More than individual genius, it’s collective intelligence that matters
These words are an attempt to answer the question: Why do we care about the question (or issue) of collective culture?
Why not accept the individualism of men and their disinterest in what goes beyond their environment and their immediate needs?
For a moment, as a result of extensive reading, experiences and discussions, an idea has taken hold of me: It is incorrect to overvalue the genius of individuals, and that the developement rate of history is in fact the result of interaction and collective intelligence. The book “Collective Intelligence” supports this idea and puts forth scientific theories that concretise it. This rich book (640 pages!) provides abundant amounts of evidence on the value of collective intelligence and its relation to natural selection.
I will content myself to mentioning just one of these ideas: the model of innovation and creation in societies is not linked to the intelligence of the members of these societies (due to genetic superiority for example), but rather to the degree of interdependence, communication and mutual influence between the members of these societies, and the cumulative preservation of this knowledge through traditions, legends, books or even preconceived ideas!
Ethnologists and other scientists have carried out numerous experiments in order to simulate and understand these dynamics. I will summarize one of the ideas broached in he aforementioned book.
Suppose there are two civilisations with the same population: The first is the nation of “geniuses”. Geniuses are able to make a discovery once every 10 generations, But the individualism of geniuses means that each one has a close relationship with only a single person.
The second nation are the “butterflies”. Butterflies make a discovery every 1000 generations, But their sense of socialization puts each of them in a close relationship with 10 people. Finally, suppose there is a 50% chance that someone will talk about their discovery to a friend. Which of the two peoples will surpass the other?
After simulating over a large number of generations, the result was that only 18% of geniuses were aware of the occurence of a discovery (and many of them repeated the entire discovery effort on their own!).
While 99.9% of butterflies knew about the discoveries made in their ranks, thanks to the density of relationships and the speed with which information was transmitted between them. This despite the overwhelming intellectual superiority of geniuses (100 times smarter than butterflies!)
Imagine, for example, that the discovery was guns. We immediately perceive the civilizational, industrial and even cultural inferiority of geniuses compared to butterflies.
After simulating over a large number of generations, the result was that only 18% of geniuses were aware of a discovery (and many of them repeated the discovery effort on their own!). While 99.9% of butterflies knew about it, thanks to the density of relationships and the speed with which information was transmitted between them. This despite the overwhelming intellectual superiority of geniuses (100 times smarter than butterflies!)
Imagine, for example, that the discovery was guns. We immediately perceive the civilizational, industrial and even cultural inferiority of geniuses compared to butterflies.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ What does this result mean? Nations where information and ideas pass quickly will always outshine calcified civilisations where individualism, castes, bigotry and mistrust is rampant.
What makes the difference historically is our ability to create this collective intelligence. And theorizing and realizing it is perhaps the greatest real achievement for anyone who wants change.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Listen to Robert Heinrich in “the secret of our success”