for it by promising various inducements?

I think you just described middle management.

Re:Another path to the Singularity

[mcrbids]

What if an AI that was only moderately smart built up a social network of "experts" and well-placed non-experts, and found ways to essentially get people to do things for it by promising various inducements? The beauty is, an AI would be very adept at tirelessly managing such a network so that each contributor wasn't just contributing to the AI's primary goal, but also contributing to satisfying the promises made to other contributors.

Another poster mentioned middle management, but my first thought is that you've just described something called an "economy". People get smart and become experts, just so that they can get other experts to do stuff for them!

I spent years building up a career and business as a software engineer. Now, I have hired contractors busy building my home extension, painters painting it, landscapers doing my front lawn, heck I even have a regular maid service to clean my home!

Lots of good stuff comes out of MIT - but this one makes me scratch my head...

Re:Another path to the Singularity

[hany]

It's good to see that you quoted precisely and left this part:

... but also contributing to satisfying the promises made to other contributors.

Otherwise I would be compeled to disagree with you. :)

Re:Another path to the Singularity

[khallow]

I thought the same thing. You don't need AI to get cooperation. The only thing an AI might improve on is to figure out how to use part of that economy to more effectively achieve a particular goal.

Re:Another path to the Singularity

[LionMage]

I suppose you could model such a thing as an economy, but it's a managed economy... because while I mentioned the carrot and omitted mention of the stick, the fact is that for such a system to be efficient, you need a way to discourage non-productive effort. (In this case, "non-productive" from the POV of the AI holding this web of people together.) To get people to cooperate, you have to give them the illusion of choice while still managing to keep them on-task.

Professor Vinge is very Libertarian, and it shows in his writing. I definitely got the feeling from Rainbows End that the Rabbit was driven by many Libertarian economic concepts. But this isn't exactly an economy in the modern sense of using money as a value placeholder for goods and services. Rather, the Rabbit was more about barter and the ancient concept of "you scratch my back, I scratch yours." I had something witty in mind about the similarities between economics and politics at this level, but it's late, and I'm not getting any younger.

Oh, and the Rabbit was definitely goal-oriented, whereas a real-world economy doesn't seem to exhibit such intelligent behavior as striving toward specific goals. A real-world economy is a pretty Darwinian thing, and what I'm talking about is not quite that kind of free-for-all.

Re:Another path to the Singularity

[LionMage]

You don't need AI to get cooperation.

But if you want cooperation to yield a specific goal or result, then you need some intelligent force guiding things along. A free-for-all economy doesn't optimize for any particular outcome. You still don't need an AI to achieve such a thing, but machines lack many human foibles.

Re:Another path to the Singularity

[khallow]

But if you want cooperation to yield a specific goal or result, then you need some intelligent force guiding things along. A free-for-all economy doesn't optimize for any particular outcome. You still don't need an AI to achieve such a thing, but machines lack many human foibles.

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.

Thank you Fred Allen

[MikeWasHere05]

Committee - a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.

Collective intelligence or collective conscious?

[Seantotheizzo]

Isn't what they really are aiming for is collective consciousness? Omit computers, and that becomes, in itself, is an issue of spirituality and a whole slew of things not happily bound to science. 100% collective consciousness is one definition of God.

Add the technological element, and you have the *DRUMROLL*...

iGod!

(i want full credit)

It already has a good name

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought "groupthink" had been re-branded as "wikiality."

A good name for the project would be Wikipedia

[Katanter]

A good name for the project would be Wikipedia, seriously, do these MIT guys even browse the web, or is that too low tech for them?

First rule: No communication between group members

[rollingcalf]

If a groupthink system is going to produce very good results, the most important part is that the individuals must not know what the others are thinking or have thought, except perhaps a central mediator or coordinator. Otherwise, people get influenced either by charismatic/intimidating individuals in the group, or the "follow the herd" mentality kicks in once they know a large percentage of the group is thinking in a certain direction. The individuals must work independently or at most in pairs, then some sort of human + computer combination finds a way to piece together the separate results.

