human-meaning

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 were killed or captured.

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 other and, crucially, against professional

In 1945, two atomic bombs killed approximately 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 80 years since, nuclear weapons have killed no one in war. Zero. Is this evidence that humanity is getting better? Or are we just living in the gap between catastrophes? This question—whether violence

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. Less murder. Less torture.

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 be smarter than individuals—

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 is correct approaches certainty. This is