SubscribeThere are two lessons to draw from these experiments. First, in most of them the members of the group were not talking to each other or working on a problem together. They were making individual guesses, which were aggregated and then averaged. This is exactly what Galton did, and it is likely to produce excellent results. (In a later chapter, we'll see how having members interact changes things, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.)[/em added :] to be cont'd...
Second, the group's guess will not be better than that of every single person in the group each time. In many (perhaps most) cases, there will be a few people who do better than the group. This is, in some sense, a good thing, since especially in situations where there is an incentive for doing well (like, say, the stock market) it gives people reason to keep participating. But there is no evidence in these studies that certain people consistently outperform the group.
With speech, the collaborative process of creation of knowledge expanded from the person to the tribe. With writing, it spread to the level of citystates. With printing it encompassed nations and even continents. With computer networking, everyone in the world is involved whether they like it or not. There's nowhere left to hide.i.e. advances in telecommunication (ability to aggregate information) allows greater social cohesion and more complex and larger group affinities, such that people not only behave like particle-agents, but become like a BEC, and a schizophrenic decohering one at that, i find interesting (against my better judgement; i'd be wary of such analogies :) also i think presenting it as some how inevitable is a deterministic fallacy, altho i agree with it as a condition!
The coin had been passing from hand to hand and purse to purse for more than a hundred years, and probably had more tales to tell than a ship full of Irish sailors—yet it was just a single mote in the dust-pile that was the English money supply. In a certain way to take that dust and shovel it into the maw of the crucibles was monstrous, like burning a library.the notional amount traded everyday, recycled, in the crucible of electronic currency markets approaches $2 trillion (that's the world's annual economic output traded every three and half weeks). if you count the number of mutual funds, closed-end funds and hedge funds (and funds of funds), there are more than there are securites that make them up. to what purpose does all this trading, swapping and repackaging suit? it all seems rather bizarre and, by all accounts, none of it should work, yet, for the most part, they usually function pretty well; markets and the institutions that support them, supposedly, are able to keep track of and smoothly allocate it all.
The Dynamics of Learning project takes computational mechanics in a new direction. Anything people are willing to call an agent has inputs and outputs. In organisms, the inputs are all the senses, and the outputs all the motions of the animal. In machines (say, a mobile robot), the inputs would come from sensors (e.g., cameras, heat detectors, wireless links) and the outputs would go to "effectors\" (e.g., motors in wheels and wireless links). Some mechanism connects them, making an agent into what computer science calls a transducer or a channel with memory. Computational mechanics now has the tools to discover the patterns of intrinsic computation going on in a transducer, including the way it changes its own organization in response to inputs. These tools work even when the transducer is a "learning channel\" and works by building a model of its input—we can do pattern discovery on pattern discoverers![/em added :] kinda like a sociological takeoff from chaitin's work on algorithmic information theory/program-size complexity.
Using these methods, Crutchfield and his former student Dave Feldman have already calculated how much internal complexity an agent must have in order to adequately model its environment. Excessively simple agents can't grasp all the structure in the environment, and therefore see it as more random than it really is—and the amount of excess randomness depends on the mismatch between the agent's cognitive complexity and the environment's structural complexity.
The next stage of the project will go beyond single-agent learning, to learning and adaptation in multi-agent systems. A collective of agents is like a network of interconnected transducers. Computational mechanics can show how the local behavior of the agents builds up into the global behavior of the network, and can identify the intrinsic computation the collective performs. Given that, the group will begin seeing when the collective can do things that individuals cannot—how an adaptation can be distributed, just as a computation can be. The ultimate goal of the project is to understand collective cognition, the way groups can sometimes solve problems and learn things better than any of their members could. It's only fitting that what amounts to a quantitative sociology of science be initiated at SFI.
[S]ynaesthesia is the pre-dawn of a higher-level linguistic/symbolic sense becoming hardwired in much the same way. Transhumans will be mentally superior in so many ways. Meaning will exhibit pop-out. Objects will be declared by semantics, not by early visual processing edge detection.(mine is that our brains are quantum computers linked thru the multiverse, and like SDB's supposition, we're just the substrate for higher order intelligences we cannot fathom -- kinda like understanding higher dimensions, the 'neuron' cannot know the mind! or can it? :) and some interesting thoughts on comparative species' cognition besides! :]
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For the crowd to be intelligent, the people within it have to be making decisions on their own, while drawing on diverse sources of information. During a bubble or panic, people's decisions become dependent on others'--"If they're selling, I better sell, too"--and diversity vanishes as people get caught up in the prevailing frenzy.
From your second link:
Plenty of questions remain about this theory, such as: Why assume that ignorance leads to random decision-making? Maybe elites, demagogues or the press can sway uninformed voters in one direction, thereby drowning out the votes of the informed minority.
This is good stuff (thanks kliuless!) but I'm of the mind that the caveats open holes so large that they overwhelm the value of the original speculations about mass wisdom.
posted by vacapinta at 2:54 PM on May 25, 2004