For those young people who are inheriting the world their recent ancestors (such as my generation) have managed to completely screw up, they will find that most of the problems, such as climate change, population growth, clean water, poverty, and so forth and so on, will require the wisdom and intelligence of the many, not the hubris of the few. To that is, the readings below might begin to provide some perspective.
Helene Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("The heart of the book is thus a defense of the 'collective intelligence' hypothesis in favor of democracy. I argue that there are good reasons to think that for most political problems and under conditions conducive to proper deliberation and proper use of major rule, a democratic decision procedure is likely to be a better decision procedure than any nondemocratic decision procedures, such as a council of experts or a benevolent dictator. I thus defend a strong version of the epistemic argument for democracy. In my view, all things being equal otherwise, the rule of the many is at least as good a, and occasionally better than, the rule of the few at identifying the common good and providing solutions to collective problems. This is so, I will suggest, because including more people in the decision-making process naturally tends to increase what has been shown to be a key ingredient of collective intelligence in the context of both problem solving and prediction--namely, cognitive diversity." Id. at 3. 'However bold it may seem, the epistemic argument defended here is ... only probabilistic. The claim that democracy is overall the smartest method for making group decisions does not exclude the possibility that some democratic decisions will be mistaken, nor does it exclude the possibility that a particular democracy will do worse than a particular oligarchy. Some of the time, the argument implicitly acknowledges, a democratic decision will prove inferior to one that would have been imposed by a dictator or a group of aristocrats or experts. Some of the time, a democracy will fail where a dictatorship or an oligarchy would have succeeded. On average, however, and in the long run, the claim is that democracy is a safer bet than dictatorship or even an aristocracy." Id. at 8-9. "Over the last several decades, cognitive science has shown that intelligence is a complex notion, encompassing diverse mental and social phenomena such as learning and understanding, reasoning and problem solving, perception and adaption. This general definition has the merit of being valid across a range of cultures and populations. Intelligence is thus distinct from 'merely book learning, narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts,' reflecting instead 'a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings--'catching on,' 'making sense' of things, or 'figuring out' what to do.' The main theories of intelligence today ... all emphasize the multidimensionality of intelligence, in contrast with narrow notions such as rationality." "Collective intelligence is this concept of intelligence applied to groups as opposed to individuals. Although it can theoretically be a linear function of the individual intelligence (the sum of the parts), collective intelligence is often conceptualized as an 'emergent' property (more than the sum of the parts). In other words, collective intelligence is more than a function of individual citizens' intelligence and depends on properties that cannot be found in individuals themselves but only in the whole. Such a concept is often used to describe the behavior of groups of social animals such as ants or bees, which display a form of intelligence at the level of the group that is not found at the level of each distinct animals--also referred to as 'hive mind'." Id. at 18 (citations omitted). It should be obvious that this concept of 'group intelligence' would be bastardized by the process where certain individuals are excluded from the group before the the subject decision is made. For instance, a department head who appoints members to a committee undermines the value of collective intelligence. It may results in the collective intelligence of the committee, but it loses the collective intelligence of the whole due to the exclusion of some individuals. Though, I would think, randomly selecting the members of the committee would tend to have greater collective intelligence value than nonrandom appointments of committee members. "Even though the brain has an essential function, it can accomplish very little by itself." Id. at 20. "The general point of the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem is that it is often better to have a group of cognitively diverse people than a group of very smart people who think alike. This is because whereas very smart people sharing local optima will tend to get stuck quickly on their highest local common optimum, a more cognitively diverse group has the possibility of guiding each other beyond that local optimum toward the global optimum." Id. at 103. Put down this book, and view the film Twelve Angry Men; then pick up this book again.).
Helene Landemore & Jon Elster, eds., Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanism (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2012) (From Helene Landemore, "Collective Wisdom: Old and New": "All in all, I would argue that the new 'collective wisdom' is not just the old one writ large. The Internet-based technological revolution that has taken place over the past twenty years is changing the reality of human affairs and interactions. The explosion of the literature on collective intelligence has already affected the way business and politics are conducted, spreading the view that, in an increasingly complex and connected world, knowledge and smart solutions are more likely to emerge from the bottom up, among groups of regular people, than to be produced at the top by a few experts. It is now time for the theory to catch up with the practice." "The goal of this edited volume is to go beyond the accumulation of anecdotes and vague intuitions about collective wisdom and to offer the first attempt at systematic and scholarly inquiry into the nature of the phenomenon." Id. at 4-5. This is a nice, but taxing, collection of essays by Emile Servan-Schreibe, Gloria Origgi, Lu Hong & Scott E. Page, Daniel Andler, John Ferejohn, Josiah Ober, Jon Elster, Philippe Urfalino, Christian List, David Estlund, Helene Landemore, Gerry Mackie, Bryan Caplan, Adrian Vermeule, Dan Sperber & Hugo Mercier.).
