The Few vs. The Many

Anyone who has been forced to sit through a committee meeting will agree the decision making process can slow to the pace of a snail, a snail who was just run over by a minivan carrying five sumo wrestlers, when you open the process to multiple people. Recently I learned about some things which seem to contradict this.
Let’s look to the world of nature. The lowly ant can create feats of engineering which make the builders of the New York City subway system look like a three-year-old with a plastic shovel. The problem is the individual ant does not have the intellect of the three-year-old. The ant doesn’t even have the intellect of the shovel. Yet, they “know” what to do and how to do it when you get them all together.
Since people give human qualities to everything under the sun, we think some ant must be the boss. Wrongo! Nobody is the boss. You look at any one individual ant and you see brain power only slightly greater than the twig the insect is carrying. These hexapods are stupid. But, when you go to the big picture you find “intelligence” surpassing what is possible for any other living thing.
As research into how the brain works keeps finding more and more specifics, it is looking like the ant model may be a decent analogy. Each individual neuron has a very limited range of function, a.k.a. the IQ of a plastic shovel. But, when a whole bunch of those little synapse start synapping (not a term recognized by the American Medical Association) amazing things happen.
One little group of neurons has the capacity to recognize color, another group sees shape, another size, another smell and so on and so on. When all these little groups start chirping you have something like an orchestra. Each individual instrument may sound weak or dissonant, but put them all together you have harmonies and melodies and all the stuff which creates Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli.
For example, one set of neurons starts firing because they are programmed to see green, another group reports round, and so on. When all are “playing” at the same time your brain “hears” Rachmaninoff’s Variations on an Apple of Granny Smith.
Now let’s look at groups of people. There was this guy who was a very big elitist. He really thought the only people who should vote, own land or even have children should be educated upper class people. One day in 1906 he is visiting a fair of some sort. There is a man selling guesses at what a large ox weighs. The people who get closest win prizes. No one guesses the exact weight, but lots of people guess. This elitist guy asks the guy running the contest if he can have all the slips of paper with the guesses.
Sir Francis Galton, the snobby British scientist, expects to prove that all these uneducated, common people would make horrendously absurd and wrong guesses. So, he totals them up and then divides by the 700 or so guesses to find the average. The average of all the guesses turns out to be literally one pound less than the actual weight of the ox. They whole group of people had a better “intelligence” than any of the individuals.
Lots of scientists have done similar experiments. Place a jar of jelly beans in front of a large group of people, and ask them to guess how many. The average of all is quite frequently better than any single guess.
The natural extrapolation of all this information leads me to think the collective intelligence of the population is actually smarter than each individual. Then I look at the things which are truly driven by large numbers of people. The internet makes it possible for millions of people to see such intellectually tantalizing material as kittens sitting on computer keyboards and fifteen-year-old boys re-creating wrestling moves requiring immediate medical attention. Television makes it possible to choose which karaoke yokel will become a household name and then join Taylor Hicks in the “where are they now” file. Or the crème de la crème - general elections. Aack!
What all this boils down to is, if we want to select a president, fix health care, improve the environment, or even select ABC’s fall schedule we may want to consider limiting the people involved in deciding. But, if I need to know how many Reese’s Pieces it takes to fill Charles Barkley the general public would come in handy.