It’s a great question. I’m sure I’ve read something about that, possibly in some pop book like Thinking, Fast & Slow. What I read was an evaluation of the relationship of IQ to wealth, and the takeaway was that your economic success depends more on the average IQ in your country than it does on your personal IQ. It may have been an entire book rather than an article.
First comes an unexplained box called “The Meeting of Minds”, which I’m guessing is an editorial commentary on the article, and it says, “The primary contributors to c appear to be the g factors of the group members, along with a propensity toward social sensitivity.”
Next is the article’s abstract, which says, “This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.”
These summaries directly contradict each other: Is g a primary contributor, or not a contributor at all?
I’m guessing the study of group IQ is strongly politically biased, with Hegelians (both “right” and “left”) and other communitarians, wanting to show that individual IQs are unimportant, and individualists and free-market economists wanting to show that they’re important.
This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.
I have read (long ago, not sure where) a hypothesis that most people (in the educated professional bubble?) are good at cooperation, but one bad person ruins the entire team. Imagine that for each member of the group you roll a die, but you roll 1d6 for men, and 1d20 for women. A certain value means that the entire team is doomed.
This seems to match my experience, where it is often one specific person (usually male) who changes the group dynamic from cooperation of equals into a kind of dominance contest. And then, even if that person is competent, they have effectively made themselves the bottleneck of the former “hive mind”, because now any idea can be accepted only after it has been explained to them in great detail.
The more a team depends on the joint brainpower, the smaller it has to be (up to the minimum size for the complexity of the ideas sought, or rather multiplied by a term for that).
We see that in software teams that are usually limited to a size of around 7.
The highly productive lightcone teams seem to be even smaller.
At equal size, teams with more women should be more stable. To test this a domain is needed where there are roughly equal men and women, i.e., not engineering but maybe science or business administration.
What is the number at the limit of what people can do? I tried to look up the team size of the people working on the Manhattan project, but couldn’t find details. It seems that individual top scientists were working closely with teams building stuff (N=1), and there were conferences with multiple scientists (N>10), e.g., 14 on the initial bomb concept conference.
What does it actually mean to do things in a group? Maybe different actions scale differently. I can quickly think of three types of action: Brainstorming an idea. Collecting feedback for a proposal. Splitting work among multiple people who do it separately.
Brainstorming and collecting feedback seem like they could scale almost indefinitely. You can have thousand people generate ideas and send them to you by e-mail. The difficult part will be reading the ideas. Similarly, you could ask thousand people to send feedback by e-mail. Perhaps there is a psychological limit somewhere, when people aware that they are “one in a hundred” stop spending serious effort on the e-mails, because they assume their contribution will be ignored.
Splitting work, that probably depends a lot on the nature of the project. Also, it is a specific skill that some people have and some people don’t. Perhaps the advantage of a good team is the ability to select someone with the greatest skill (as opposed to someone with the greatest ego) to split the work.
More meta, perhaps the advantage of a good team is the ability to decide how things will be done in general (like, whether there will be a brainstorming at all, whether to split into multiple teams, etc.). This again depends on the context: sometimes the team has the freedom to define things, sometimes it must follow existing rules.
I am just thinking out loud here. Maybe good teamwork requires that (1) someone has the necessary skills, and (2) the team is able to recognize and accept that, so that the people who have the skills are actually allowed to use them. Either of these two is not enough alone. You could have a team of experts whose decisions are arbitrarily overriden by management, or a team of stubborn experts who refuse to cooperate at all. On the other hand, if you had a team of perfect communicators with e.g. zero programming skills, they probably couldn’t build a nontrivial software project. (There is also the possibility of unknown unknowns: a team of great communicators who are all missing some important skill, and are not even aware that such skill exists. So all they do is clearly communicate that the project is difficult for mysterious reasons.) Leadership is also one of those skills.
All your thinking out loud makes sense to me. Brainstorm as you suggested probably doesn’t scale well as many ideas will be generated again and again, maybe even logarithmic distincti results. I once read that husband wife teams do better on joint tasks than randomly paired people if equal skill. This indicates that splitting is possible.
