neděle 3. října 2010

Clever individuals do not make the group smarter

This post is a reaction to the recent article (more details) in which individual brainpower contributes little to collective smarts. Instead, it’s social awareness -- the ability to pick up on emotional cues in others -- that seems to determine how smart a group can be.

When we write something new in internet discussion, we just get negative voting usually, because people aren't prepared to get new generally valid information from individuals at all. Instead of this, the more irrelevant and widespread is the internet meme in your answers, the higher score you get - because it's considered "witty". Actually you're just repeating things, which most of people are already expecting to listen unconsciously. Most of people don't expect to hear some revolutionary ideas at all - instead of this, they're feeling confounded, if not confused when being confronted with them. It should be pointed out, the poor language skills are making the sharing of emotions much more difficult, then the sharing of logical information. In addition, socially successful people tend to ignore logical arguments.

In another words, if you want to convince people for something clever or good, you have to manipulate them for it emotionally... Emotions, emotions, emotions...

Unfortunately it works in both directions, as Joseph Goebels knew already.

Actually, in dense aether theory a rather simple wave spreading model can be applied to this situation. This model renders human society like particle system, where every particle exhibits it's own surface gradient of information density, i.e. the intelligence. Theories, i.e. well accepted paradigms of human thinking correspond the density gradients at the water surface and the intelligent ideas are corresponding causual, i.e. tranverse waves in causual space, similar to ripples at the water surface. The emotional feelings correspond the longitudinal waves instead, similar to underwater sound waves.

The underwater waves are weaker but they're spreading in much faster way - whereas surface waves tend to bounce from every gradient of information density (i.e. intelligence). Very bright people are behaving like black holes in this model - they're collecting all informations freely, but their experience cannot be shared easily, because of total reflection mechanism at their surface gradient of intelligence density. With compare to it, very dumb people are behaving like mirror-like bubbles with respect to transverse waves instead: they're empty and they're even reflecting all causal information coming from outside.

A well known kind of symmetry between formal (IQ) and nonformal intelligence (EQ) exists here, though: dumb people are often quite sensitive emotionally and they can be manipulated easily in this way, whereas logical argument doesn't count very much for them. Instead of it, formally bright people are rather emotional nuts and they lack EQ and social skills often - compare the Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory sitcom.

The only way, in which black hole can radiate it's information to outside is the gravitational waves, which appear like Howking radiation. This mechanism is relatively subtle though, which explains, why really intelligent ideas are propagating slowly to the rest of society. Nevertheless, they can be supported with sufficiently emotional propaganda. For example, string theory (which is actually quite incomprehensible for laymans) is promoted with shots of beauty violinists in play at Nova TV show.