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August 12, 2004
Duncan Watts on Collective Intelligence
Posted by Clay Shirky
Great Duncan Watts piece on the dangers of centralized intelligence, his argument being that while centrally controlled organizations can respond well to situations they’ve forseen, only decentralized but coordinated groups can respond to unexpected catastrophe. (Duncan is the guy who worked out the Small Worlds pattern, providing intellectual backstop to Milgram’s Six Degrees work, so he knows whereof he speaks on the subject of decentralized networks.)
He covers the Japanese auto industry’s recovery after an earthquake, which he also describes in his Six Degrees book, but adds this more recent example:
Perhaps the most striking example of informal knowledge helping to solve what would appear to be a purely technical problem occurred in a particular company that lost all its personnel associated with maintaining its data storage systems. The data itself had been preserved in remote backup servers but could not be retrieved because not one person who knew the passwords had survived. The solution to this potentially devastating (and completely unforeseeable) combination of circumstances was astonishing, not because it required any technical wizardry or imposing leadership, but because it did not. To access the database, a group of the remaining employees gathered together, and in what must have been an unbearably wrenching session, recalled everything they knew about their colleagues: the names of their children; where they went on holidays; what foods they liked; even their personal idiosyncrasies. And they managed to guess the passwords.
Comments (7)
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1. Raquel on August 12, 2004 7:28 AM writes...
Hi!
Good article, but still nothing new. Watts explains most of the ideas on the book (also the "Small Worlds" one)and don't give anythng different, I think. Although, there's one thing that bothers me which is that people like Pierre Lévy and Derrick de Kerckhove have been talking about this sort of intelligence and how it emerges for centuries (ok, maybe not "centuries", but for some time). They even direct projects on the subject. But still, Watts writes as if everything was fresh and new and discovered just now.
BTW, I'm never abble to make trackbacks to Many 2 Many. I can't figure out how they work here. :)
Permalink to Comment2. Tim Keller on August 12, 2004 3:48 PM writes...
It was an opinion piece for a lay audience, I don't expect much detail in it. Self Organization -is- new, we're making discoveries about it all the time.
On my site I maintain a collection called NetTraq, of new papers on self organization & network theory; just this week I'm putting out an issue with a paper describing a new structure called a superquasicrystal, that's like a crystal but has a higher order of similiarity, & one on self-healing peer-to-peer networks, along with about 10-15 others. That's in addition to the dozens of other papers I've got on the subject.
Self organization is happening, & in time the Intelligence Community will be remade by it along with every other aspect of society.
Tim
Permalink to Comment---
The Self Organization Project
"we've got math on our side"
3. Brian Yeung on August 13, 2004 10:23 PM writes...
Just noticed this while nutr.itio.us'ing the link:
http://slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2104808&%3bMSID=68FDD2F45EB04313AE23741D71BDF3BA
Was this url Amped?
Permalink to Comment4. JamesJayTrouble on August 15, 2004 9:48 AM writes...
"The solution to this potentially devastating (and completely unforeseeable)"
Is this intended to be a comedy??
That's unforeseeable to somebody that has absolutely no idea about either IT or business organizations.
Again, how does this fly??
If Self Organization actually IS new, Tim, how'd the world get by without YOU for SO long...?!?
I mean, for a follow-up question: Is it not somewhat amazing that societies of all sizes have self-organized for millenia without the SELF part being dependent on Tim Keller and his organization?
Go figure...;-D
Got any better snakeoil, any-a you all on blogs??
Permalink to Comment5. JamesJayTrouble on August 15, 2004 9:53 AM writes...
The 'six degrees' is voodoo science, in case some-a you hadn't noticed yet.
It's mathematically correct blogus, is what it is.
It assumes concentric rings of communities, which is false, and that there's a free flow of intelligence between communities, which is also false.
Furthermore, I don't care how intelligent something sounds, if it's false it'd be the opposite of intelligence... And that's why you get SO much STUPIDITY in decentralized networks.
And you get even MORE stupidity in highly centralized networks which are PRETENDING to be decentralized, is my guess.
So anybody know of any ACTUAL INTELLIGENCE, as opposed to virtual intelligence (ie stupidity) regarding how false most-all of these memes are you all are selling (for free, mostly, but there's a cost).
The meme that stamping blog on a person's career is a good thing, what's the half-life of that meme??
Permalink to Comment6. JamesJayTrouble on August 15, 2004 9:55 AM writes...
crap... meant "non-concentric"...
Permalink to Comment7. JamesJayTrouble on August 15, 2004 10:29 AM writes...
I actually went back and started skimming the article. It was mostly crap, (as I predicted...;-) which shows the disadvantage of a HIGHLY CENTRALIZED approach to "gathering stupidity".
"Once again, the secret to their success was not so much that any individual had anticipated the need to build up emergency problem-solving capacities or was able to design and implement these capacities in response to the particular disaster that struck."
Well, you see, when you have a POLITICAL point you are trying to make, then it might appear that way. Especially if you have no idea what you are talking about, but a lotta creds and an audience, or more precisely a cult-following, that will blindly accept stupidity as wisdom.
Because I know somebody (talked to once, actually) a person who DID SOMETHING ABOUT the i5 shops that were in deep do-do. I do NOT know precisely WHAT he did.
However, I and he and just about EVERY PROFESSIONAL, ignorant tho we are since we don't waste most of our day on blogs, actual HAD HEARD of this marvelous invention.
DR.
So that pretty much blows the entire "thesis" outta the water, if you have eyes to hear.
[snip]
"So, how does one make this kind of magic happen? Unfortunately, no one is quite sure."
Then why this write-up that is SO SURE it has NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYthing having to do with leaders and/or a centralized approach...??
And why is there SUCH a CENTRALIZED group-think forming around DE-centralization??
Btw, the stupidest comment I've seen in a long time is the quote above, because he goes on to SPECIFICALLY IDENTIFY EXACTLY, ACCURATELY and PRECISELY how it IS DONE.
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW:
"Different organizations, from business firms to research communities to the military, have tried to address their collective problem-solving needs in a variety of ways."
Now THERE'S an idea...!!!
You wrote a blog, 'long' back, Dr. Shirky on the small Linux-driven box that collected.. what.. comments from students on movie's they'd seen??
Something, and the POLITICAL point you were trying to make was Linux=good and small=good scaling=bad.
You missed your own points, Dr. Shirky. A tiny app that is also used by a tiny number of people can easily be accomplished through the 'ancient' technique of baby-sitting it. No, those apps don't scale well.
People that have spent the last 2 or 3 decades designing AND IMPLEMENTING AND LEARNING from systems that canNOT be baby-sat..
..'cause that free stuff gets pretty expensive real quick with those kinds of apps that DO NOT SCALE AT ALL....
Real expensive, real dollars, real quick.
But the meme is...??
Anyhoo, the whole point that was and is missed:
Any-a you pseudo-experts come across this principle in systems design, either in your schooling or your experience, either one:
"Appropriateness of fit"
Iow, when a solution FITS the problem that NEEDS to be solved (as opposed to most software EVER written, which attacks the strawman)..
..well, it don't matter WHAT the approach is, if it fits and it's not a strawman looking for big bucks.
Did you all know that? No, or you've forgotten the fundamentals.
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