[Ci4cg-announce] A framework for working with and towards civic intelligence [1st installment]

Tue Aug 2 13:06:46 PDT 2016

Thanks, Doug, for all of these thoughts and clarifications. I do like the term "civic intelligence", as well as "collective intelligence", and I agree that these concepts make sense as a way to capture how well collectivities or polities achieve their common goals, or the "common good".

I think the best way to summarize my earlier thoughts is that I am urging caution about the scope of these terms. In other endeavors I have watched people try to claim more territory for a popular concept than that concept can credibly accommodate. So I am trying to apply that lesson as we move forward with attempts to define and apply ideas like civic intelligence. I would like to see that developed in a way that acknowledges its limitations. I think with you about where the world should be heading in terms of more democracy, etc., but I am not ready to sign on personally to the way you are using language. Again, I say this not to dissuade you, because I think what you are doing is useful. You are challenging our usual understanding of the concept of intelligence, for example, and I would like to see where that leads. My own linguistic proclivities just lead me in a slightly different direction.

More specifically, you write the following:

"Definition of Intelligence: An integrated set of processes that enable an agent to act in ways that are appropriate to the agent's goals and to the environment in which it exists / acts — particularly areas that present actual or potential challenges or opportunities.

An 'agent' can be one or more people, any group, animal, computer program, hybrids of the above, and others as well as any artifacts, natural or otherwise, or system of artifacts that are useful in pursuit of the goals."
Kenneth Arrow and others have shown us some deep difficulties with treating as a single agent a collection of individuals who have their own preferences, e.g. that individual preferences cannot generally be aggregated into a coherent social preference ordering. On a more gut level, I get nervous when people talk about a "world brain" (referencing your 2001 article about civic intelligence), because I worry that language like that may lead us to forget the multiplicity of our experiences and the distinctions between human (and other) beings. Where people's goals (mostly) align, I think you will get broad agreement about the appropriateness of the term "intelligence" as a characteristic of collective processes for achieving these common goals. But there is a vast space of civic issues on which we must make collective choices for which there is no widely agreed upon, best way to do that. In such cases I am more comfortable conceding that, while there are clearly unintelligent ways of making social decisions, the concept of intelligence does not give us a way to distinguish the ones that are the most just and the most productive and the most inspiring and the most likely to lead to species survival, etc., because these latter goals are different from and often incompatible with each other. To keep collective notions of intelligence useful, I think we need to limit the ambitions we have for their application and not count on them to resolve the fundamental conflicts we face as a species.

Todd

Todd Davies
Symbolic Systems Program
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, 94305-2150 USA

email: davies at stanford.edu

phone: 1-650-723-4091

office: 460-040C

web: web.stanford.edu/~davies<https://web.stanford.edu/~davies>

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From: ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org <ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org> on behalf of Doug Schuler <douglas at publicsphereproject.org>
Sent: Monday, August 1, 2016 6:49 PM
To: ci4cg-announce at scn9.scn.org
Subject: [Ci4cg-announce] A framework for working with and towards civic intelligence [1st installment]

Todd — and everybody else (hopefully of interest)

This is a follow-on to the conversation that Todd's note launched. This note is more like the first version of a summary of the findings and assertions so far in relation to my exploration of civic intelligence. As you know I'm trying to develop civic intelligence as a focus for research, activism, education, policy-making, ... , etc. You also of course know that it's not a term that's in common use and I'd like to change that. I would love your comments on any and all aspects of this.

I've been packing the idea of civic intelligence in many ways for quite awhile. Sometimes it's used as a part of social inquiry, sometimes it's meant to be aspirational, and sometimes it's intended to be used as a goal or guideline — and other uses are possible (ranking schools for example). These varieties of uses could be a source of confusion (in either the critique or the exploration itself). My belief and hope is that the diverse perspectives are in fact coherent, although that might not be apparent without the background logic.

I'd like to think that a graphic depiction can be developed that showed the main elements and regions of the overall exploration. Ideally this would help maintain coherence, reduce misinterpretation, and promote additional work in this area. (And, of course, critique could help shape this effort into more productive ways.)

I'm trying to explore a lot of things simultaneously — including the fact that exploring and practicing civic intelligence seems to be empowering to students, although this isn't addressed in this note.

The following is an attempt to describe one region of the framework which is largely positivistic and should have the necessary rigor and logic to be palatable to social scientists of various types. I consider that everything is subject to modification.

(1) We start with a (working) definition of Intelligence. This seems to be keeping with standard views of intelligence while containing elements that lend themselves to characterization and analysis. I wanted to focus on the potential richness of the concept (of intelligence) rather that be limited to a minimal, quantified and somewhat non-useful construct that some social scientists seem to prefer.

Definition of Intelligence: An integrated set of processes that enable an agent to act in ways that are appropriate to the agent's goals and to the environment in which it exists / acts — particularly areas that present actual or potential challenges or opportunities.

An "agent" can be one or more people, any group, animal, computer program, hybrids of the above, and others as well as any artifacts, natural or otherwise, or system of artifacts that are useful in pursuit of the goals.

Collective intelligence is a major type of intelligence that is distinguished from individual intelligence (e.g. that of a single person).

Intelligence can also be distributed over space and time. And the results of the diverse processes can be stored in many ways—in human memories, libraries, online, or in tools, systems, or artifacts.

(2) The various components / elements of the definition suggest ways to characterize, analyze, categorize various approaches.

Composition of the "agent"
Environment in which the intelligence operates (Intelligence is context dependent)
Processes that are used and how they are integrated (i.e. the structure)
Goals, values, and norm
The products of the processes

The claim that I'm making is that it is probably possible to identify different versions of intelligence by the goals, types of actions, and composition and coordination of the agent. This might not be 100% certain but it could be useful.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Douglas Schuler
douglas at publicsphereproject.org<mailto:douglas at publicsphereproject.org>
Twitter: @doug_schuler

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