Ryan Collison

Violence and Its Decline Are We Getting Better at Not Killing Each Other—Or Just Waiting for the Next Catastrophe? Here's a claim that sounds too good to be true: we live in the most peaceful era in human history. Not relatively peaceful. The most peaceful. Less war.

Synthesis: Designing Smarter Groups We've covered a lot of ground: the wisdom of crowds, prediction markets, superforecasting, groupthink, swarm intelligence, epistemic democracy. Now let's pull the threads together into practical principles for making groups smarter. The core insight is simple: collective intelligence is engineerable. Groups can

Epistemic Democracy: Voting as Knowledge Aggregation In 1785, the Marquis de Condorcet proved something remarkable about majority voting. If each voter is more likely to be right than wrong on a binary question—even just slightly more likely—then as the number of voters increases, the probability that the majority

Swarm Intelligence: Ants and Algorithms An ant has a brain smaller than a pinhead. It can't plan. It can't reason. It can't hold a map in its head. A single ant is, by any reasonable measure, unintelligent. And yet: ant colonies build sophisticated structures.

Groupthink: When Collectives Fail On April 17, 1961, about 1,400 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. They were there to overthrow Fidel Castro's government, backed by the CIA and approved by President Kennedy. The invasion was a catastrophe. Within three days, the exiles

Superforecasting: What Makes Good Predictors In 2011, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) launched the largest forecasting tournament in history. They recruited thousands of volunteers to predict geopolitical events: Would North Korea conduct another nuclear test? Would the euro crisis escalate? Would Assad fall? The volunteers competed against each