An interesting irony that acting as individuals with access to different information produces highly coherent group behaviour.
..having uninformed individuals participating in this decision-making actually democratizes the group decision-making. It prevents extremist individuals from having disproportionate influence. Misinformation can be percolated through human societies through things like the media or through broadcasting, where you're broadcasting vast amounts of information the same information to multiple individuals. When you broadcast the same information to multiple individuals you've eroded the capacity for collective intelligence. Collective intelligence relies on the individual components to gather evidence themselves towards the problem not be told what to think. We find again and again when we look at animal groups that in actual fact, they've evolved strategies to avoid having overly correlated information. Unfortunately in human society we rely too much, in my opinion, on such information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-5ffl5_7AI
I watched the video before reading the quoted section. I have to say, I was shocked at the idea that humans don't exhibit enough sheeplike behavior. Also, I disagree with the idea that giving more people access to information is bad. Look at what humans have built as a species. Our most ignorant people know so much more than their ancestors. I'd agree giving people misinformation is bad.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, what I was going to say before that snippet happened, is that there's a field of study somewhat similar to chaos, called complexity, that is all about emergent behaviors that arise from simple rules. Schooling fish, stock market bubbles, flocks of birds, those wavy lines in the sand on the beach, etc. It's very interesting stuff
I think the sheep analogy has to be taken very indirectly. Obviously sheep don't do much in the way of complex reasoning. But by thinking independently - or at least acting on necessarily independent information - a harmonious group behaviour emerges which is quite different to what happens with, say, a bunch of angry cats. I believe that's the intended message, that independent thought can result in group harmony rather than discord. It doesn't always, but it can.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much information available that people also have to pick and choose which they want to process. I think the message here is more of "unity in diversity", that a consensus is stronger precisely because it has dissenting voices - it's a sign that all positions have been properly considered.
Of course, human analysis of information is a lot more complex than how a fish decides to swim, so I take the advice here with a very large pinch of salt. The bit I found most interesting was that extremists can't flourish if opinions are too diverse, though I suspect that having an enormous diversity of opinions better approximates to angry cats than harmonious sheep.