But I you seem to go more in the direction of looking for specific mechanisms while I am more interested in data on scaling laws. Though indeed what are the scaling parameters? I guess I can be happy if there is any data on this at all and see what parameters are available.
I guess I can be happy if there is any data on this at all and see what parameters are available.
Yeah.
Well, taking your question completely literally (a group of N people doing an IQ test together), there are essentially two ways how to fail at an IQ test. Either you can solve each individual problem given enough time, but you run out of time before the entire test is finished. Or there is a problem that you cannot solve (better than guessing randomly) regardless of how much time you have.
The first case should scale linearly, because N people can simply split the test and do each their own part. The second scale would probably be logarithmic, because it requires a different approach, and many people will keep trying the same thing.
...but this is still about how “the number of solved problems” scales, and we need to convert that value to IQ. And the standard way is “what fraction of population would do worse than you”. But this depends on the nature of the test. If the test is “zillion simple questions, not enough time”, then dozen random students together will do better than Einstein. But if the test is “a few very hard questions”, then perhaps Einstein could do better than a team of million people, if some wrong answer seems more convincing than the right one to most people.
This reminds me of chess; how great chess players play against groups of people, sometimes against the entire world. Not the same thing that you want, but you might be able to get more data here: the records of such games, and the ratings of the chess players.
Sure, it depends on the type of task. But I guess we would learn a lot about human performance it we tried such experiments. For example, consider your “many small tasks” task: Even a single person will finish the last one faster than the first one in most cases.
My interest is not political—though that might make it harder to study, yes. I think it’s relevant to AI because it could uncover scaling laws. One presumable advantage of AI is that it scales better, but how does that depend on speed of communication between parts and capability of parts? I’m not saying that there is a close relationship but I guess there are potentially surprising results.
Has anybody ever tried to measure the IQ of a group of people? I mean like letting multiple people solve an IQ test together. How does that scale?
It’s a great question. I’m sure I’ve read something about that, possibly in some pop book like Thinking, Fast & Slow. What I read was an evaluation of the relationship of IQ to wealth, and the takeaway was that your economic success depends more on the average IQ in your country than it does on your personal IQ. It may have been an entire book rather than an article.
Google turns up this 2010 study from Science. The summaries you’ll see there are sharply self-contradictory.
First comes an unexplained box called “The Meeting of Minds”, which I’m guessing is an editorial commentary on the article, and it says, “The primary contributors to c appear to be the g factors of the group members, along with a propensity toward social sensitivity.”
Next is the article’s abstract, which says, “This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.”
These summaries directly contradict each other: Is g a primary contributor, or not a contributor at all?
I’m guessing the study of group IQ is strongly politically biased, with Hegelians (both “right” and “left”) and other communitarians, wanting to show that individual IQs are unimportant, and individualists and free-market economists wanting to show that they’re important.
I have read (long ago, not sure where) a hypothesis that most people (in the educated professional bubble?) are good at cooperation, but one bad person ruins the entire team. Imagine that for each member of the group you roll a die, but you roll 1d6 for men, and 1d20 for women. A certain value means that the entire team is doomed.
This seems to match my experience, where it is often one specific person (usually male) who changes the group dynamic from cooperation of equals into a kind of dominance contest. And then, even if that person is competent, they have effectively made themselves the bottleneck of the former “hive mind”, because now any idea can be accepted only after it has been explained to them in great detail.
That would imply some interesting corollaries:
The more a team depends on the joint brainpower, the smaller it has to be (up to the minimum size for the complexity of the ideas sought, or rather multiplied by a term for that).
We see that in software teams that are usually limited to a size of around 7.
The highly productive lightcone teams seem to be even smaller.
At equal size, teams with more women should be more stable. To test this a domain is needed where there are roughly equal men and women, i.e., not engineering but maybe science or business administration.
