Collective intelligence exceeds any individual’s without erasing individual expertise

Evidence

As the title of a book by David Weinberger neatly encapsulates, we must rethink the very notion of knowledge – and be suspicious of traditional relationships between the figure of relevant information and the ground of implicit knowledge – ‘now that the facts aren’t facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room’. The issue is not so much that that those who are sitting at the back next to the radiator, consulting Wikipedia on their smartphone, may ‘know’ more than the speaker who is professing from his lectern. Even if they may now and then correct a mistaken date or name, the professor still has a head start on them thanks to the syntheses and the schemas of understanding that he has had the opportunity to accumulate over the course of the years, his readings and his experiences. It is not a question of knowing who knows the most, but of realizing that we are more intelligent together than any one of us can be individually – as long as vacuoles have enabled each of us to enjoy moments of separation, necessary for the deepening of our singularization. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 552

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘the room’ as the site of collective intelligence that surpasses both novice and expert individuals.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Citton reconcile the ‘vacuole’ need for separation with swarm-based wikiknowledge? The tension between singularization and collective intelligence seems undertheorized here.
• SHARE: Weinberger’s ‘the smartest person in the room is the room’ — the nuance that the professor still out-knows smartphone users is a reframing worth sending to anyone teaching under AI-tool conditions.
• XREF: connects to: Collective intelligence depends on material infrastructure beyond human minds — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 554; Interlaced but decoupled attentions generate knowledge exceeding any member’s contribution — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 341; Human judgment combined with algorithms outperforms either alone — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 1194 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Interlaced but decoupled attentions generate knowledge exceeding any member’s contribution #corroborates (0.90) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 341
• Attentional alignment with others generates communal powers no individual could reach alone #corroborates (0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 111
• Individual intellectual achievements are culminations of collective momentum #qualifies (0.80)
• Human judgment combined with algorithms outperforms either alone #corroborates (0.75) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1194