Collective Intelligence: Lessons From Fish, Friends, Family and ‘Animal Farm’

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In the first part of this two-part series, I argued that there is value in ignorance and that we shouldn’t force our educational ideals on our kids. Of course, after publishing that, I immediately coerced my daughter into reading about stoicism. I wasn’t sure how else to instill virtues like resilience, courage and discipline in her. When I started this piece her resistance had already grown strong, and her escape tactics (paradoxical questioning, subversion and diversion) were exceeding my best efforts to keep her on task. She had even resorted to intentionally mispronouncing Epictetus as “Asparagus.” I had already agreed to write about collective intelligence, a form of knowledge gained through group collaboration and consensus. Still, I felt like an uninformed hypocrite whose kid thinks philosophy is a joke. One Sunday night I was trying to squeeze some reading in before my weekly roller-skating session when she tried the “Asparagus” trick, renaming Cleanthes “Kleenex” and citing su

Getting schooled. Assimilating behaviors from a group, as fish do, can lead individuals to produce something bigger than they could do in isolation. Image Credit: Tiago Thedim/Wikimedia Commons In the first part of this two-part series, I argued that there is value in ignorance and that we shouldn’t force our educational ideals on our kids. Of course, after publishing that, I immediately coerced my daughter into reading about stoicism. I wasn’t sure how else to instill virtues like resilience, courage and discipline in her. When I started this piece her resistance had already grown strong,…

Collective Intelligence: Lessons From Fish, Friends, Family and ‘Animal Farm’

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