Thanks @Ozzie Gooen and @Aaron Gertler, for the detailed comments. As Ozzie pointed out, the findings in collective intelligence (CI) are indeed very scattered, in the sense that what we know about CI exists as bits of effects that are often not connected. While real-world scenarios are typically affected by many interacting social and psychological factors, and how these effects interact is oftentimes unclear. I don’t think there is an up-to-date synthesizing effort in the field at the moment, which is my frustration too, and what I’m trying to do in my work, and it’s no easy task). As a young transdisciplinary field, CI still has much work to do in organizing and synthesizing. In fact, they just started to have their own journal (Collective Intelligence published by ACM) very recently. In the area of organizing, I think CI can learn a lot from the EA efforts.
Good question on the applications of collective intelligence findings, and of the role of technology. I don’t have in-depth knowledge about these areas. However, a resource that could be helpful is Handbook of Collective Intelligence (2005), edited by Bernstein and Malone. It devotes a chapter to discuss organizational behavior (effects on teams and organizations), and another on AI. Also see Nesta on some efforts applying collective intelligence research findings in policymaking and beyond.
As for collective intelligence in the more complex scenarios, there is a study on project groups, another on solving a large engineering problem, also a Huff Post article on CI for “mega problem-solving.” The work done on complex, real-world problem solving is not much compared to those done in labs. I hope there to be more on this in the future. Start-ups would be a great subject to study! I haven’t seen any work on this, though.
Thanks so much for the summary, I just noticed this for some reason.
I’ll keep an eye out.
It sounds a bit like CI is fairly scattered, doesn’t have all too much existing work, and also isn’t advancing particularly quickly as of now. (A journal sounds good, but there are lots of fairly boring journals, so I don’t know what to make of this)
Maybe 1-5 years from now, of whenever there gets to be a good amount of literature that would excite EAs, there could be follow-up posts summarizing the work.
Thanks for posting this Vicky! It’s a super interesting line of thought and I’d love to hear more about your research and how you view its path to effecting change in the world.
I’m commenting to flag one typo which threw me off the first time I read Vicky’s comment for any future readers—I think Bernstein and Malone’s Handbook of Collective Intelligence was published in 2015, rather than 2005.
It feels like CI has been coming into its own as an actual field of research over the last 10-15 years. It’d seem much less promising to me if there had been a handbook published in 2005 without any major synthesizing efforts since.
Thanks @Ozzie Gooen and @Aaron Gertler, for the detailed comments. As Ozzie pointed out, the findings in collective intelligence (CI) are indeed very scattered, in the sense that what we know about CI exists as bits of effects that are often not connected. While real-world scenarios are typically affected by many interacting social and psychological factors, and how these effects interact is oftentimes unclear. I don’t think there is an up-to-date synthesizing effort in the field at the moment, which is my frustration too, and what I’m trying to do in my work, and it’s no easy task). As a young transdisciplinary field, CI still has much work to do in organizing and synthesizing. In fact, they just started to have their own journal (Collective Intelligence published by ACM) very recently. In the area of organizing, I think CI can learn a lot from the EA efforts.
Good question on the applications of collective intelligence findings, and of the role of technology. I don’t have in-depth knowledge about these areas. However, a resource that could be helpful is Handbook of Collective Intelligence (2005), edited by Bernstein and Malone. It devotes a chapter to discuss organizational behavior (effects on teams and organizations), and another on AI. Also see Nesta on some efforts applying collective intelligence research findings in policymaking and beyond.
As for collective intelligence in the more complex scenarios, there is a study on project groups, another on solving a large engineering problem, also a Huff Post article on CI for “mega problem-solving.” The work done on complex, real-world problem solving is not much compared to those done in labs. I hope there to be more on this in the future. Start-ups would be a great subject to study! I haven’t seen any work on this, though.
Thanks so much for the summary, I just noticed this for some reason.
I’ll keep an eye out.
It sounds a bit like CI is fairly scattered, doesn’t have all too much existing work, and also isn’t advancing particularly quickly as of now. (A journal sounds good, but there are lots of fairly boring journals, so I don’t know what to make of this)
Maybe 1-5 years from now, of whenever there gets to be a good amount of literature that would excite EAs, there could be follow-up posts summarizing the work.
Thanks for posting this Vicky! It’s a super interesting line of thought and I’d love to hear more about your research and how you view its path to effecting change in the world.
I’m commenting to flag one typo which threw me off the first time I read Vicky’s comment for any future readers—I think Bernstein and Malone’s Handbook of Collective Intelligence was published in 2015, rather than 2005.
It feels like CI has been coming into its own as an actual field of research over the last 10-15 years. It’d seem much less promising to me if there had been a handbook published in 2005 without any major synthesizing efforts since.