5 ms·

Human collective intelligence as distributed Bayesian inference

91 points by levbrie 10y ago

jarmitage 10y ago
When all you have is a hammer...
- habitue 10y ago
  Bayes theorem is quite the versatile hammer...
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Bayesian inference is more of a swiss-army knife than a hammer. It is a very versatile concept. Yet, even if it were a hammer, getting the nail-like characteristics of an unknown object is very valuable. You just have to repeat the procedure for the other tools on your toolset and you'll either get to completely know it, or characterize a hole on your toolset that can now be filled. A big gain, either way.
dTal 10y ago
I have often thought this, and I'm glad someone wrote the paper. I'd like to see more research in this area. It could end up being applicable to the design of more intelligent processes for group decision making at government scale.
- ghgfhgfhn 10y ago
  "more intelligent processes for group decision making at government scale" Yeah, it's called direct democracy and democratisation of media.
- zeristor 10y ago
  Yes, having read "The Theory That Would Not Die" [0] I too soon came to the conclusion that this seems to be what is behind the Wisdom of Crowds. Aircraft searches are a big thing, and there's a book on how it has been applied to MH370... [0] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-That-Would-Not-Die-ebook/dp/B0050QB3EQ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-That-Would-Not-Die-ebook/dp/...
visarga 10y ago
For long I have been thinking that online communities such as YC and reddit benefit from an accelerated process of group evolution. Where other contexts necessitate 10 years to converge on a common idea/ideology, some communities do it orders of magnitude faster. Maybe this paper could explain why it works faster in some groups than others, given the topology and size.
- sudoscript 10y ago
  Memes are a great example of this. They form, spread, and evolve so much more quickly on online communities than in the real world. I wonder if this represents a faster evolving community online, or one with weaker bonds because they're always in flux? [1] Memetics is a theory that the base unit of culture is a "meme" (in the Richard Dawkins sense of shared worldview, not in terms of Pepe. But him too) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
smaddox 10y ago
Asset markets are a poor choice for studying "accurate shared beliefs". They're an excellent choice for studying groupthink, though. The whole premise that people arrive at accurate shared beliefs is rather extraordinary to begin with. In my experience, widely shared beliefs are much more likely to be inaccurate.
pkrafft 10y ago
I'm the first author of this paper if anyone has any questions!
- habitue 10y ago
  In this framework, treating popularity as a prior over all previous information, what do you make of groups that maintain irrational beliefs for very long periods of time? Specifically things like superstitions where accidental correlations between unrelated events don't seem to be corrected by individual actors adding just a bit of objectivity at each step This is really neat by the way, thanks for producing this paper, I think it's an important area to start poking around in.
  - pkrafft 10y ago
    Thanks! The model predicts that areas in which there is little evidence one way or the other available are the ones where incorrect beliefs could be sustained, particularly when the belief is held by those around you. I guess one interesting characteristic of certain superstitions is that people will avoid the scenario that they think will lead to a bad outcome, so they actually don't collect personal evidence discrediting that superstition. This line of argument suggests that positive superstitions should be less persistent than negative superstitions, though I am not sure if that is true.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      Ok, so let's keep going from there. I mean, it ought to be intuitive, with everyone having a favorite personal example, that groups of people seem pretty able to sustain very flagrantly wrong, and even downright stupid, beliefs over long periods of time. So a theory of socially distributed cognition should ideally either explain how this happens, or explain it away as an unfortunate side-effect of rational thinking in ambiguous situations (like certain optical illusions and the Bayesian brain theory). One mechanism I've heard posited (by Friston's neurosci lab) for how humans deal with noisy environments is to weight our sensory inputs by their expected precision. I might look at the ocean's surface and expect to see a froth of sea-foam, particulate matter, and water, so I won't pay enough attention to see a camouflaged fish. I'll still notice if Godzilla walks up out of it, though. Would a similar precision-weighting mechanism help to model social trust, and to thus give us an idea of how groups can fixate on incorrect group-beliefs? Are people treating outgroup members or "opponents", so to speak, as uselessly noisy, and thus down-weighting any need to update based on what those persons say or do? Could this contribute to people's (supposed) occasional failures to accurately model their outgroups, since they're intuitively modelling those outgroups precisely as mostly outputting random noise rather than precise information?
devy 10y ago
I was just reading Michael Nielson's free ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning: A Principle-Oriented Approach[1] yesterday. When Dr. Nielsen tries to reason why it may or may not have a simple algorithm that represent the intelligence, this excerpt strike me the most: In the 1970s and 1980s Marvin Minsky developed his "Society of Mind" theory, based on the idea that human intelligence is the result of a large society of individually simple (but very different) computational processes which Minsky calls agents. In his book describing the theory, Minsky sums up what he sees as the power of this point of view: What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. Thought it's relevant to mention about it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305455

