A Short Literature Review on Collective Intelligence

The study of collective intelligence is important to understand some fascinating trends of our time such as open innovation, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and cryptocurrencies.

Here’s a list for beginners in this field. As any list, it is of course incomplete. But still a good point to start.

The Pioneers

To my knowledge, the first notions of collective intelligence can be traced back to Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle discusses the notion of achieving better results by more people participating in decision-making.

Condorcet was the first modern writer to take an interest in these issues. The famous Condorcet Theorem holds that, under certain conditions, a larger group has more chances of being right than a smaller one. To learn more, read the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions.

Collective Intelligence and Political Philosophy

Collective intelligence is related to political science and political philosophy, mainly through Habermas idea of ​​deliberative democracy. The central idea is that democracy has an epistemic component, that is, it helps a society acquire knowledge through the practice of dialogue and rational exchange.

Some notions of Habermasian philosophy can be useful to start learning about collective intelligence. A good book for this purpose is Gordon Finlayson’s Habermas, a very short introduction.

Habermas’s ideas have a direct application to new forms of collective decision making enabled by the web. For an introduction on how deliberative democracy works in the Internet era, I suggest Promises and Limits of Web-deliberation by Rafael Kies.

Christian List studies how groups of people add their judgment in decision making. David Estlund discusses the epistemic status of democracy. Among other topics, he studies the optimal number of members a government assembly should have.

A rising star in the field is the French philosopher Hélène Landemore, who teaches at Yale’s department of political science. She has a great book called Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many.

If democracy includes more people in decision-making, then democratic governments make better decisions, right?

Not everyone agrees. For a critical view of the subject, read Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.

Diversity and Decision Making

University of Michigan Professor Scott Page wrote the highly recommended, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.

Along with Lu Hong, Scott Page is the author of the Hong & Page theorem, which holds that diversity is more important than individual talent for group decision making. When diversity is high, the members mental models supplement each other. Here is the paper with Hong and Page theorem.

Social Epistemology

Social epistemology studies how humans organize to produce knowledge.

Some of the questions that seeks to answer this discipline are: can we trust testimony as corroboration of facts? Under what conditions should we trust experts? What is reasonable disagreement? Are groups rational for decision making?

Social epistemology received considerable interest in recent years because the Internet brought radically new ways to aggregate information, such as Wikipedia. Can its success be replicated? Under what conditions does the Wikipedia way work?

To know more, read Social Epistemology: Essential Readings compiled by Goldman & Whitcomb.

A fascinating topic within social epistemology is the law. Are court procedures adequate to discover the truth about a crime? How many members should a jury have? One, twelve, a thousand?

People interested in such questions should read Truth, Error, and Criminal Law: An Essay in Legal Epistemology by Larry Laudan.

Collective Intelligence in Practice

In Wiki Government, Beth Simone Noveck tells the story of creating the Peer to Patent project, a US government program to crowdsource patent research.

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (2010) by Stanford Professor Josiah Ober is a must. It explains how the institutional architecture of the Athenian polis favored decisions from the perspective of modern network analysis and information aggregation theories.

Wikinomics and Macrowikinomics, by Don Tapscott, discuss the impact of collective intelligence on business.

Sociobiology

Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Seneca, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montesquieu had something in common. They all wrote about bees as an analogy for human societies. The honeycomb is a symbol of social networks. There is also collective intelligence among bees.

To understand how this work from a sociobiology perspective, I recommend Honeybee Democracy where Thomas Seeley explains how a honeycomb works as a democratic system of decision-making.

Prediction markets

1906. In a state fair, there was a contest where participants had to guess the weight of an ox. Mathematician Francis Galton ran some statistical tests on the results and found that the average prediction (1.197 lbs) was surprisingly close to the actual weight of the ox (1.198 pounds).

Several studies suggest that prediction markets are more effective than discussion groups for information aggregation.

A prediction market works like any sports wager. Participants expressed their belief in the likelihood of some event to occur by buying and selling assets. Prediction markets are used quite successfully to predict the winner of an election, the Oscars and to do sales forecasts.

Some developments in this direction are the Augur platform and Inkling Prediction Markets.

For an excellent introduction to prediction markets, read Chapter 1, Prediction Markets: Trading Uncertainty for Collective Wisdom by Emile Servan-Schreiber, compiled as part of the Collective Intelligence: Principles and Mechanisms, edited by Hélène Landemore.

So, where do I start?

For newbies, here as some books to start to learn about the fascinating field of collective intellgence.

The Starfish and the Spider by Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman explains a number of trends towards decentralization we face since the birth of the Internet. The operation of P2P networks is reviewed in great detail.

Cass Sunstein’s Infotopia is also a must. And of course, The Wisdom of the Crowds, by James Surowiecki.

So, here’s an overview of the main topics in collective intelligence. It is incomplete of course, but I believe it’s enough to start learning about this fascinating field.