[walleeee]

If your point is that competent people must direct the activities of a group in order to accomplish a complicated task, sure. That's almost always true.

> Collective intelligence of a group is bounded by the smartest person there.

I maintain this is false. Who was the smartest person in the Vienna circle? A group of competent, well aligned people is potentially a much more capable thing than the one member with the highest IQ score alone. Collective intelligence is no simple combination of the capacities of its constituents. That is what the anthill demonstrates. The capacities of individuals do limit the capacities of the whole in some way, but it is nowhere near as simple as "bounded by the smartest person". This has a lot to do with the fact that "smartest person in the room" is not a particularly meaningful title absent a precise definition of what intelligence/competence means in your context of interest.

I agree with your point that adding people to an organization does not necessarily improve its capacities. Collective intelligence is not simply additive, nor is it simply bounded by the best individual on any particular dimension

[IgorPartola]

Ok let me reframe it like this: the collective intelligence of a random group of people is bounded by the collective intelligence of its top N% members, ranked by intelligence, where N is some relatively small number.”

If you assume a bell curve for intelligence, then it is primarily the people who are two standard deviations and up from median that are driving innovation, assuming the group allows such individuals to do so. In a small group this might be just one person, in a nation of hundreds of millions it would be single digits of millions, etc.

If the whole group is actively hostile towards this or there is a systematic barrier to it, such as the intelligentsia purge under Stalin, then there is probably going to be another factor that is much stronger at bounding the maximum intelligence.

I postulates that this holds true for any group where the average intelligence is close to 100 IQ or any other metric you want to use to designate the median intelligence in the human population overall.

If you get together a group of people who are already all over two standard deviations up from the overall median you will probably get a different calculation for the upper bound because higher order terms will become more significant, such as specialities, age, experience, etc. But when we are talking about societies, you are always talking about comparing to the median. As far as I know something like a median intelligence slowly trends up in humans over centuries but it is slow enough that there aren’t societies where their median intelligence is a lot lower or higher than any other society in existence at the same time.

Ants are a terrible example due to using a completely different intelligence model. They are incapable of recognizing innovation, so even if you throw in a group of Fermat ants into the mix, they will still end up working as just slightly more efficient drones. This fits into the model above as the society being set up with an active barrier to allowing its smartest members to innovate.

[walleeee]

> [ants] are incapable of recognizing innovation, so even if you throw in a group of Fermat ants into the mix, they will still end up working as just slightly more efficient drones.

And yet the anthill does very complex things even though its Fermats might feel their unique talents go unused. This strengthens the case unless you posit that humankind is so close to a universal intelligence limit that we can see its precise contours and can therefore know exactly what can be known and done, and how, exhaustively.

Separately, everything you say needs an operationalization of intelligence. I understand IQ is your proxy of choice. Presumably this measure correlates to innovation in such things as physics and mathematics. Presumably also to innovation in speculative financial vehicles, elaborate social schemes, weapons of mass destruction, and success in the war against nature. Will you adjust your definition when some of its manifestations come into tension with others, or stick with it come what may?

There is no intelligence absent context. Intelligence is a relation between an agent and everything else relevant, with respect to a goal.

[IgorPartola]

I will grant you that intelligence is very difficult to quantify in absolute terms and is very context dependent. If it was easy I would give you a mathematical proof instead of hand waving hypotheticals. IQ is not a great measure of it either and you also have to account for intelligence as in the ability to learn new things, create new concepts, recognize patterns, connect the dots, and having the wisdom when to do and not do certain things. In the context of this conversation we were talking about a society’s ability to innovate. I postulated that innovation in a society is not bounded by the median intelligence (or perhaps more accurately ability to innovate) of its members but by the intelligence/ability to innovate of its top members as ranked by intelligence/ability to innovate. I have not seen anything so far that disputes this hypothesis. A corollary to this hypothesis is that the median for a society can be, in theory, dumb as an ant and that society can still produce innovation at an impressive rate. Think of it as min-maxing your D&D party if that helps.

Ants do not feel so it doesn’t matter what the smartest ants feel. A CPU is infinitely more complex than an ant hill in its function, and is equally as predicable. Ants do not innovate any more than a laser etched chunk of silicon. They are a bad analogy to a conversation about innovation.

But I am also explicitly saying that there are ways a society can hamper its ability to innovate. One such way is to not create the organizational structure to set up its most able innovators for success. Another is to try to systematically eliminate them. A third is to separate them so that you do not get the synergistic effects of multiple experts in different fields being able to cooperate. All of these can happen in a society with a low median ability to innovate as well as a high ability to innovate.

The only truly unique thing you get in a society with low literacy in terms of innovation is that someone of very high intelligence as defined not by education but by ability to learn, would not be able to find the education they need to proceed. Before Fermat was a genius of his age he had to learn from some perfectly average people +/- one deviation. If there are no average teachers then your geniuses cannot be recognized as such. You see this same phenomenon in sports. Countries that do not have kids playing soccer for fun produce fewer world class soccer player per capita because there are fewer opportunities for the most talented players to get the experience and recognition. But even so, you can get exceptions. In basketball you still get Yoa Ming out a country that does not emphasize basketball in the same way the US does.

[walleeee]

> I postulated that innovation in a society is not bounded by the median intelligence (or perhaps more accurately ability to innovate) of its members but by the intelligence/ability to innovate of its top members as ranked by intelligence/ability to innovate. I have not seen anything so far that disputes this hypothesis

If you don't see how the anthill is relevant I'm not sure what else I can say to make it clear.

This argument is circular and, in the case of innovation (as opposed to a better-defined domain of competence like, say, the shotput) egregiously self-defeating. I'm not sure how to help you see that either. So I think we'll have to leave it.

I don't disagree with anything in your third paragraph, for what it's worth, assuming you somehow operationalize innovation, but it's a separate discussion.

I strongly disagree with a CPU being more complex than an anthill. One of these things is a primitive automaton, the other an instance of by far the most advanced technology (to adopt a familiar but limited point of view) in the known universe.

Cheers