Group Think gone wrong

[Meph_the_Balrog]

Sometimes is hard for a group of "smart" people to agree on something,I rather have them experiment with a cluster of idiots (available in large quantities,they usually agree on anything as long as is stupid) and have the system do the oposite of what they choose.

Does this mean its time to harness the power of infinite monkeys on infinite keyboards?

Ouch

[Plutonite]

Wouldn't it be sad if they couldn't collectively agree on a name for this type of collective effort, even using their collaborative capabilities induced by computers?

Ok, ok I'm leaving now, quit the shoving.

2 Examples of Collective Intelligence

[LionKimbro]

1. A Corporation.
2. A Town.

Re:2 Examples of Collective Intelligence

[Lemmy Caution]

3. A sports team.
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 (even if they didn't do them all), we now rely on hundreds, thousands of people who do things that we don't really understand to do their jobs well, in order for us to live as we do.

Re:2 Examples of Collective Intelligence

[Erixxxxx]

These are not examples of collective intelligence, but aggregate intelligence. Each one of those examples will be no better than the aggregate ability of the individuals comprising the group. At no point is there a 'thing' seperate from the individuals; though there is the impression of such, that is merely a trick of perspective.

Re:2 Examples of Collective Intelligence

[Lemmy Caution]

That is absolutely incorrect. Each of those examples involves specialized tasks, and can be only performed effectively by distributed both cognitive load and task load. If you see the collective task as a computational problem, it is clear that the task requires too much parallelism to be done by a single mind, and that considerable message passing occurs between individuals. Some people even act as buffers, filters, and parsers for information: assistants who determine which information needs to go upstream, people who record data and wait for an appropriate time (when the cognitive load and task-urgency of the information recipient permits it) to transmit the data, etc.

There are plenty of things separate from the individuals, as well: artifacts that store data, that structure processes, etc.

Yes, it already exists.

[RingDev]

Is collective intelligence possible?

Yes, and it's called Wiki.

-Rick

They obviously don't read Pratchett

[frogstar_robot]

"The intelligence of a mob is the intelligence of the stupidest member divided by the number of people in the mob."

Easy way to make true AI

[CrazyJim1]

I posted this before if you want True AI If you want smarter networks. Take Digg, then add groups.
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 the internet because I always know what is coming next, but never the motivation to code it.

Re:Easy way to make true AI

[Blakey Rat]

You all should know that CrazyJim is a prodigy. Not only does God speak to him, but he also can predict the future with 100% accuracy! For instance, he came up with the idea for a Starsiege Tribes-like game only a year after Tribes was announced. Amazing! He's also invented a comic book about a hero who uses katanas with rockets in the hilt, and you can bet your ass that'll be a top seller in only a few years. Hell, he's designed thousands of video games even if those fat-cats in the game industry won't hire him as a designer! (Can you believe they actually care about something as stupid as "experience" when it comes to game design? What morons.)

Unfortunately, his highly-funded program to produce "true AI" has failed because his $10 webcam doesn't have enough resolution to make out detail in images.

The problem with groupthink...

[JustNiz]

All the decisions that get made are a result of multiple compromises in order to deal with each members agenda. Consequently committee mentality takes over and therefore any decisions take an overly long time and are all mediocre. Any truly innovative or out-of-the-box thinking doesn't ever survive the gauntlet.

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

[killermookie]

Here's why

How about capitalism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there no greater example of collective intelligence than the global economy?

Re:How about capitalism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism is global slavery for the profit of a few.
It's more like collective stupidity...

ASP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their web site is running ASP on a M$ server.
What kind of collective intelligence is promoted?

Re:It's a moderation problem, not a technical one

[HiThere]

Yes, an clearly moderation *isn't* good enough for slashdot. This doesn't mean that it's not required, but it's not good enough.

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 certain researcher in Korea recently comes to mind here.) Perhaps no system could be better...or perhaps the only improvement could be in speed. OTOH, perhaps things could be a lot better. We don't know. We don't even have a clear theory as to how to derive this. Therefore...

"When in doubt, cut and find out!" (A motto sarcastically attributed to surgeons in the 1800's.)

