We live in a physical universe, and everything in it obeys physical laws that operate on many levels, from the quantum to the galactic.
Each level has its own truths, all approximate, yet accurate enough to work. The progress of human culture has been to understand more and more of these truths. As we understand more, we move problems from the domain of belief (where the answers are long, complex, and superficial) into the domain of evidence-based knowledge (where the answers tend to be shorter, simpler, and more profound). At no stage has anyone done the reverse — to prove that evidence-based science is not the best way to solve problems. Nor has this process slowed down; indeed, it moves faster each day.
Human culture seems to have evolved to mine truths. Like the an-cient bacterial colonies that filtered particles of gold from the sea and laid them down over millions of years to form gold deposits, human society acts as an information-processing machine. Each individual mind, for purely selfish reasons, collaborates with others to turn ob-served data into patterns of information, and then into reusable tools,
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in other words, knowledge. “Information” is shorthand for “data, in-formation, and knowledge.”
Collective intelligence operates as a social network that collects in-teresting problems. It then solves these by casting around for as many solutions as possible — even insane ones. It filters and remixes these solutions, testing them against known facts. It tries them out in as many diverse situations as possible. It finally reduces the set of pos-sible answers down to minimal packages that can be traded and car-ried across generations. The better the collective intelligence, the faster it works and the more accurate and useful its results. The more these results approach general truths, the more useful they are, to more people.
Collective intelligence needs ways to shift information around. Im-portantly, it must assign the right value to everything because other-wise it cannot filter out the rare and valuably accurate pieces of in-formation from the vast majority of junk. The best mechanism ap-pears to be that each peer in the network places a value on the inform-ation they share or are offered and work accordingly. It’s not as simple as placing a monetary cost on a whispered secret.
Rather, peers value other peers for their ability to deliver useful in-formation over time, and peers will maintain notions of inin-formation credit and debt with respect to others. We can try to model collective intelligences as economies of information that operate according to the principles of specialization and trade in a free market.
The basic rules for moving information around human society are economics. We specialize in our favored areas, and we trade informa-tion about those areas in what is ideally a free market. The ability to properly value and trade information with other people is a sign of adulthood. A teenager is mature when he or she can take part “in adult conversation,” which essentially means entering the informa-tion market.
And so the jet I am flying in is more “accurate” than the planes of a century ago. It is faster, carries more people, is safer, travels further,
and consumes less fuel per passenger mile. It is a truth: the result of vast numbers of information exchanges between individuals and groups.
Looking at successful on-line communities from a distance, we see human society in its most general form. Our history, over millions of years, is a long story of meeting stark challenges with radical cultural and technological innovation. Obviously, our species is the descend-ants of tough and smart survivors who found an answer for every single problem facing the family for over 3.5 billion years, the dawn of life. High five! For all its many inefficiencies and dark aspects, post-ape human culture has been remarkably adaptable and success-ful. It seems fair to assume that the earliest roots of our particularly human culture grew from our ability to think collectively as well as reason individually.
How can I make such a broad statement? Well, it seems clear that the mental tools we need in order to construct wise crowds are built into our minds; they have evolved and were not learned. I’m not just thinking of the language instinct, though this is clearly fundamental.
I’m also thinking of what I consider the social instincts, such as re-spect for authority and rules, willingness to collaborate, intolerance of cheaters, strength of identity, pride of accomplishment, memory of others' accomplishments, ability to calculate collective rankings, and so on. These are instinctive — visible in young children without prompting, consistent across all human societies, and irrepressible no matter what pressure is applied.
Yet one nagging question comes back: Why is there so much stu-pidity in the world when we’re apparently so well equipped to act as wise crowds? The answer is that sometimes stupidity beats wisdom, and just as we’re born with the talent to create, we’re born with the ability to destroy. Wise crowds have the potential to become mad mobs, as you’ll see in the following scenarios.