Ryan Collison

Wisdom of Crowds: Surowiecki's Conditions In 2003, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed something that seemed insane: a futures market for terrorism. You could bet real money on the likelihood of assassinations, coups, and attacks. The idea was that such a market would aggregate intelligence better

Groups Can Be Smarter Than Individuals—If Structured Right In 1906, the British statistician Francis Galton attended a livestock fair in Plymouth. He was there to observe a contest: guess the weight of an ox after it had been slaughtered and dressed. About 800 people submitted estimates—farmers, butchers, and

Collective Intelligence Why Groups Can Be Smarter Than Experts—And Why They Usually Aren't In 1906, Francis Galton went to a county fair and discovered something that should have been impossible. A crowd of 800 people guessed the weight of an ox. Individually, their guesses were all over

The Institutionally Creative Human We've now traveled through 10,000 years of institutional history. We've seen that the standard story—the straight line from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states—is wrong. We've seen egalitarian cities, seasonal hierarchies, temples before farms, and people

Primary State Formation: How States Actually Emerge For most of human history, there were no states. Then, in a handful of places around the world, states appeared. Mesopotamia. Egypt. The Indus Valley. China. Mesoamerica. The Andes. Independently, in each of these regions, the apparatus we recognize as "the state&

Göbekli Tepe: The Temple Before the Farm In 1994, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt arrived at a site in southeastern Turkey that local farmers had known about for decades. They called it "Potbelly Hill"—Göbekli Tepe in Turkish. It was covered with worked flint and limestone fragments.