What is the number at the limit of what people can do? I tried to look up the team size of the people working on the Manhattan project, but couldn’t find details. It seems that individual top scientists were working closely with teams building stuff (N=1), and there were conferences with multiple scientists (N>10), e.g., 14 on the initial bomb concept conference.
What does it actually mean to do things in a group? Maybe different actions scale differently. I can quickly think of three types of action: Brainstorming an idea. Collecting feedback for a proposal. Splitting work among multiple people who do it separately.
Brainstorming and collecting feedback seem like they could scale almost indefinitely. You can have thousand people generate ideas and send them to you by e-mail. The difficult part will be reading the ideas. Similarly, you could ask thousand people to send feedback by e-mail. Perhaps there is a psychological limit somewhere, when people aware that they are “one in a hundred” stop spending serious effort on the e-mails, because they assume their contribution will be ignored.
Splitting work, that probably depends a lot on the nature of the project. Also, it is a specific skill that some people have and some people don’t. Perhaps the advantage of a good team is the ability to select someone with the greatest skill (as opposed to someone with the greatest ego) to split the work.
More meta, perhaps the advantage of a good team is the ability to decide how things will be done in general (like, whether there will be a brainstorming at all, whether to split into multiple teams, etc.). This again depends on the context: sometimes the team has the freedom to define things, sometimes it must follow existing rules.
I am just thinking out loud here. Maybe good teamwork requires that (1) someone has the necessary skills, and (2) the team is able to recognize and accept that, so that the people who have the skills are actually allowed to use them. Either of these two is not enough alone. You could have a team of experts whose decisions are arbitrarily overriden by management, or a team of stubborn experts who refuse to cooperate at all. On the other hand, if you had a team of perfect communicators with e.g. zero programming skills, they probably couldn’t build a nontrivial software project. (There is also the possibility of unknown unknowns: a team of great communicators who are all missing some important skill, and are not even aware that such skill exists. So all they do is clearly communicate that the project is difficult for mysterious reasons.) Leadership is also one of those skills.
All your thinking out loud makes sense to me. Brainstorm as you suggested probably doesn’t scale well as many ideas will be generated again and again, maybe even logarithmic distincti results. I once read that husband wife teams do better on joint tasks than randomly paired people if equal skill. This indicates that splitting is possible.
But I you seem to go more in the direction of looking for specific mechanisms while I am more interested in data on scaling laws. Though indeed what are the scaling parameters? I guess I can be happy if there is any data on this at all and see what parameters are available.
Yeah.
Well, taking your question completely literally (a group of N people doing an IQ test together), there are essentially two ways how to fail at an IQ test. Either you can solve each individual problem given enough time, but you run out of time before the entire test is finished. Or there is a problem that you cannot solve (better than guessing randomly) regardless of how much time you have.
The first case should scale linearly, because N people can simply split the test and do each their own part. The second scale would probably be logarithmic, because it requires a different approach, and many people will keep trying the same thing.
...but this is still about how “the number of solved problems” scales, and we need to convert that value to IQ. And the standard way is “what fraction of population would do worse than you”. But this depends on the nature of the test. If the test is “zillion simple questions, not enough time”, then dozen random students together will do better than Einstein. But if the test is “a few very hard questions”, then perhaps Einstein could do better than a team of million people, if some wrong answer seems more convincing than the right one to most people.
This reminds me of chess; how great chess players play against groups of people, sometimes against the entire world. Not the same thing that you want, but you might be able to get more data here: the records of such games, and the ratings of the chess players.
Sure, it depends on the type of task. But I guess we would learn a lot about human performance it we tried such experiments. For example, consider your “many small tasks” task: Even a single person will finish the last one faster than the first one in most cases.
I like your chess against a group example.
I think in your first paragraph, you may be referring to: https://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/IQandNationalProductivity.pdf
My interest is not political—though that might make it harder to study, yes. I think it’s relevant to AI because it could uncover scaling laws. One presumable advantage of AI is that it scales better, but how does that depend on speed of communication between parts and capability of parts? I’m not saying that there is a close relationship but I guess there are potentially surprising results.