Not new

[BierGuzzl]

Collective intelligence is not a new term and is certainly not a new concept. (see: http://www.co-intelligence.org/Collective_Intellig ence.html ) However, studying it and finding ways to actually make it work is a worthwhile challenge.

Re:Step #1

[Sqwubbsy]

But this is MIT. I'm sure that they can think a bit past the very pedantic Wikipedia.

Scores of MIT students are now googling 'wikipedia' to see if they can meet chicks there...

Nutshell.

[Kaenneth]

Large group projects break down when the energy spent coordinating the project exceeds the work produced by the project. (Death Spiral, Bureaucracy)

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:

[dangitman]

With tubes.

Contrary to Popular Belief

[Greyfox]

A single sheep is not a stupid animal. Quite the opposite, in fact. They tend to be fairly clever (for sheep.) Herd a bunch of sheep together, though, and they're collectively far more stupid than any single sheep in the herd would be. Likewise, humans.

Re:It's a moderation problem, not a technical one

[ozmanjusri]

Yes, an clearly moderation *isn't* good enough for slashdot. This doesn't mean that it's not required, but it's not good enough.

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, but you have to walk before you can run, and as far as first steps go, both Slash and Wiki were pretty big strides.

BrainStorm is the solution...

[ahakmeh]

We spend lots of time 'looking up' stuff about everything and nothing, I can simply imagine an environment (meeting room) where one or more people have a meeting, collaborate on solving a problem, do homework, write software, do product research, etc... What's special about this room is that computer brain running the displays all around the walls, listening in for commands or keywords in a discussion and independently doing intelligent searches, data mining, aggregation, feeds, etc and displaying the results around the room allowing the human activity to progress towards its goal more efficiently. I'd call it BrainStorm. (don't know if the name is already taken by something else though!)

Publications?

[NitsujTPU]

I think that it will be interesting to see papers coming out of this group. Perhaps they'll all be group written, with the entire front page consumed by authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses.

Think anti-hierarchical...

[macraig]

Whatever group structure they imagineer had better have a complete absence of any discernible hierarchy. We're all witnesses to weekly examples now of the depths of stupidity, selfishness, and vacuous ethics to which any number of our larger present human hierarchical collectives will stoop, such as corporations, political parties, and governments. The problem, of course, is Mother Nature: those with the greatest ambition tend to be (a) the most selfish, (b) the least ethical, (c) the most manipulative, (d) most cunning but less intelligent, and (e) the most eager to "spread their seed"... which is of course exactly what Mother Nature had in mind in the first place, with the whole alpha-male paradigm. What that paradigm DOESN'T lead to is better ethics. Since in virtually every human society to date these uber-ambitious types are the ones who wind up making decisions for the rest of us, it means that large hierarchical collectives dominated by such behavior - such as corporations, for instance - make even less ethical and "wise" decisions than the average single human.

We need some form of collective anarchy. Maybe the Borg almost had the right idea after all?

Collective Intelligence - Delphi Method

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll assume they are not just re-inventing the Delphi method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method), otherwise RAND can point they were there decades earlier.

Borg cube

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, somebody had to write it...

We need Group Being not Group Thinking

[voxelman]

There is a fundimental lack of understanding about the real problem. It is not Group Thinking that needs to be refined but rather Group Being. If science was religated to using only a hammer and pick for discovery the level of knowledge would be concomitantly crude. The tool that needs refinement is the entire human psychophysiology. Effective methods and understanding of this refinement are currrently being taught by His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. See: http://www.mum.edu/ for more information.

Re:We need Group Being not Group Thinking

[voxelman]

Knew I should have used a spell checker this morning. 8^D

But haven't we all seen a "good" group in action?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of posts modded informative complaining groups produce worse results than individuals.

Has no one ever worked on a *well-facilitated* group project? Or done one of those organizational behavior simulations where your group needs to cope with a crisis (shipwrecked, stranded in the desert, etc.?) For some of those, you score how well the group functioned as a team, then you find out how well the group guessed the "correct" response (the one that military survival experts judged most effective.) You also get to see how well each individual would have scored if they had gone it alone.

