The Wisdom Of The Crowd – How We Are Smarter & Stronger Together

The Wisdom Of The Crowd – How We Are Smarter & Stronger Together

Featured, Science

In an election year, people might disagree about who makes the best candidate. But you don’t hear much argument on the merits of democracy: that millions of average people can together make a wise decision.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist. What Is The Wisdom Of The Crowd? According to Wikipedia, [which is itself an excellent example of the wisdom of the crowd]: The wisdom of the crowd is the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question. A large group’s aggregated answers to questions involving quantity estimation, general world knowledge, and spatial reasoning has generally been found to be as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any of the individuals within the group. An intuitive and often-cited explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.” The following video shows how the wisdom of the crowds has been implemented: Can The Wisdom Of The Crowds Be Extended Past The Definition Provided Above? I’ve been studying nature recently… starlings in the area around Edinburgh, in the moors of England… at night they come together and they create one of the most spectacular things in all of nature, and it’s called a murmuration… this thing has a function; it protects the birds. You can see on the right here, there is a predator being chased away by the collective power of the birds. Apparently this is a...
Israel & Iran: A Love Story? [TED Talk]

Israel & Iran: A Love Story? [TED Talk]

Culture, Featured

They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. So… now it’s communication. It’s a two-way story. It’s Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other.” – Ronny Edry, Israeli graphic designer Given the contentious nature of relations that exist between Israel and Iran, it is a wonder that one man, Ronny Edry, could start a whole new dialogue between the peoples, simply by creating one poster on Facebook. That poster [the image above] said: Iranians, we will never bomb your country, We [heart] You.” The following quotes are from Edry’s TED talk. In it he details how that poster led to many more posters, conversations, and the revelation of love between Israelis, Iranians, and many others: On March 14, this year, I posted this poster on Facebook. This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag. I will try to explain to you about the context of why and when I posted. A few days ago, I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store, and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other, and the owner was explaining to the client that we’re going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel. And the client was saying, no, it’s 10,000 a day. (“10,000 missiles”) This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel. We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now, and we have people, you know, afraid. It’s like every year it’s the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran. It’s like, if...
What Causes Corruption In Today’s Society? A Few Powerful Men, Or The Self-Interest Of All?

What Causes Corruption In Today’s Society? A Few Powerful Men, Or The Self-Interest Of All?

Culture, Featured

Since the beginning of civilization those in power have successfully restricted the interests of the majority by regulating their values, by controlling resources through money, not to mention controlling the very processes that exist to challenge them. Is it a conspiracy? Do such powerful men meet in dark rooms and work to figure out how to keep their power? Actually, no not as much as you might think. You see the hilarious thing about all of this is that such a process of manipulation is actually self-generating, justified in a step-by-step manner with basic self-interest guiding the whole way. The real corruption is not occurring in back room meetings or at the docks. The real power resides in how you, the public, actually perpetuate, condone and support the very systems that suppress you.” Change Will Come By Rewarding & Reinforcing Values Of Mutual Responsibility Until the social premise itself, and hence the fundamental psychological drivers of our economy – balance, scarcity, narrow self-interest, exploitation and competition – until those are altered to the extent that the system begins to reward and reinforce collaboration, human and ecological balance, efficiency and sustainability, nothing is going to really change. In a sociological condition where everything is based on advantage over others, what we call ‘corruption’ today isn’t actually corruption at all. It’s just ‘business as usual.’ I mean, seriously, what did you people expect? In an economy where everything is for sale by the very ethic inherent underscored by the false notion that we possibly can’t work together intelligently to benefit all, no level of supposed ‘corruption’ should surprise any of us.”...