Collective intelligence is an important field underlying to many fascinating trends of our time, such as open innovation, crowdsourcing and cryptocurrencies.

Here’s a basic reading list for beginners in this field. It is, of course, incomplete. But still a good place to start.

The pioneers

Early notions of collective intelligence can be traced back to Aristotle’s Politics. The founder of Lyceum argues that better results can be achieved by letting more people participate in decision-making.

Condorcet was the first modern writer to write on this topic. Condorcet Theorem holds that, under certain conditions, a larger group has more chances of being right than a smaller one. To learn more, read the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions.

Collective intelligence and political philosophy

Habermas' idea of deliberative democracy bridges collective intelligence to political science and political philosophy. The main idea is that democracy has an epistemic component. It helps societies develop knowledge through the practice of dialogue and rational discourse. To learn about the Habermasian approach, I would suggest Gordon Finlayson’s Habermas, a very short introduction.

Habermas’s ideas have direct applications to the new methods of collective decision making enabled by the web: how people debate and vote online. A good reading on deliberative democracy works in the Internet era is Rafael Kies', Promises and Limits of Web-deliberation.

Christian List studies how individual judgement is added for collective decisions. David Estlund discusses the epistemic status of democracy. These discussions are related to topics such as: what is the optimal amount of members in a government assembly?

A rising star in the field is French philosopher Hélène Landemore, who teaches at Yale’s department of political science. She wrote a great book called Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many.

If democracies include more voices in decision-making, do democratic governments make better decisions consistently?

Not everyone agrees. For a critical view of the subject, read Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.

Diversity and decision making

University of Michigan Professor Scott Page wrote the highly recommended, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.

With Lu Hong, Scott Page coauthored the Hong & Page theorem, which holds that diversity is more important than individual talent for group decision making, because diverse mental models complement each other for better results.

Social epistemology

Social epistemology is the study of how humans organize to produce knowledge.

Some of the questions that seeks to answer this discipline are: can we trust witnesses as corroboration of facts? Under what conditions should experts be trusted? What is reasonable disagreement? Are groups rational for decision making?

In recent years, there was considerable interest in social epistemology because the Internet brought radically new ways to aggregate information, such as Wikipedia. Under what conditions does the Wikipedia model work? Can its success be replicated? 

For an exhaustive treatment of these topics, I would suggest Social Epistemology: Essential Readings compiled by Goldman & Whitcomb.

The study of law is a fascinating topic within social epistemology. Are court procedures adequate to discover the truth about a crime? How many members should a jury have? One, twelve, a thousand?

People interested in such questions should read Truth, Error, and Criminal Law: An Essay in Legal Epistemology by Larry Laudan. This is the underlying logic of the Crowdjury project that I founded, the first judicial system for the Internet, based on state of the art social epistemology. 

Collective intelligence in practice

In Wiki Government, Beth Simone Noveck writes about her experience with the Peer to Patent project, a US government program to improve the working of US Patent Office with crowdsourcing.

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (2010) is an extraordinary book by Stanford Professor Josiah Ober. It uses modern network analysis and information aggregation theories to explain how the institutional architecture of the Athenian polis favored decision making.

Don Tapscott's Wikinomics and Macrowikinomics discuss the impact of collective intelligence on economy, society and business.

Sociobiology

Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Seneca, Erasmus, Shakespeare and Montesquieu wrote about bees as an analogy for human societies. The honeycomb is a symbol of social networks and bees are all about collective intelligence.

In the book Honeybee Democracy, Thomas Seeley uses a sociobiologic perspective to explain how a honeycomb works as a democratic system of decision-making.

Prediction markets

In a 1906 state fair, mathematician Francis Galton witnessed a contest where participants had to guess the weight of an ox. He ran some tests on the results and found that, while no individual participant had guessed right, the average prediction (1,197 pounds) was surprisingly close to the actual weight (1,198 pounds).

Several studies suggest that prediction markets are more effective than discussion groups for aggregating information.

In a prediction market, participants express their belief in the likelihood of some event to occur by buying and selling assets. This method is used, quite successfully, to predict the winner of elections, the Oscars and for sales forecasts.

Some developments in this direction are Inkling Prediction Markets and the blockchain-based projects Augur and Gnosis.

For an excellent introduction, read Chapter 1, Prediction Markets: Trading Uncertainty for Collective Wisdom by Emile Servan-Schreiber, compiled as part of the Collective Intelligence: Principles and Mechanisms, edited by Hélène Landemore.

So, where to start?

For newbies, a good place to start is The Starfish and the Spider by Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman which explains a number of trends towards decentralization since the birth of the Internet. The working of P2P networks is reviewed in great detail.

Cass Sunstein’s Infotopia is a classic work. And of course, The Wisdom of the Crowds, by The New Yorker writer, James Surowiecki.

So, here’s an overview of the main topics in collective intelligence. It is incomplete of course, but enough to start learning about the fascinating field of collective intelligence.