A large number of Self-Styled Collective Intelligence Projects — Citizendium, Digital Universe, DMOZ, Nupedia, Textop, and last alphabetically but far from the least significantly, Wikipedia — have turned out to be, or seem fated to be, major disappointments to those observers and workers who have been dreaming of such things and working to build such things from the day they first touched that Monolith in Olduvai Gorge.

I'm sure you don't need Euclid's algorithm to work out the common denominator of most of those projects, but maybe it would help to tease out a bit more expressly some of the design factors that have led them to, or will most likely lead them to, the despair of all our dreams and work.

Back after coffee ...

Jonny

Anyone who reviews the history of Artificial Intelligence will notice the themes of Collective Intelligence and Self-Organizing Systems appearing on a recurring basis, perhaps under a variety of more catchy names, but always funnelmentally the same ideas. The ideas themselves have had their ups and downs as far as their influence in computer science and the society at large goes. There have been periodic revivals, ebullient bubbles of enthusiasm and hype to the max, interspersed with decades of disappointment, backpeddling, backtracking, and back-to-the-drawing-boarding.

The ideas are now embedded in pop culture — blogosphere, coffeehouse, and party chatter — and so it's difficult to know anymore, at least, at first, whether the person talking the talk actually knows what he or she is talking about, or is mirrorly echoing some bit of hype that he or she heard on this or that grapevine full of pleasing intoxi-cant.

Need more coffee ...

Jonny

I obviously haven't studied it to anywhere near the extent that you have, but from what I've observed, it seems like the big problem with Collective Intelligence is that it keeps running into the ol' Brick Wall of Collective Morality and Collective Self-Preservation.

This is what forces Wikipedia into operating as a quasi-religion. In order to justify its continued existence within the framework of the larger society, the people running it have to set up rules and rituals to convince themselves that they're "following proper procedure" and "applying fundamental principles" when they do bad things. They do good things too, but there they run into the 80-20 rule, writ large: Since 80 percent of the bad things will be done by just 20 percent of the users, it actually takes less human energy to create conflict than to avoid it - to be sure, this is a paradox, but personally I believe it's real, and that the trend will therefore be towards more, and larger, conflicts and blundering. And as the site's overall existence becomes more problematic, and eventually even pestilential, the amount of quasi-religious officiousness and rigidity will only grow worse as the cult attempts to preserve itself by any means necessary.

Actually, if you look at the three major "Abrahamic" religions, you see the same basic pattern - an initial period of great energy in which an overarching ideology and rules are established; followed by the creation of a bureaucracy designed to promote, proselytize, and expand, but which ultimately becomes entrenched and reactionary; and over time, the ideologies and rules are changed, along with the historical record itself, to fit in with changing social mores. Schisms also develop, some of which succeed to an alarming degree. Eventually the religion bears little or no resemblance to the original version - often a good thing. But the main point here is that the religion adapts to survive, not unlike an animal or insect species would in the pure Darwinian sense.

Wikipedia will adapt to survive too, or at least try, which is really too bad, because it's such a huge waste of intellectual (and, yes, quasi-intellectual) resources. IMO, efforts at building "Collective Intelligences" can't really succeed at anything other than the gradual dumbing-down of society. People will always accede to the lowest common denominator, if only just to get their point across. In the end, everybody loses.

Everybody has heard about "Abrahamic" religions. Future discussions will, perhaps, discuss the "Jimboic" ones.

Not Of Necessity Random Readings

Before I lose track of things, I will reserve this page for collecting some readings that come to mind.

Collective Intelligence and Society of Mind

Just from my own reading of past and passing literature on the subject, I count a revival of these Baron von Münchhausen Collective Bootstrap ideas coming every 20 years or so since the 1940's, though I may have lost track of every last blip on the radar in the last decade or so. Certainly one of the most well-brought-up 2nd or 3rd childhoods of the Social Intelligence Bootstrap (SIB) idea is due to none other than Marvin Minsky taking up the sound of one gauntlet clapping, as recounted in his book of the mid 1980's:

• Minsky, Marvin (1986), The Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY.

Learning Communities and Learning Organizations

Learning Communities and Learning Organizations are different things, but they do share a large fund of ideas that derives from the study of adaptive systems, cybernetics, optimal control systems, and systems theory in general. In particular, theory and practice in both areas recognize the importance of Learning About Learning, Learning How To Learn, or Second Order Learning.

• Theory. Peter M. Senge (1990), The Fifth Discipline : The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Doubleday, New York, NY.
• Practice. Peter M. Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard B. Ross, Bryan J. Smith (1994), The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook : Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, Doubleday, New York, NY.

Charisma, Authority, Bureaucracy

On the connections between politics, religion, and other topics under the heading of Fifty Ways To Lose Your Friends, the all time sine qua non is:

• Weber, Max (1930), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons (trans.), Anthony Giddens (intro.), Harper Collins, 1930. Reprinted, Routledge, London, UK, 1992. First published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 1904–1905. Translated from the revised version in Weber's Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion), 1920–1921.

Especially pertinent to our discussion are Weber's ideas about the Conversion Of Motivation (COM) and the Routinization Of Charisma (ROC).

Further Reading

• See GetMeta Wreads

Jonny

Bumping this old topic to the top of the heap for old tome's sake.

Jonny

The same conversations seem to come around like holidays commemorating otherwise long forgotten lessons of history.

Here is my recent version of this same conversation.

Copying this old cache under new manglement by way of re*cycling the information.

I concur with Jon's identification of these resources as particularly germane to our overarching concerns here.

Random Bump

Jon

Jon, we have now mentioned these ideas several times in the past three years.

Perhaps the time is at hand for demonstrating the process of constructing a live and fully functional learning community that incorporates the ideas outlined above.

There appear to be certain obstacles. This often happens with any bright idea. No sooner do you see a promising new avenue of approach than all the old roadblocks start to pile up. There is nothing for it but pausing and reflecting on what that's all about — "analyzing the resistance" as Freud might have said.

I prefer to meditate on this. Ohhhhhhmmmmmmm....