KK continues his ruminations about the hive mind (see Old School for previous discussion)

It's taken a while but I think we've learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don't need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.

Yet if the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all?

Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough.

More importantly, the brute dumbness of the hive mind produces the raw material that smart design can work on. If we ONLY listen to the hive mind, that would be stupid. But if we ignore the hive mind altogether, that is even stupider.

Yet because the hive mind works at a slower pace on a different time scale, there's a bottom to the bottom. I hope we realize that a massive bottom-up effort will only take us part way -- at least in human time. In the realm of encyclopedias, we want totally reliable articles that are the most authoritative in the world, the most understandable in the world, and the most current in the world. We want news that is relevant, with a low noise to signal ratio. We want research reports that are unbiased but comprehensive and consistent. We want expertise.

I think that KK misses the point. The product of an adhocracy isn't just the thing - the encyclopedia. It is also, and more importantly, the hive itself, the social mind as others have more insightfully put it.

This may be easier to grasp when you think of the kinds of community creations that have always been part of human society, things that an ad hoc group of neighbors banded together to make or do. Sure, the thing they made was useful. It was also symbolic, a material manifestation of the bond formed in the community by the shared work. Less obviously the individuals who formed the community were improved by the effort and so the social mind was improved too.

When you think longer term it isn't the encyclopedia that has great value, it is the making of the encyclopedia that has value. When the community does the making it is improved even when the encyclopedia takes longer to make and has more flaws. I think that is, or should be, our higher goal.

In this view the function of the best and brightest, the experts and editors, isn't to control or shape the encyclopedia, it is to help the social mind improve. By demonstrating expertise the social mind becomes a little bit more expert itself. And by declining to serve as top down controllers, however light the whip, experts avoid the traps that bedevil them now. As Randolph Nesse put it:

Universities may be best show in town for truth pursuers, but most stifle innovation and constructive engagement of real controversies, not just sometimes, but most of the time, systematically. . .

by a process of unintentional selection, diversity of thought and topic is excluded. If it still sneaks in, it is purged. The disciplines become ever more insular. And universities find themselves unwittingly inhibiting progress and genuine intellectual engagement.

Not all experts are in universities of course, but I think that the dynamic Nesse describes applies to all elite groups, any meritocracy. They ossify if they endure.

That's a double loss. The social mind is less than it would have been, and the meritocracy is diminished too. The short term value of the made thing is less than the loss to the social mind and all of its individual members. We are, as Kelly notes, impatient. We want the world and we want it now. My point is that the shortest path to the great value we demand requires a certain steadiness to travel. If we get too distracted by short term achievements of lesser value it will take longer to get there, if we get that at all.