Wise crowds work together
Which of the three groups sees more than the other groups?
Which of these three groups is more able to spot and then coordinate against the various dangers that come from different directions? Which of these groups would you yourself want to be part of the times were dangerous and your own survival was on the line? Group 3, right? They might not be individually super smart, but because they look in all directions (i.e. they are diverse) and are able to work together (holding hands), they can spot dangers and opportunities in all directions. In contrast, the brilliant individuals in group 1 all look in the same direction and would not see the dangers from the side or behind, nor be able to organise against them.
This illustrates a crucial point for education systems: it is not (just) about creating skilled individuals, it is also about collective intelligence – an ecosystem of diverse individuals with the social skills and motivation to work together.
There is thus a two-fold problem with staring at the PISA education results. One is that it leads us to believe that high scores are a sign of an education system that is working, rather than that it is producing lots of individuals who are clever in the same way, and thus a system that perhaps is not working at all. The second, deeper point, is that it does not measure the outcome of true interest, which is whether we are producing collective intelligence: diverse individuals who can work together. PISA tests measures neither diversity nor cooperation.
For sure, rapidly declining PISA scores in reading and mathematics are a sign of cognitive decline in a society and an increasingly defunct education system. Yet, the Pisa scores tell us of no more than one-third of the education picture. Let us look for other data to gauge the evolving state of diversity and cooperation.
Average OECD PISA scores over time for mathematics and reading, data sourced from OECD
Diversity that can cooperate
What is a reasonable measure of whether a society contains diversity of thinking, of perspectives? What measures whether a society is able to look in many different directions?
Freedom of thought, of conscience, and of expression is at the heart of diversity of opinions: the members in group 3 are different in that they look in different directions, seeing different things. The noises these diverse perspectives make to the rest of the group is then the proof of real diversity in the group. Thus, a useful measure of the diversity aspect of collective intelligence can be gleamed from the diversity of perspectives in mainstream news.
How much diversity is tolerated and thus incorporated in mainstream news in different societies about sensitive topics, like climate change, political corruption, Zionism, eugenics, or the Ukraine war? The best index I know for this is the World Press Freedom Index. The graph below show it over time for selected countries.
Reporters without Borders World Press Freedom Index, developed leveraging data from Reporters without Borders
Press freedom as a whole in the world peaked in 2015 and went down ever since, rapidly since 2020. Only 1% of the world is now counted as living under a high degree of press freedom. The graph shows that lonely Norway is an outlier – just as free now as in 2015. Yet, Germany went down nearly 10 points on this scale and is no longer a great place for press freedom. A slide can be seen for all the countries here, including the US, China, and India.
Indeed, this index does not fully capture the degree of the slide. Organisations like Propaganda in Focus and the Grey Zone have meticulously noted the rapid increase in hidden forms of censorship, such as websites one can no longer reach because browsers block them automatically after the authorities put them on a black list. So matters in Germany, the UK, and the US are worse than this index suggests. Yet, even in this index, all the big Western countries have seen a major loss in Press Freedoms.
I interpret this data as evidence of rapidly declining diversity of thought all around the world, including the West. A loss of perspectives. I partly blame new technologies for creating the pressure against tolerance. Mobile phones, social media, and other technologies have the business model to tell the consumer that or she is right and the rest is wrong. That breeds intolerance and blind egotism. I also blame an increased parasitism in Western bureaucracies and politics ever since the 1960s, a natural outcome of having been at relative peace for so long.
However, I think good education – particularly academia – should counter the forces that erode high collective intelligence. Good education is where groups find how to optimally use new technologies whilst minimizing their bad effects. It should be the place where solutions to parasitism and other social problems are found. I will talk in later episodes about Estonia and Singapore – the top PISA countries in Europe and Asia – to see whether their education systems are indeed finding a way. Here I simply note the huge reduction in press freedom and how that illustrates the increasingly narrow views that the vast majority of the population is exposed to. ‘We’ are increasingly like Group 1, but then not so smart individually.
What is also important to realise is that the grass is not greener on the other side: press freedom is not well in China, India, Russia or much of the rest of the world either. Partly this is because the West is no longer setting a good example, but also because they are subject to the same technological and societal forces as we are. Their education systems are not yet helping them find solutions either. Almost the whole of humanity is becoming less able to generate a diversity of perspectives that the rest is able to live with.
The ability to cooperate
Tolerated diversity, a key sign of collective intelligence, is thus strongly down since 2015, even before the disruptions of covid and the recent wars.
What about the ability to cooperate? Partly, this is also about an ability to benefit from diversity and hence already reflected somewhat in the Press Freedom index, but cooperative skills are also a thing of itself, even among totally like-minded individuals.
The ultimate test of being able to work together is in collective accomplishments, like winning wars and building attractive societies. These ultimate tests are very subjective though and very hard to pin down. One might for instance think that migration streams tell one which country is more attractive, as one might think that migration is from dysfunctional to well-run. In a vague sense that is indeed true of the broad migration streams, but in many particular instances of migration, other considerations dominate. In many cases, large migration streams happen in wars, with people fleeing to their neighbours, ending up in UN camps. I would not want to count UN refugee camps in a country as a sign of great collective intelligence though. More a sign of recent tragedy.
When it comes to organisational ability, I propose a different indicator: the length of time that large businesses survive. After all, large businesses can choose their own workers and set up new internal structures robust to outside disruption. Being able to survive with the workers one has hired is then a sign of the adaptability of the collective. Short survival times are a sign of being unable to coordinate and adapt together.