The two times I've done this, in a room full of separate teams:

* The teams that described themselves as working together best (prior to knowing their scores) also produced the highest scores.
* The highest team scores were higher than the scores of every individual within the group.
* And, yes, the worse a team worked together, the more people within the group would have outperformed the group's score.

So a lot of these thread on /. seem to be calling out for exactly the kind of improved group function they're suggesting.

BINGO!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad to see someone located the problem.

Although the level of human understanding is improving every day, we will ultimately need to be able to interpret neural processing from static stimuli, how each individual processes answering the same question/ formulating the correct answer. I say static meaning a question and answer, given all things relative, that which no other answer can exist for that question. I'm thinking of math regarding this, but that probably breaks down with imaginary numbers and systems.

Is this where AI will come into play??

Re:But haven't we all seen a "good" group in actio

[Greyfox]

Possibly for smaller teams. I'm not convinced that once you go over 4 or 5 people that you can continue to add members to a well-oiled team without experiencing some degradation of the quality of work per person in the team. Watch something like Congress in action and you get the impression the collective IQ of the room is just under the temperature of that room.

Re:It's a moderation problem, not a technical one

[somersault]

I'd kind of agree with you on Wikipedia that it is a good step towards collaborative efforts, though I'd just call Slashdot a news site with a built in forum, which, not to put Slashdot down, isn't that amazing (though maybe I just say that as I'm used to having Slashdot around, and in fact it was originally a large stride for collaborative efforts)..

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 /. and Wikipedia suck, just that they're not perfect, and he was right y'know.

too lazy to read

[Jasper__unique_dammi]

Multimedia (pictures, movies, interactive stuff) can not nearly replace text as an efficient way to convey information. Sometimes they can help form the model in your head, though. (and they can be fun to watch)

Ayn Rand?

[Syncerus]

"Center for Collective Intelligence"

I do believe that she's rolling in her grave over this.

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

COIT

PhDs

[zoftie]

On a side note, artifical intelligence was(and is) a bane on research computing communities. Most people will recommend you not to take up PhD in AI, because, besides being hard, you will have to compromise any scientific integrities of your project and come up with something to show, ie not large but not complete step in solving large domain problem, but demonstrable short term gain research...
2c

Re:I'm sorry, but... forward to the past

[bitmonki]

I agree.

Also, this sounds to me like an expensive, high tech way to 'rediscover' how tribal councils, etc. work -- complete with wise elders and shamans.

I'm not very enthusiastic about trying to "productize" and systematize this -- its about people communicating, silly.

Ok, I'll bite

[StarfishOne]

Let me do the heavy duty of adding the obligatory quote:

"You must unconditionally surrender. You will become one with the Borg. You will all become one with the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own".

The pinnacle of Collective Intelligence and Group Think already seems to have a name... just not a pleasant customer relation management! :P

a good example

[swell]

... is hard to find.

Surely in the anals of history there are examples of good results from 'group think'.

Perhaps the founders of the United States can be said to have brought about a good result. It's hard to imagine such a wide ranging, thoughtful and comprehensive set of principles coming from an individual (or a computer). If only this kind of thinking could have been sustained...

-

The language is full of references to failed 'groupthink'. Upon seeing an ugly building, product or work of art, it was once common for people to say that "it looks like it was designed by a committee".

There's that Tower of Babel thing showing that even the ancients understood these problems. We might take liberties with an old cliche and suggest that with an infinite number of modern writers typing for an infinite period of time, we would be lucky to find one product equal to a Shakespeare play.

-

So, It's easy to poke fun and find failed examples. It is likely that Shakespeare, Einstein, and Chopin will never be threatened by groupthink. But maybe there is a place for it--surely there are more good examples...

Wiki is like parallel computing?

[Julian Morrison]

I have a suspicion that formal collectives of the Wiki style will be discovered to be useful only for some bounded set of problems, like, and for much the same reasons as, massively parallel computing.

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

[painehope]

...but I think it bears repeating :

"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 that expresses approximately the same sentiment.

Re:We not as think as you dumb you are (or old)

[RamblerRandy]

I always thought Wikipedia was "old tech". I'd love to work at that place to develop "new tech". If I had time to read this garbage ;-) posted here I'd know what was going on there. Time and money. I have neither! :-|