Garett Jones: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s try some questions related to your first book, Hive Mind. Here’s a reader question: “The term hive mind is often thought of as a science fiction term, first used in 1950 in a short story, “The Second Night of Summer” by James Schmidt, about alien intelligences. In the Cold War era this was frightening. And of course, there’s the Borg from Star Trek: Next Generation. Do you think the term hive mind is now fully thought of as a good term, rather than a concept that strikes fear?” Yeah, it’s a great question. I have to say, the Wall Street Journal very kindly wrote an entire article about that. The heart of the article was how I picked the title of my book, and it was about this very theme. The hive mind used to be a negative idea, but now people routinely, on social media at least, treat it as a positive idea. The idea that we can grab ideas from a lot of other people, and synthesize those ideas, and get — to use the business cliché — synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — this is something that people can see on a regular basis now, in a way that was much more theoretical 50 years, 75 years ago. I think the idea of a hive mind or collective intelligence still has the scary downside, and it should. But the positive upside is way too visible for people to ignore. In the 1970s, Irish IQ measured as lower than British IQ, and people worried about this as a problem. These days, Irish IQ measures as higher. What should we learn or infer from this development?…

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