The AI answer to this question basically leads to a McKinzie report that looked at how long Fortune 500 firms survived in different decades: in the 1930s to 1960s, firms survived on average well over 50 years. In the last 20 years, they only survive on average 15 years, i.e. the vast majority do not last that long anymore. This says something about the reduced ability of large organisations to survive.
The Fortune 500 firms all reside in the US though, and only include very big firms. Still, the same phenomenon has been observed looking at broader stock-market data, labour statistics, and particular industries in the US: a large decline in business longevity over time. What about elsewhere? Studies looking at Japan and Europe find, if anything, even shorter longevity of businesses there. So yes, the decline in business longevity does seem a general trend in the OECD, though the data is patchy.
How about the data problems behind business longevity studies, I hear you ask? They are, unfortunately, formidable. Less so though for bigger companies. Why? Because very small firms are often fake firms with no-one working in them, set up to hide taxes or ownership, meaning that large numbers of small firms disappear every year without having ever really produced anything. Large firms, at least, are easy to track down and difficult to hide. So one can be pretty sure they exist as real companies, making it easier to see how long they survive.
Hang on, I still hear you say, hasn’t competition become tougher and don’t many big companies get taken over by others? Well, take-over is certainly a thing nowadays, but it was also a thing in the 1930s. Competition has become more international, yes, but that has also made it possible for companies in trouble in one place to move and survive elsewhere (like German companies moving to the US).
Moreover, there actually are companies in every industry that are quite old. Some banks, mines, and breweries go back centuries. IBM is still around in the computer markets. The top oil companies of the 1930s are largely still there, just like the airplane and electronic companies. Ford is still building cars, some 125 years after inception. Hence, yes, it is possible to build an organisational structure that adapts and survives, though it does mean building a whole group of workers that feels they have joint ownership over the firm (we teach those structures at ALM!). Very few modern companies are led well enough to have that kind of joint feeling take root.
While the data problems are thus severe and one should not take the statistics too seriously, changes in observed business longevity is still the best I can give you as a reasonable indicator of changes in our ability to cooperate. If you can think of better, do let me know in the comments.
One would think that modern companies would learn from the successful examples, but few do for reasons we also teach at ALM: the structures that last are less parasitical and authoritarian. That might sound like a good thing for the leadership of a new company to aim for, but ‘parasitical and authoritarian’ sounds quite good to many who are on top. So the structures that last longer, such as family businesses in which many have a real say, are less pleasing to bossy and narcissistic leaders. Well, there are rather a lot of those leaders nowadays. Erosive structures are more flattering to bossy narcissists. Over time, we are seeing erosive structures that do not last long arise more often, a clear measure of lower collective intelligence.
You see the same phenomenon in other large human organisations, like political parties and niche religions: they are less stable and more ephemeral than in decades past. It even holds for countries. Political scientists call it the ‘age of fragmentation’. In the media, the terms ‘cancel culture’ and ‘bubbles’ captures the same phenomenon: an increase in atomisation. That describes the second group at the top – a bunch of disconnected loners, unintelligent as a group.
The lack of cooperation can be seen in many other statistics too. About half of American youngsters are designated as having some kind of mental health problem, thus not subject to ‘normal’ expectations on cooperative behaviour. Similarly, we see the rise of gated communities, with the wealthy physically disconnecting from the rest. Distrust in politics and media is rising. And so forth: we are seeing a large loss of collective intelligence.
How does education fit in? Education should be part of the solution, with vigorous experiments into how to overcome the collapse of collective intelligence. Unfortunately, the education structures got corrupted along with the rest of society: as we saw in the Netherlands in the previous episode, education structures that were once healthy, are now totally rotten and parasitical themselves.
A bulging and expanding group of hangers-on (administrators, psychologists, coaches, bureaucrats, bad teachers) is holding Dutch children hostage, making sure that any attempt to improve education increases the winning of the hangers-on. They are all pretending to be protecting children from harm, catering to their special needs. Since 1990 education got double the money for much worse outcomes, with an average three years loss in development per child. It is the trap professor Frank Furedi noted in his 2002 book “paranoid parenting”: the weaponisation of safetyism against children’s development. This is also part of what happened in the US.
Parasites don’t leave the body out of some kind of pity for their victim, or even out of some well-understood self-interest that the host is dying. Just as dysfunctional Fortune 500 companies usually go bankrupt (or get taken over, if they are lucky) rather than reform, I am afraid something similar might happen to our societies. However, just like in business, the small and the new can already get going and map new ways forward while the big and the old are on their death beds. Parents can and should take the lead in educational renewal for they are the only ones who can do so quickly.
Is there hope? Can one still have high collective intelligence in this modern world? Yes, Norway is not alone. Switzerland, Taiwan, the Amish, and other small successful groups show the way. They are the opposite of autocratic and narcissistic and have in different ways resisted the worst of the changes in other groups. They still see a lot of internal debate (arising from internal diversity) and coordination. We teach many of the collective intelligence principles used by those successful groups at ALM.
Now is then the time to sow solutions in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the dysfunctional West: for families to take their parental roles seriously and for strong small new communities to emerge.
Next week in this PISA series: China.
Want to learn more about alternatives in higher education?
Check out the various programs at Academia Libera Mentis.
The book “Minds that Dare” describes the journey of Academia Libera Mentis from both a teacher and student perspective.
