SOCIAM all-hands meeting, September, University of Oxford

1. Mandevillian Intelligence
September 2017
Oxford, UK
Paul Smart

2. Mandevillian Intelligence
Thus yet every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.
Bernard Mandeville,
The Grumbling Hive, 1705
Cognitive and epistemic properties that are typically seen as
shortcomings, limitations or biases (vices) at the individual level can,
on occasion, play a positive functional role in supporting the
emergence of intelligent behaviour at the collective level.

3. Noisy Neurons
“The girls who the teacher has picked for the play
which will be produced next month practice every
afternoon.”

4. Noisy Neurons
“The girls who the teacher has picked for the play
which will be produced next month practice every
afternoon.”

5. Noisy Neurons
“The girls who the teacher has picked for the play
which will be produced next month practice every
afternoon.”

6. Noisy Neurons
“The girls who the teacher has picked for the play
which will be produced next month practice every
afternoon.”

7. Noisy Neurons
“The girls who the teacher has picked for the play
which will be produced next month practice every
afternoon.”

8. Collective Search

9. Collective Search

10. Collective Search

11. Collective Search

12. Collective Search

13. The Wisdom of the One
How many beans?
140
157
190
175
167
179
152
• Hourihan & Benjamin (2010):
• low memory span subjects
exhibit better performance.

14. • Zollman (2010):
• dogmatism helps to
preserve diversity.
• prevents premature
convergence on sub-
optimal solutions.
• important for
collective cognitive
success.
Dogmatism
“...a limited amount of
dogmatism is necessary for
progress. Without a serious
struggle for survival in which
the old theories are tenaciously
defended, none of the
competing theories can show
their mettle – that is, their
explanatory power and their
truth content.”
- Karl Popper

15. • Nemeth & Wachtler
(1983):
• the value of a committed
(but mistaken!) minority.
• Epistemic Tolerance:
• a tolerance of those who we
‘know’ to be wrong, or those
whose epistemic abilities
we regard as suspect.
Irrationality
Individuals can often look epistemically sub-optimal, but such
shortcomings are sometimes instrumental in promoting collective
success!

16. • Confirmation Bias:
• a tendency to seek out
confirmatory evidence.
• a failure to consider
contradictory evidence.
• Mercier & Sperber (2011):
• individual confirmation bias
serves the collective
cognitive good.
Confirmation Bias

17. Vicious Technologies?
• Simpson (2012):
• accentuation of confirmation
bias.
• Miller & Record (2013):
• undermines the justificatory
status of an agent’s beliefs.
• Pariser (2011):
• filter bubbles.
• Proposed solutions:
• avoid personalization,
publicize algorithms,
government intervention,
legislative frameworks.

18. • The Vice Kit!
• the adaptive exploitation of existing cognitive
vices.
• the creation or accentuation of cognitive
shortcomings.
• March (2006):
• “A technology of rationality has to be balanced
by other technologies that free action from the
constraints of conventional knowledge and
procedures and introduce elements of
foolishness into action.”
Virtuous Engineering?

19. • Cognitive
Augmentation:
• drugs.
• technology.
• hard work.
Me++

20. • Cognitive
Augmentation:
• drugs.
• technology.
• hard work.
Me++
Individual Enhancement = Collective Diminishment

21. Virtue Epistemology
Intellectual Virtue
Faculty Virtue Trait Virtue
Virtue
Reliabilism
Virtue
Responsibilism
appeals-to appeals-to
Intellectual
Humility
Intellectual
Courage
Openmindedness
Curiosity
Memory
Perception
Induction
Deduction
is-property-of is-property-of
Epistemic Agent
Cognitive
Character
S knows that p if and only if S believes the truth (with respect to p)
because of the exercise of S’s cognitive abilities (intellectual virtues).

22. • My Vice, Our Virtue:
• individual cognitive
vices are responsible
for (realizing?)
collective cognitive
virtues.
• Intellectual Virtue:
• what constitutes an
intellectual virtue is
relative to whether our
analytic gaze is
oriented towards the
individual or collective
level.
Virtue Relativism

23. Physarum Machines

24. Boom and Bust

25. Boom and Bust

26. Boom and Bust

27. Boom and Bust

28. Boom and Bust

29. Conclusion
• Mandevillian Intelligence:
• a particular form of collective intelligence.
• individual cognitive vice plays a productive role
in yielding collective cognitive success.
• It is an idea!
• Implications:
• technology, epistemology, social policy.
• the design and evaluation of social machines.

30. Publications
• Smart, P. R. (in press) Mandevillian
Intelligence. Synthese.
• Smart, P. R. (in press) Mandevillian
Intelligence: From Individual Vice to Collective
Virtue. In Socially-Extended Epistemology.
Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
• Smart, P. R., & Clowes, R. W. (submitted)
Epistemic Tolerance. Erkenntnis.
• Smart, P.R. (in prep) The Cognitive and
Evolutionary Consequences of Boom and
Bust.