Human intelligence is collective

This post is the transcript of this video.

We often hear that humans are a social species. But what does it mean in practice? Among other things, it means we need to be loved early in life to develop properly. It means relationships and group activities can be some of the most fulfilling experiences. And it means when we put our heads together, we are much greater than the sum of our parts. 

No matter how smart a person appears, working or consulting with others who have the same goals will take them farther. Because we are all different in so many ways, the best way to harness our intelligence is in groups. We’ll start today with examples of how we do that already. Next, we’ll look at the effects of thinking some people are smarter than others, then at the ways our culture makes us think intelligence is a hierarchy.

In my last video, I looked at the movie Brazil, and how one of the features of the world of Brazil was people separated from each other, not able to see each other as fully human, and incapable of working together outside hierarchical social systems. Fortunately for us, that’s probably the biggest difference between our world and that of Brazil. In our world, some people in some places still have enough freedom that we can gather, discuss and act together without being told to by someone higher up.

Collective intelligence

In a group, we can trade ideas and perspectives, lending the benefit of our experience. As long as everyone in the group is encouraged to participate and not fear embarrassment or punishment, everyone young and old can teach and contribute something. Provided no one is afraid to dissent, you can avoid groupthink. As individuals we are particularly ignorant, but if we recognize that ignorance, we can work with people who know different things, who can tell us we are wrong, or at least who know where to look it up. Everyone has their own knowledge, which when combined either in group decisions or just in spontaneous order empower us to discover new galaxies, build cities, coordinate global supply chains, and practically anything else.

Even just communicating the problem to another person helps us clarify it and prompts us to think what objections the other might raise while we’re still talking. I usually find the best way to “advise” someone is to let them talk and figure things out for themselves. They probably have the answers–they are the ones involved in the situation, not me; they just needed to talk to someone else to realize what the answers were.

Another major part of our intelligence that stands out among animals is a collective memory that enables us to learn from others, even if we haven’t met them. Hunter-gatherers learn how to identify every plant and animal in their environment, not because the chief figured it all out for themself but because many people before them figured it out, and passed on the benefit of their efforts. One person tested one plant. Another person tested another. They shared their knowledge with the group. In humans, knowledge is created and transmitted collectively. Now that we can write things down, our collective memory has no limits, well, besides paywalls, which the right browser extension can bypass.

That’s how science works. Though they’re not perfect, we can use the physical sciences to find or approximate the truth over time. That’s not because there’s one genius making all the discoveries but because there are thousands of people around the world working on this and related topics. They consider each other’s work, try to replicate it, report their results, and slowly but surely advance our knowledge of the field. However smart you think you are, you can’t just enter a field and expect to advance it if you have no idea what a million people before you have said. What you can do, however, is read the people who know about this field, learn from them and then enter the field with the same knowledge as them. If there are jobs available. Scientists make use of collective intelligence by writing, reading each other’s papers, discussing, exchanging, holding conferences, collaborating across space and time. We can do that for almost any goal. Think about the potential for organizing direct action around some of the things I talk about in other videos on this channel.

Are some just smarter than others?

If we treated a few scientists as individual geniuses, we would miss that they are standing on the shoulders of millions of people. So why do we pay so much attention to a few CEOs? Why do we treat and pay them like they did all the work themselves, or the only work that matters? Do we really believe the recent success of a business is entirely due to their uncommon intelligence? Certainly, many businesses are structured to empower one or a few people to make huge decisions that everyone else in the firm just has to accept, because that’s how the powerful choose to structure wealth-creating organizations for maximum control. But it begs the question to say some committee at the top should make the decisions on their own, without having to answer to employees or customers, that they are better at making decisions than the people doing the work.

But I understand this thinking, the idea that intelligence is a hierarchy. We get it drilled into us right from the first day of school, when we’re told to start striving to be better than those around us so that we get higher marks than everyone else to make our parents happy. Higher marks are taken as official proof of a person’s superior intelligence, as if the abilities school exams, or for that matter, IQ tests, test for were the correct measures of overall intelligence. Everyone soon finds out who is smart and who is not smart. If you are not naturally talented in school subjects or aided by your parents, you must have low cognitive ability and are not capable of achieving anything noteworthy in life.

