Collective Stupidity - How Can We Avoid It?
Presenter:
Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder
Time:
20:55
Summary
When we come together in groups we can be so much more than the sum of the parts. But sometimes groups are just much more stupid. Collective stupidity is the flipside of collective intelligence, and we see it a lot on social media. Why are groups sometimes collectively stupid and sometimes not? What can we do to be more intelligent in groups? In this video I explain the most important points.
Transcript
You and I together are more than the sum of the parts. It's not just that I know some things you don't know and you know some things I don't know. Like how to prevent hair from looking like sauerkraut. No, there's more to it, maybe, hopefully, every once in a while, I point one of you into a new direction and you see something I couldn't see together, we're more intelligent than either of us alone, but collective intelligence has a flip side, collective stupidity. Sometimes we're more stupid together than we are on our own. But what makes some groups of people intelligent and others stupid? That's what we'll talk about today.
Everything around you is made of just a few types of elementary particles. Fundamentally, there's little difference between you and a cheese cracker. Both are made from up and down quarks with electrons held together by gluons and photons. If you combine many of those particles, you get increasingly complex systems. First you get atoms, then molecules, and those molecules can combine to living beings, which can combine to societies. Each time you combine many constituents with their interactions, you can get completely new behavior. We call this behavior emergent. The difference between you and a cheese cracker isn't on the fundamental level. It's on the emergent level.