Emergence [Organizing Content #19]
July 20th, 2010 | Posted in blog 8 Comments »
In the ongoing series on organizing content, we now shift attention to the phenomenon of emergence, and how intelligent, sophisticated systems emerge from relatively simple, unsophisticated parts. I listened to a Radiolab podcast the other day that explored this topic in depth.
The hosts related how in the 1800s, Francis Galton visited a county fair where there was a contest to guess the weight of an ox. About 800 people submitted various guesses about the weight. None of them were right. Later, Galton took the average of the 800 guesses and found it to be just one pound off from the actual weight of the ox. James Surowiecki wrote about this event in his well-known book, The Wisdom of the Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few, and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Businesses, Economies, Societies and Nations.
The wisdom of the crowds is a term often used in discussions of social media. But emergence takes this concept a bit further. Emergence describes the phenomenon of an intelligent system forming from dumb parts. In the ox example above, none of the individuals were intelligent enough to guess the real weight of the ox. But collectively, the average of their answers was extremely intelligent. Emergence looks at how complex, intelligent systems arise despite the apparent absence of intelligence in each individual part.
The Radiolab hosts look at the ants as a prime example of emergence. Individually, ants are dumb. They can spend hours pushing and pulling a twig, without any higher sense of purpose or direction. They are practically brainless, acting without thought. They move here and there, randomly wandering around for food.
Despite their lack of intelligence at the individual level, collectively ants build sophisticated colonies, organize wars with generals and armies; build water barriers to protect themselves from storms; have queens and clearly defined society roles. They can start at two distant ends and meet each other exactly in the middle. Somehow, collectively the ant colony is brilliant. But alone, each ant is mostly dumb and thoughtless. How is it that the complex, ordered system emerges from a sum of thoughtless parts? That’s the idea of emergence.
As another example, take the thoughts in your head. Where do they come from? The neurons? Okay, take one neuron out and analyze it. Is that where the thought is? Take another, and another. The thought doesn’t exist in or stem from any particular neuron, yet collectively when brought together they form a complex system of intelligence.
Google is another example. In the early days of the Internet, everyone complained about the difficulty of finding anything online. Google came up with a new search algorithm. In Google’s search algorithm, every link that someone makes to a site counts as a vote for that site. Further, those sites with a lot of votes have more voting weight.
Individually, no one controls what appears at the top of the results when you search for a term in Google. We don’t usually add links to our posts with the idea of influencing the results in Google, and individually few of us have the voting power to influence that high ranking. But the end result of all these links, and the votes and weighting inherent in the algorithm, is findability. Now when you search for information on Google, you usually get a very intelligent set of results — a set of links that exactly answer your question. Again, a complex, intelligent result stems from individual parts that aren’t complex at all.
How exactly does emergence apply to technical communication and help authoring? I will cover that in the next post in this series. Mainly, emergence can only happen when you harness the collective intelligence of the crowd. If you can do that, you can take your help from a useless, frustrating group of topics to an intelligent, highly responsive and accurate body of knowledge.
Collectively we are intelligent; alone we are simple-minded.
——–
photo by James Cridland
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Tags: ants, collective intelligence, emergence, featured, google's algorithm, Technical Writing, web 2.0
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Tom,
I’ve enjoyed reading your blog over the last few weeks. I am a seminary graduate who has recently decided to enter the world of technical writing. As one coming from a non-traditional background, I’ve found the information on your blog helpful and encouraging. Thanks.
Emergence is a concept that has fascinated me over the last couple of years. My introduction to the concept was through Steven Johnson’s book Emergence: The Collective Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. I am very interested in what you have to say on this topic.
I should read Johnson’s book. They interviewed him for the podcast that I referenced, I believe. I appreciate your note about my blog.
By the way, how does a seminary graduate turn to technical writing?
I know I’m fighting a losing battle when I disagree with the whole notion of emergence and the wisdom of crowds.
But anyway… Here are some counter-notions:
“Now when you search for information on Google, you usually get a very intelligent set of results — a set of links that exactly answer your question.”
I don’t subscribe. Firstly, when I search for information on Google, I get six million results. I regard that as approaching insane, in the real clinical sense of the word. I only want one result, thank you, and I don’t think it’s great or amazing that Google presents me with 5.9 million links to something else.
Secondly, the set of links I get doesn’t exactly answer my question. It’s a set of links. When I click on them, I barely notice that my question has been reformulated when I arrive on the site. I arrive on Google to search for information, and bring to my search a context – a bit like bringing a piece of green fabric to a seamstress because it’s got a hole I’d like mended. Although she mends the hole with the right shade of green and the right material, she returns me some red fabric. It has a nicely-patched green area, but it’s red.
I also have a problem with the ox-weighing scenario, which is this: 800 people spent time and cognitive effort considering how much it weighed. But a single expert ox-weigher could have done the same. That also seems to approach lunacy. When Shirky suggests Wikipedia took 100 million man-hours to write, people nod and say this is an exciting development. I nod, and say it’s a monument to human folly and waste. As you can see when you look at the history of any article, the vast majority of the work has been thrown away. It’s time and cognitive effort wasted.
Crick and Watson’s DNA wasn’t an example of collective intelligence, unless you count the fact that they were building on previous work.
Newton wasn’t a collective. Nor Einstein or Dostoevsky. And so on.
Hoover, thanks for sharing your thoughts. You raise a good point about the geniuses who have operated independently of collective input. Maybe there’s room for both kinds of intellectual power.
Re Google, have you switched to another search engine?
Hoover, I think you’ve got a lot of good points. There are definitely lots of situations where one expert can get a better result than a bunch of amateurs.
Another downside to the idea of the wisdom of crowds is that people are easily swayed by those around them, and it’s hard to go against the grain. (I’m thinking of the Asch conformity experiments, where someone could be convinced of an incorrect answer because the people around them were giving that answer.) So the wisdom of the crowd isn’t necessarily wise–it’s easier for a whole group of people to be wrong, all together.
Then again, I think calling Wikipedia a monument to human folly and waste is oversimplifying. A lot of the content gets thrown out, but that happens with *any* writing project that goes through extensive revisions.
I used Google, which led me to Wikipedia, to find out about the Asch conformity experiments, using pretty vague kewyords (psych experiment groups line length).
I think group-based information sources are like any other tool or resource: useful for certain things, less useful for others, with specific strengths and weaknesses that it’s important to be aware of.
Kelly, thanks for responding to Hoover’s comment. I agree about the way crowds can be easily swayed. Mob-type action can follow and in many cases lead to greater error than individual thought.
Kelly, thanks for the pointer to Asch conformity tests.
I’ll dig into the literature, using Google
Here’s a footnote to my earlier comment: If a musical director tells a medium-sized to large choir to sing any given note without providing a cue from a piano, they will tend not to sing that note but one nearby.
Hoover, I sing with a Medieval/Renaissance music group, and I think that’s a perfect example.
That might be a key difference between the group and the expert–groups can usually get you into the right ballpark (like asking the audience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire), while experts are more likely to have an exact, specific answer in their own field.