Original post from r/Futurology on Reddit:
I recently stumbled on this post and found the question to be very interesting and also relevant to the saga of GME investors.
The events of January 2021 were spectacular and exciting. Many people on the internet, for the most part on Reddit, had their attention drawn into this wild story that was unfolding, with what appeared to be accelerating momentum, until the incumbents colluded to prevent any further purchasing of shares of GME and other stocks. What has followed has been an interesting ordeal involving hundreds of thousands of individual investors who collectively believe in the idea, to put it simply, that there is way more to this story under the surface.
Many interesting and worthwhile things have been discovered, shared, discussed, dissected, and expanded upon, by these hundreds of thousands of individuals.
What do you call this group of people? I don't mean terms like "ape", I mean, like the original question above, what do you call an emergent superintelligence that arises when hundreds of thousands of individuals all work together towards a common objective?
Most likely Hivemind, could also be called, Gestalt Intelligence, group mind, group ego, or mind coalescence. It's very much a staple of sci-fi for decades.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_mind_(science_fiction)
Personally, I believe "hive mind" is an appropriate word to use to refer to the collective combined intellectual power of a group like this. Another worthwhile candidate from that Reddit thread is "collective".
Either way, whether you call it hive mind, or a collective, or something else, what is interesting to me is the existence of this emergent phenomenon at all. To me it is interesting to think about how this all happened and how, regardless of how it happened, here we are in the year 2023 caught in a game of information warfare, hundreds of thousands of individual investors who believe in an idea that they perceive to be true, versus incumbent power holders that have never had to deal with such a force before.
There is an enormous amount of information out there on the internet and elsewhere. Way too much information for any one person or small group to process themselves. Among lots of good information, misinformation is also present, and much of the effort involves determining what is true and relevant and worthwhile, and what is not.
I like to think of it like a very big jigsaw puzzle, a million piece puzzle. For one person to assemble a million piece jigsaw puzzle would probably be nearly impossible, or if not impossible then so time consuming as to be not a worthwhile effort. But, if you have many participants, all working together to assemble the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, a division of labor so to speak, suddenly it isn't quite so difficult. And when you work on a jigsaw puzzle, the rate of completion is typically always increasing, accelerating. At first, progress is very slow because you have 1 million possible pieces to work with to put in 1 million possible locations. But as progress is made, there are now less pieces and less possible locations to put them in, so the total amount of work required to make further progress is less. In other words, nobody is going to waste valuable resources (time, effort) trying to solve a section of the puzzle that is already solved. So those valuable resources are able to be spent in a more worthwhile area.
In terms of this story of GME, it could maybe be summarized as such:
- 2020: things happened - DFV created interest in GME, RC started to set the stage
- 2021 January: accelerating trading price of GME created enormous interest in what was happening. Suddenly nobody was able to buy any more shares of GME, much of this momentum was destroyed. Wtf just happened? Hive mind, assemble!
- 2021 March to September - the hive mind of hundreds of thousands of individuals gather in places like Superstonk and elsewhere to discuss what they know and what they think about what is going on with this very unusual idiosyncratic stock
- 2021 September - the hive mind has discovered very valuable information. e.g. the cellar boxing playbook gives very valuable insight into the actions and motivations of our opponents that spend their efforts against the success of GameStop and GME investors. the idea of DRS was percolating among the GME investor hive mind and eventually found it's way to the forefront of our conscious attention.
- 2021 December - By December 8, we've been provided evidence that tells us basically for certain that DRS is a key endeavor in this ongoing struggle.
It took less than 1 year for this large group of individuals, this hive mind, harnessing the combined intelligence of hundreds of thousands of individuals, to go from being confused and uncertain about what was happening and how it worked and why it was happening, to having figured out basically the main concepts involved and what we can do about it. DRS has existed for decades, but only since 2021 has it had any real relevance in the minds of regular household investors.
It reminds me of some companies are calling AI, digesting quantities of information.
I wonder if it woukd be useful to set up an instance of llama (free AI) and feed it the library and archives.
A related term is swarm intelligence.
Borg.
AI
It's the same process AI is trained with.
A thousand smoothes think random things and the 10% of the apes that can spell derivative throw out the dumbest 90% of the ideas. Rinse repeat
