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

Mon Aug 8 14:09:21 PDT 2016

HI, Doug, thanks for all this. it looks to me like we agree that collective and civic intelligence are useful concepts, that some people are taking the concept of collective intelligence too far, and that it is important to have critical voices in that conversation. There is more to discuss by way of follow-up to your thoughtful messages, but for me that would require a longer form medium.

Until then,

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>

________________________________
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: Saturday, August 6, 2016 4:26 PM
To: Todd Davies
Cc: ci4cg-announce at scn9.scn.org
Subject: Re: [Ci4cg-announce] A framework for working with and towards civic intelligence [1st installment]

Thanks Todd. I'll throw in a few words here. We may not have to go back and forth with this much more. We may have still have some differences but probably not too many. (?)

The usual warning on length...

On Aug 2, 2016, at 1:06 PM, Todd Davies <davies at stanford.edu<mailto:davies at stanford.edu>> wrote:

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've noticed that too. I'm trying not to overstretch the concept. But many concepts have slightly different meanings in different contexts.

I would like to see that developed in a way that acknowledges its limitations.

I do try to acknowledge its limitations. (On the other hand, having limitations is more-or-less intrinsic to any concept that we use.)

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.

I'm not the only one who's challenging this. It seems to be fairly common now to open up the concept. Go to Google Scholar and look up collective intelligence or distributed intelligence. I think that people are basically using those terms for two reasons: (1) the term "intelligence" is the most appropriate one for the job (see my working definition) and (2) it describes a very important phenomenon. (After all, what activity of significance is created by one mind working alone?) [And what definition should we use?]

A simple example: I used to work at Boeing where they design and build airplanes. A couple of people would sketch out an airplane concept — how many miles it would fly, how many seats it would have, what type of fuel economy (e.g.) — and about 10 years later one would fly, generally followed by hundreds more. This involved an integrated set of processes and tens of thousands of people; they learned, they perceived their environment; they marshaled resources and they coordinated their activities. I'd say it was an intelligent agent. A bunch of uncoordinated people couldn't do it. (We do talk about the intelligence of individuals but in reality it's nearly impossible to think of a person's intelligence (not what's measured by IQ tests) as being separate from other people.)

My assertion is that we are more-or-less forced to think about our collective intelligence because it's required for survival...

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.

I guess I'm not ready to abandon what I consider to be an absolutely essential enterprise because there are "deep difficulties" with it. On the other hand, I'm not sure what Arrow means by this. Philosophical? methodological? Theoretical? And does he say that we should ignore it?

To me it doesn't seem like a good reason not to explore this because "individual preferences cannot generally be aggregated into a coherent social preference ordering." In reality individual preferences (which I suspect aren't static or necessarily orderable or discrete anyway) don't align. They seem to be everywhere in conflict. But they're important social phenomena — and very relevant! We get things done in spite of "coherent social preference ordering" — even though I confess I don't know much about CSPO's.

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.

I also get super nervous when I hear people "going too far" with the "world brain" idea. I totally regret using it in the title. It's from an H.G. Wells article where he describes something that is a bit like Wikipedia!  I did QUOTE the "world brain" string in the title— and I totally distance the idea of civic intelligence from the idea of  a "world brain" in the article.

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.

You raise very important points here.

One, however, I see as a red herring — I don't see the fact that there is no "best" way to proceed as being a show-stopper from exploring the concept of civic intelligence. In "real life" (non-trivial problems) the "best" way is rarely if ever knowable. We had to "muddle through" but, hopefully, there are better ways to muddle through than others.  (And intelligence—at least the way I view it— has a real-time requirement. If the sabre toothed tiger kills  you while you are working on the best escape route, you aren't as intelligent as the IQ test suggests you are.

I agree with you that maybe looking at the "clearly unintelligent" ways is a good start towards civic intelligence — and the Agnotology work and, even, our anti-patterns seem to be useful here.

I hope you remember that my vision of "intelligence" is not just a "rational" or "cognitive" or otherwise quantified or gamified approach. The "emotional" and other types of intelligences has helped us think of "intelligence" before it was turned into something that solely measured on a test. The idea of justice, fairness, empathy, emotions, courage, humility, etc. presumably play a role. That's one reason why we don't turn our affairs over to some AI approach. I've heard that it has actually been validated that people who use numbers and logic exclusively to make decisions fit the model for certain types of severe emotional problems.

I don't see "civic intelligence" as a panacea. I certainly don't make any claims about the future based on the "inevitability" of civic intelligence. (How could anybody think when Donald Trump is actually a major candidate for president of the US)

I don't count on civic intelligence to "resolve the fundamental conflicts" (or anything for that matter) but I think it could help us move in that direction.

I do go back to my weaker (but still somewhat strong) claim that civic intelligence is an important social phenomenon that probably can be increased or decreased. Having "more" and "better" of it is probably good. But we need to study it and consider it.

Thanks Todd! And anybody else who is still reading!!!!

— Doug

Todd

Todd Davies
Symbolic Systems Program
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, 94305-2150 USA
email: davies at stanford.edu<mailto:davies at stanford.edu>
phone: 1-650-723-4091
office: 460-040C
web: web.stanford.edu/~davies<https://web.stanford.edu/~davies>

________________________________
From: ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org<mailto:ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org> <ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org<mailto:ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org>> on behalf of Doug Schuler <douglas at publicsphereproject.org<mailto:douglas at publicsphereproject.org>>
Sent: Monday, August 1, 2016 6:49 PM
To: ci4cg-announce at scn9.scn.org<mailto: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

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Sphere Project
     http://www.publicsphereproject.org/

Mailing list ~ Collective Intelligence for the Common Good
      http://scn9.scn.org/mailman/listinfo/ci4cg-announce

Creating the World Citizen Parliament
     http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2013/creating-the-world-citizen-parliament

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (project)
     http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/lv<http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/>

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (book)
 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11601

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Sphere Project
     http://www.publicsphereproject.org/

Mailing list ~ Collective Intelligence for the Common Good
      http://scn9.scn.org/mailman/listinfo/ci4cg-announce

Creating the World Citizen Parliament
     http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2013/creating-the-world-citizen-parliament

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (project)
     http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/lv<http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/>

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (book)
 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11601

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.scn.org/private/ci4cg-announce/attachments/20160808/a6602ae1/attachment.html>