Wednesday, December 13, 2006

MIT Weighs in on Collective Intelligence

Citing the work of MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) and best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, CIO Magazine has an interesting article MIT Puts Its Mind to Collective Intelligence where they explain MIT's desire to study how individuals harness technology to act intelligently.

There are people who think that collective intelligence is magic, and if you just add it, it'll make everything wonderful.

--Thomas Malone, CCI Director


What do you do when the "crowd" is wrong?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hopefully when the "crowd is wrong" as you put it, you do not run off the cliff. I like what D. Q. McInerny observes in his work Being Logical, 2004:

That a majority of the population in a given society holds a particular opinion on a given matter is interesting sociological information, but it has no necessary bearing on the truth or falsity of the matter in question. Majorities can be wrong. They can also be right. The "democratic fallacy" is the assumption that the mere fact that most people believe proposition X to be true is sufficient evidence to allow us to conclude that proposition X is true.

I think I see the cliff now....