[HN Gopher] Ants vs. Humans: Putting Group Smarts to the Test
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Ants vs. Humans: Putting Group Smarts to the Test
Author : thunderbong
Score : 25 points
Date : 2024-12-25 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il)
(TXT) w3m dump (wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il)
| yuvalr1 wrote:
| The website took some time to load. Here is a link to the video
| in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHpu7ngQxwE&t=39s
|
| The conclusions - humans work best by themselves and the quality
| decreases as the number of people increases. For ants it's the
| opposite. Quite interesting!
| yuvalr1 wrote:
| And here is the actual paper (linked from the article as well):
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2414274121
| yamrzou wrote:
| I remember reading somehwere about the optimal size for human
| groups to be efficient, but I can't recall the source. If
| anyone has any pointers, I'd appreciate it!
| suryajena wrote:
| > _" Forming groups did not expand the cognitive abilities of
| humans. The famous 'wisdom of the crowd' that's become so popular
| in the age of social networks didn't come to the fore in our
| experiments"_
|
| If it were true wouldn't all democratic societies be in danger.
| Our whole society is based off the wisdom of the crowds.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| That seems to be university PR doing its "magic." The actual
| study is much more interesting: the humans weren't allowed to
| speak to each other, and pheromones wouldn't help the ants
| solve the problem, so both groups were communicating through
| haptic feedback. Ants do this naturally and demonstrated swarm
| intelligence behavior by "going with the flow", but the humans
| kept working at cross purposes by trying to implement a
| complete solution without coordinating the details.
|
| I agree with the overall conclusion, even if it's phrased
| misleadingly: human collective intelligence is primarily about
| individual intelligences accessing group knowledge rather than
| groups working together to tackle complex problems beyond
| individual comprehension. Ants are not individually capable of
| understanding the piano-mover problem at a basic level;
| research administrators are generally capable of understanding
| the work of individual researchers, they just don't have the
| time to digest all the details.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > If it were true wouldn't all democratic societies be in
| danger.
|
| Democracy is more or less in a permanent state of crisis. This
| has been discussed thoroughly since the time of Athens, and
| certainly Rome. The late days of the republic were
| characterized by squabbling over the specifics of who got to
| lobby voters, how they were allowed to, and where they were
| allowed to. For instance they have laws on the books dictating
| the physical structure of the buildings that people voted in to
| ensure that the rich couldn't basically station people in the
| halls leading to the ballots to purchase votes or physically
| intimidate voters. This is also reflected in the sudden
| populist turns of eg the Gracchi brothers and Caesar himself.
|
| It's also true of the American republic. Self-conception of us
| as an egalitarian democracy is still around at best a century
| old, and more accurately around sixty years old. And we remain
| _extremely_ far from being an obviously healthy democracy. Of
| course, the state has vacillated between actions you could
| _argue_ are wise and those that are clearly _not_ , before and
| after these divides.
|
| I really would be very cautious at viewing democracies as
| reflecting of "wisdom". We often can (and often do) come to
| consensus that is extremely ill-advised from the perspective of
| the needs of the populace. Democracy is more or less
| permanently perched on the tension between the will and needs
| of the constituents which are often at blatant odds with each
| other. There's a reason why the Philosopher King has held such
| a cultural weight through the millennia. At best democracy is a
| best-faith effort to approximate wisdom through consensus--
| sometimes with better faith than other times.
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| Polybius's Anacyclosis
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > If it were true wouldn't all democratic societies be in
| danger.
|
| All democratic societies _are_ in danger -- because the wisdom
| of the crowd does _not_ have the capability to handle scenarios
| where the crowd has sufficiently great power.
| notduncansmith wrote:
| Given the coordination/cooperation aspect of the problem, this
| isn't really the "wisdom of the crowd" as I've always
| understood it.
|
| Something like estimating the number of beans in a jar is a
| good fit, since there is only one layer of perception to agree
| on and no coordination required.
|
| This experiment as described seems closer to "design by
| committee" with (predictably) similar results.
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