If you were a victim of being told how smart you are, you have been limited. The kids told they are not smart are the most limited, because unless they are defiant and know how to question authority–and where would they have learned to?–then they’ll probably assume there’s no point in trying because others will always be better, so they might as well settle for a life of hard work and financial struggle. The kids who were told they were smart have also been impeded in several ways, because they learn they’re better and don’t need other people, and if they don’t do it all on their own, they’re failures and they’re letting themselves and their parents down.

Whichever of those categories you’ve been scarred by, school teaches you to work alone and rely on your own brain, whatever its strengths and weaknesses. Working with others is called cheating. So instead of learning we can do anything through cooperation, we learn we can only do some things, or if we do poorly on all the tests, nothing. These are just a couple of the ways school ruins our brains, so I go deeper into school in this series.

People who don’t seem like geniuses might just not have had much opportunity to develop their skills and knowledge how they want. If you don’t have the time, or no one taught you something exists, you can’t spend the time necessary to understand it properly. You might even think of yourself or others as lazy, but that could just mean you haven’t found work that motivates you or a topic that interests you. We think of a bunch of dead white guys as geniuses when any of their servants and slaves could have made the same discoveries if they had had all day to do as they liked. History ignores the people whose labor made it possible for someone else’s genius to come out. Today, billions of people around the world labor so that a few rich people can get called geniuses.

People given the chance to develop as individuals gain a variety of skills and experiences, which don’t have any more inherent value than any others. A lot of attention is paid to geniuses, but as I explain in my video on the topic, the idea of genius isn’t a defined concept but just a celebration of whatever cognitive skills people who’ve been called a genius appear to exhibit. 

Really, no one is smarter than anyone else, or to put it another way, everyone is smarter than everyone else. I know stuff you don’t know and vice versa. I can give you perspective on your thoughts and vice versa. I’m better at some things, you’re better at some things, and we need someone else to help us with all the other things. What if we were in a bigger group? What if there were 20 of us, each one smarter than the other? We might have enough skills to do almost anything, as long as we take advantage of our collective brain. That might mean dividing up tasks based on skill. The most knowledgeable should be teachers, empowering the less knowledgeable. The more experienced can take roles like project manager, making them leaders for specific functions, and when they do other things they don’t know as well, they can be followers.

Why do we believe some are smarter than others?

We are indoctrinated to see everything as hierarchy. We rank children according to test results, for no purpose other than to embarrass them. It seems normal to us there are people with more power and people with less power. There are the countries that are the good countries I want to go to one day and the bad countries we don’t want immigrants from. That’s because the people in those countries are lower down the hierarchies of race and nationality, not like us, the better countries with superior cultures and civilized people. The same is true of intelligence. We are taught to believe some people are smart and some people are not; some people are capable of creativity or logic or critical thinking or whatever we say it means to be smart, but not everyone. Some people will even use their imagined hierarchy of intelligence to justify their imagined hierarchy of race, saying those people just aren’t as smart as we are, and that’s why we don’t want them around us.

But none of these beliefs are based on facts. There is no superior country, culture or race except by arbitrary criteria, and there is no one is smarter at everything than you. They might do better on an IQ test, but an IQ test is not a test of intelligence. It tests for like two or three cognitive skills. Some people have read more books than you, but maybe they just have more time to read books, or more interest in books, and you’re more into practical skills. I might think faster than you but you might think deeper than me. We could spend all day naming ways that one person can be smarter than another, and everyone has one of them.

We’re not superior and inferior to each other. We’re diverse. We complement each other, and that’s why we’re smarter in groups. White supremacy abhors the idea of diversity, because it demands conformity, viciously oppressing everyone who does not have the right skin color and demanding strict adherence to the law from everyone else. White supremacy imagines hierarchies not just of race but gender, nationality, physiology, psychology and other made-up reasons.

Many of the people who come to believe in white supremacy are relatively wealthy, not just the super rich but small-business owners, middle managers, and so on, because they feel they could benefit from the enforcement of imaginary hierarchies. Hierarchical thinking makes their power seem normal, and makes people think someone has to have power so my group should have power so that the system favors me. But why do you want symbolic power in an imaginary hierarchy when we could have freedom? We should see through this propaganda to the reality of our equality, our diversity and our capacity to do anything if we work together.