Friday, October 12, 2007

The collective as a nose

As a reminder, the underlying theme pertains to how we know the truth which then supposes that we can define various types of truth and our related mechanisms for knowing the truth such as the knowing by nose. Could there be a collective nose?

Of course, there are other ways of knowing depending which will be discussed under the guise of truth engineering.

But back to to the nose of the crowd, techniques related to Collective Intelligence are interesting. One approach uses a market framework where money is the value for stock trading whose meaning is related to some question. To avoid some troublesome aspects, such as greed or the aura of gambling, monies won are contributed to charity.

In the recent case of the 787 delivery vote, a stock was defined and offered; the decision for the voter was to determine an opinion on the likelihood which would then be an offer for the stock; the last buy offer was in the $0.20 range. There are other examples, such as sport games (which may offer a way to play and to do so in a positive manner).

In lieu of other measuring devices, could voting like this represent a collective nose? Well, it's something that is worth more consideration.

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