91 points by levbrie 10y ago

jarmitage 10y ago

When all you have is a hammer...

habitue 10y ago
Bayes theorem is quite the versatile hammer...
marcosdumay 10y ago
Bayesian inference is more of a swiss-army knife than a hammer. It is a very versatile concept. Yet, even if it were a hammer, getting the nail-like characteristics of an unknown object is very valuable. You just have to repeat the procedure for the other tools on your toolset and you'll either get to completely know it, or characterize a hole on your toolset that can now be filled. A big gain, either way.

dTal 10y ago

I have often thought this, and I'm glad someone wrote the paper. I'd like to see more research in this area. It could end up being applicable to the design of more intelligent processes for group decision making at government scale.

ghgfhgfhn 10y ago
"more intelligent processes for group decision making at government scale" Yeah, it's called direct democracy and democratisation of media.
zeristor 10y ago
Yes, having read "The Theory That Would Not Die" [0] I too soon came to the conclusion that this seems to be what is behind the Wisdom of Crowds. Aircraft searches are a big thing, and there's a book on how it has been applied to MH370... [0] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-That-Would-Not-Die-ebook/dp/B0050QB3EQ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-That-Would-Not-Die-ebook/dp/...

visarga 10y ago

For long I have been thinking that online communities such as YC and reddit benefit from an accelerated process of group evolution. Where other contexts necessitate 10 years to converge on a common idea/ideology, some communities do it orders of magnitude faster. Maybe this paper could explain why it works faster in some groups than others, given the topology and size.

sudoscript 10y ago
Memes are a great example of this. They form, spread, and evolve so much more quickly on online communities than in the real world. I wonder if this represents a faster evolving community online, or one with weaker bonds because they're always in flux? [1] Memetics is a theory that the base unit of culture is a "meme" (in the Richard Dawkins sense of shared worldview, not in terms of Pepe. But him too) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

smaddox 10y ago

Asset markets are a poor choice for studying "accurate shared beliefs". They're an excellent choice for studying groupthink, though. The whole premise that people arrive at accurate shared beliefs is rather extraordinary to begin with. In my experience, widely shared beliefs are much more likely to be inaccurate.

pkrafft 10y ago

I'm the first author of this paper if anyone has any questions!

habitue 10y ago
In this framework, treating popularity as a prior over all previous information, what do you make of groups that maintain irrational beliefs for very long periods of time? Specifically things like superstitions where accidental correlations between unrelated events don't seem to be corrected by individual actors adding just a bit of objectivity at each step This is really neat by the way, thanks for producing this paper, I think it's an important area to start poking around in.
- pkrafft 10y ago
  Thanks! The model predicts that areas in which there is little evidence one way or the other available are the ones where incorrect beliefs could be sustained, particularly when the belief is held by those around you. I guess one interesting characteristic of certain superstitions is that people will avoid the scenario that they think will lead to a bad outcome, so they actually don't collect personal evidence discrediting that superstition. This line of argument suggests that positive superstitions should be less persistent than negative superstitions, though I am not sure if that is true.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    Ok, so let's keep going from there. I mean, it ought to be intuitive, with everyone having a favorite personal example, that groups of people seem pretty able to sustain very flagrantly wrong, and even downright stupid, beliefs over long periods of time. So a theory of socially distributed cognition should ideally either explain how this happens, or explain it away as an unfortunate side-effect of rational thinking in ambiguous situations (like certain optical illusions and the Bayesian brain theory). One mechanism I've heard posited (by Friston's neurosci lab) for how humans deal with noisy environments is to weight our sensory inputs by their expected precision. I might look at the ocean's surface and expect to see a froth of sea-foam, particulate matter, and water, so I won't pay enough attention to see a camouflaged fish. I'll still notice if Godzilla walks up out of it, though. Would a similar precision-weighting mechanism help to model social trust, and to thus give us an idea of how groups can fixate on incorrect group-beliefs? Are people treating outgroup members or "opponents", so to speak, as uselessly noisy, and thus down-weighting any need to update based on what those persons say or do? Could this contribute to people's (supposed) occasional failures to accurately model their outgroups, since they're intuitively modelling those outgroups precisely as mostly outputting random noise rather than precise information?

devy 10y ago

I was just reading Michael Nielson's free ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning: A Principle-Oriented Approach[1] yesterday. When Dr. Nielsen tries to reason why it may or may not have a simple algorithm that represent the intelligence, this excerpt strike me the most: In the 1970s and 1980s Marvin Minsky developed his "Society of Mind" theory, based on the idea that human intelligence is the result of a large society of individually simple (but very different) computational processes which Minsky calls agents. In his book describing the theory, Minsky sums up what he sees as the power of this point of view: What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. Thought it's relevant to mention about it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305455