| The more I reflect on Toby Segaran's book on Programming Collective Intelligence, the more strongly I want to recommend it to those who pursue a long term, system oriented vision of civil society. When you think about civil society, democracy, economics, and other structural expressions of social will, the more you realize that a large part of what we are all trying to do is figure out ways of turning a mass of individuals into an intelligent group. That's what Amazon's product recommendation system tries to do. And that's what voting tries to do.
Sometimes the masses are stupider than the individuals and sometimes they are wiser. What determines the difference is a combination of the nature of the problem to be addressed, the scales involved, and the structures (or programs) used to go from individual action to group action. Every method described in the book - from decision trees to genetic algorithms - is a source of inspiration for anyone working to figure out how to empower groups of people. Don't let the very modest amount of math in the book stop you from taking your time with each gem and seeing how it could connect to your work.
Posted: 11/26/07; 10:47:52 PM # |
