Samuel L. Jackson gets to be this week's Quote of the Week; I didn't even realize that this line came from "The Long Kiss Goodnight", I thought it was just a colloquialism. I bring this up because of a line from the Bruns article this week.
"In many domains, the collaboratively compiled knowledge of users is now (or is at least believed to be) virtually on par with that of expert scholars..."
It's an unfortunate truth that Sturgeon's Law, which claims that "ninety percent of everything is crud", applies to scholastic communities as much as to science fiction novels and Youtube commenters. Gaps in knowledge are unavoidable, so in my view it's a mistake to count on other contributors to cover the missing material. The exact problem areas are usually hard to pinpoint; this unfortunately means that it might seem paranoid, but you can't assume that collective intelligence can solve the world's problems.
Completely agree with you. Weaknesses of collaborative intelligence become more evident the bigger the team size. From my experience small teams with proven people is the place where synergy appears.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you can find those 10% of anything only if you seek. Hence, it is inevitable to deal with the undesirable 90%.
I feel that the world of information available to us is a double edged sword. It's wonderful to be able to source information immediately and to be able to drill down to specifics. However, it's also very easy to validate our predispositions by ignoring sources that contradict them.
ReplyDeleteWhile you refer to collective intelligence, we have to remember that humans will continue to use various types of cognitive bias to pick and choose the information they utilize and internalize. Vladimir and I may participate in the same workshop. Listen to the same lectures, read the same materials. But our takeaways will most likely be very different based on our interests, prejudices, and realities.
More about cognitive bias' here. http://io9.com/5974468/the-most-common-cognitive-biases-that-prevent-you-from-being-rational