I share Richard Kennaway’s feeling that this is a rather strange question because the answer seems so obvious; perhaps I’m missing something important. But:
“Collaborative” just means “working together”. Collaborative truthseeking means multiple people working together in order to distinguish truth from error. They might do this for a number of reasons, such as these:
They have different skills that mesh together to let them do jointly what they could not do so well separately.
The particular truths they’re after require a lot of effort to pin down, and having more people working on that can get it done quicker.
They know different things; perhaps the truth in question can be deduced by putting together multiple people’s knowledge.
There are economies of scale; e.g., a group of people could get together and buy a bunch of books or a fast computer or a subscription to some information source, which is almost as useful to each of them as if they’d paid its full price on their own.
There are things they can do together that nudge their brains into working more effectively (e.g., maybe adversarial debate gets each person to dig deeper for arguments in a particular direction than they would have done without the impetus to compete and win).
There is a sense in which collaborative truth-seeking is built out of individual truth-seeking. It just happens that sometimes the most effective way for an individual to find what’s true in a particular area involves working together with other individuals who also want to do that.
Collaborative truth-seeking may involve activities that individual truth-seeking (at least if that’s interpreted rather strictly) doesn’t because they fundamentally require multiple people, such as adversarial debate or double-cruxing.
Being “collaborative” isn’t a thing that in itself brings benefits. It’s a name for a variety of things people do that bring benefits. Speech-induced state changes don’t result in better predictions because they’re “collaborative”; engaging in the sort of speech whose induced state changes seem likely to result in better predictions is collaboration.
And yes, there are circumstances in which collaboration could be counterproductive. E.g., it might be easier to fall into groupthink. Sufficiently smart collaboration might be able to avoid this by explicitly pushing the participants to explore more diverse positions, but empirically it doesn’t look as if that usually happens.
Related: collaborative money-seeking, where people join together to form a “company” or “business” that pools their work in order to produce goods or services that they can sell for profit, more effectively than they could if not working together. Collaborative sex-seeking, where people join together to form a “marriage” or “relationship” or “orgy” from which they can derive more pleasure than they could individually. Collaborative good-doing, where people join together to form a “charity” which helps other people more effectively than the individuals could do it on their own. Etc.
(Of course businesses, marriages, charities, etc., may have other purposes besides the ones listed above, and often do; so might groups of people getting together to seek the truth.)
I share Richard Kennaway’s feeling that this is a rather strange question because the answer seems so obvious; perhaps I’m missing something important. But:
“Collaborative” just means “working together”. Collaborative truthseeking means multiple people working together in order to distinguish truth from error. They might do this for a number of reasons, such as these:
They have different skills that mesh together to let them do jointly what they could not do so well separately.
The particular truths they’re after require a lot of effort to pin down, and having more people working on that can get it done quicker.
They know different things; perhaps the truth in question can be deduced by putting together multiple people’s knowledge.
There are economies of scale; e.g., a group of people could get together and buy a bunch of books or a fast computer or a subscription to some information source, which is almost as useful to each of them as if they’d paid its full price on their own.
There are things they can do together that nudge their brains into working more effectively (e.g., maybe adversarial debate gets each person to dig deeper for arguments in a particular direction than they would have done without the impetus to compete and win).
There is a sense in which collaborative truth-seeking is built out of individual truth-seeking. It just happens that sometimes the most effective way for an individual to find what’s true in a particular area involves working together with other individuals who also want to do that.
Collaborative truth-seeking may involve activities that individual truth-seeking (at least if that’s interpreted rather strictly) doesn’t because they fundamentally require multiple people, such as adversarial debate or double-cruxing.
Being “collaborative” isn’t a thing that in itself brings benefits. It’s a name for a variety of things people do that bring benefits. Speech-induced state changes don’t result in better predictions because they’re “collaborative”; engaging in the sort of speech whose induced state changes seem likely to result in better predictions is collaboration.
And yes, there are circumstances in which collaboration could be counterproductive. E.g., it might be easier to fall into groupthink. Sufficiently smart collaboration might be able to avoid this by explicitly pushing the participants to explore more diverse positions, but empirically it doesn’t look as if that usually happens.
Related: collaborative money-seeking, where people join together to form a “company” or “business” that pools their work in order to produce goods or services that they can sell for profit, more effectively than they could if not working together. Collaborative sex-seeking, where people join together to form a “marriage” or “relationship” or “orgy” from which they can derive more pleasure than they could individually. Collaborative good-doing, where people join together to form a “charity” which helps other people more effectively than the individuals could do it on their own. Etc.
(Of course businesses, marriages, charities, etc., may have other purposes besides the ones listed above, and often do; so might groups of people getting together to seek the truth.)