Hmm. While I think there's a lot of interesting potential in such a system, I'm somewhat dubious about the efficacy of collective intelligence for solving thorny world problems, at least without careful cultivation.
I saw an interesting essay a while back (that I cannot furnish a convenient link to, sadly) about the places where collective intelligence worked and where it failed. The author used a predominantly statistical basis for his points, and they seem difficult to argue with at a basic level: if, within the pool of people whose intelligence you draw, the average person has a better than 50% chance of recognizing The Right Thing, a larger pool will trend towards rightness... but if the chance is less than 50%, the trend is the opposite. Hence, it's easy to use collective intelligence to construct the list of U.S. presidents, and very very hard to use it to construct a solution for world peace.
So, if you want to solve the world's problems this way, what you need is a way to filter your contributing pool such that it only includes those who are likely to come up with great ideas, and recognize great ideas in others - I don't know how to do that, but once the odds are above 50%, you should be golden.
(And, to pick a nit, I disagree mildly with your usage of "meme". Memes are ideas more than they are practices, e.g. "Magenta is not a color" (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/yes-virgina-there-is-a-magenta.ars) is a meme, because it's a notion that people pass on, but "List 25 random things about yourself" is not, because there's no unifying belief to it, although there are memes loosely associated with it. The notion that things people pass around on LJ are memes is, itself, a meme, though I would argue that it's cancerous.
But, moving to an actually useful point, a system that can recognize a meme as it propagates, and somehow encourage propagation of more Correct memes, is, I think, exactly what you're seeking to build. With just, as they say, a SMOP.)
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-02-22 05:54 pm (UTC)I saw an interesting essay a while back (that I cannot furnish a convenient link to, sadly) about the places where collective intelligence worked and where it failed. The author used a predominantly statistical basis for his points, and they seem difficult to argue with at a basic level: if, within the pool of people whose intelligence you draw, the average person has a better than 50% chance of recognizing The Right Thing, a larger pool will trend towards rightness... but if the chance is less than 50%, the trend is the opposite. Hence, it's easy to use collective intelligence to construct the list of U.S. presidents, and very very hard to use it to construct a solution for world peace.
So, if you want to solve the world's problems this way, what you need is a way to filter your contributing pool such that it only includes those who are likely to come up with great ideas, and recognize great ideas in others - I don't know how to do that, but once the odds are above 50%, you should be golden.
(And, to pick a nit, I disagree mildly with your usage of "meme". Memes are ideas more than they are practices, e.g. "Magenta is not a color" (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/yes-virgina-there-is-a-magenta.ars) is a meme, because it's a notion that people pass on, but "List 25 random things about yourself" is not, because there's no unifying belief to it, although there are memes loosely associated with it. The notion that things people pass around on LJ are memes is, itself, a meme, though I would argue that it's cancerous.
But, moving to an actually useful point, a system that can recognize a meme as it propagates, and somehow encourage propagation of more Correct memes, is, I think, exactly what you're seeking to build. With just, as they say, a SMOP.)