Off with his head (only in French)

I've been thinking about swarm intelligence. This concept forms a major part of Michael Crichton's book Prey. This novel is science fiction, of course, but the idea of swarm intelligence is still interesting and highly applicable to human societies.


The general concept of swarm intelligence is the idea that the interaction of multitudes of simple agents can give rise to complex behaviors. In Prey, this made Crichton's swarms of nanoparticles incredibly intelligent and capable of rapid evolution and innovation. In reality, it makes us very, very stupid. Because people are the exact opposite of a "nanoswarm." People are, as individuals, pretty intelligent. We can be misled, but are usually able to handle ourselves fairly well. People as groups are incapable of rational thought. Consider a mob. To find the IQ of a mob, start at 70 and divide by the number of people involved. Look at the French Revolution. The more violent aspects of this period were either mob-executed (literally) or mob-inspired. Random head removal would not lower the price of bread. This did not discourage random head removal. Why? The main problem with swarm intelligence is a tendency to lose track of goals. People as individuals may see and objective and work to overcome it. I see that the price of bread is too high for me to buy as much as I want to, so I'll fire off an angry letter to Robespierre. A mob sees that the price is too high and they whack off his head. End result? Thermidorian reaction and (gasp) the price of bread stays exactly the same.



What can we learn from this? I'd say that people are, as groups, not very bright. So, let us turn our attention to the idea of democracy. Democracy is based on the idea that the majority of people should determine a government's policies. There's nothing there about desirable or sound policies, what matters is that the people are choosing their own laws. This is interesting in light of the assertion that people are weakest intellectually in large groups. The obvious counter here is that I am making a false comparison; it's pretty evident that election day differs (usually) from the elimination of Robespierre. But the concept that people are more easily confused and misled in groups holds true. Why? Because people (collectively) get caught up in the same emotional rush that drives mobs and demonstrations. Think about the recent election of certain very famous, very popular political figure. The number of Obama supporters I found who could accurately describe his policies, let alone why they supported these policies, can be counted on the hand of a blind butcher. What mattered was that Obama generated a massive emotional upwelling in enough people that it self-propagated. A few people are enraptured. The sensation spreads to their friends, families, etc., growing exponentially with each degree of separation. By the end of the campaign, millions of people acting as the democratic analogue of a mob elected a man whose policies very few of them actually know. Interesting, eh?



This explains, in part, why I have never met a person with an extreme leftist view on gun control or national healthcare who has been willing to argue logically and with evidence. Little such support exists, but this is irrelevant simply because enough other people like the idea or think they do. Want to have some fun? Lock five Republicans and five Democrats in a room. Wait for one hour. Open the door and you will find at least fifteen different opinions. How do such people get into office? Because, collectively, people are frequently idiots. The opinions don't matter; what matters is the ability to stir people up via grandiose promises of "change" or "progress" or even "values" and to get out the vote.



Solution, anyone? America's system of democracy is based on the erroneous idea that people vote in a vacuum. This may have been close to correct in 1787, but it most certainly is false now. People are bombarded with everyone else's opinion (frequently an unthinking one) and before long their own disappears into the noise. We need to restore some measure of individualism. Only when people start thinking for ourselves again can swarm intelligence be neutralized.