In this episode, I explore the strange boundary between collective intelligence and collective stupidity: why groups can sometimes solve problems better than individuals, but also amplify errors, spread misinformation, or coordinate around terrible ideas.

We start from Francis Galton’s classic “Vox Populi” example, where a crowd came surprisingly close to guessing the weight of an ox, and move through Wikipedia, GitHub, fake news, Bellingcat, NASA citizen science, ants, death spirals, diversity, deliberation, remixing, and the possibility of designing better collective systems for democracy and problem-solving.

The main question is simple: what makes the difference between a group becoming smarter together and a group becoming dumber together?

Links & references

Francis Galton — Vox Populi:
https://www.nature.com/articles/075450a0

Wikipedia and encyclopedia accuracy debate:
 https://www.nature.com/articles/438890a

False news spreads faster than true news online:
 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559

Bellingcat and open-source intelligence:
 https://www.bellingcat.com/about/who-we-are/

Shia LaBeouf / He Will Not Divide Us story:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/trolls-protest-shia-labeoufs-anti-trump-protest-art

Moon Zoo / NASA citizen science crater classification:
 https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01664

Diverse problem solvers vs high-ability problem solvers:
 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0403723101

Multiscale intelligence / intelligence beyond brains:
 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202400196

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