EXTRACT: Through my experiences and observations, I have come to believe that the physical destruction of the earth extends to us, too. If we live in an environment that's wounded — where the water is polluted, the air is filled with soot and fumes, the food is contaminated with heavy metals and plastic residues, or the soil is practically dust — it hurts us, chipping away at our health and creating injuries at a physical, psychological, and spiritual level. In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves.
To download the 2010 SCIP European Summit brochure please click here.
Phi Beta Iota: The program is unusually well-presented with detailed descriptions and “take-away” bullets. Even if you cannot attend, reading the program is worthwhile for those who would like to know more about what the competitive intelligence professionals are thinking these days.
Phi Beta Iota: RSVP requested. Highly recommended. Dr. Susan Turnbull, one of the great spirits at GSA, is returning from a two-year rotational to the Department of Energy. This is one of the most professional and interesting gatherings we know of in Washington, D.C. It is open to the public including attaches from the Embassies. Robert Steele will attend.
Date 19 November 2010, 8:45 – 19 November 2010, 16:20
Location Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Philippstrasse 13, Haus 6, Lecture Hall 10115 Berlin
A One-Day Symposium at The Center for Integrative Life Sciences
During the last two decades many researchers in the humanities and natural sciences have begun to focus on understanding the cognitive processes involved when multiple individuals coordinate and interact with each other. This newfound focus is due to the acknowledgement that a central driving force in the evolution of the human mind has been its embedding in the social context. Many cognitive processes such as learning, attention, communication, motor
coordination, and decision-making can be considered issues of the social domain because they often involve more than one individual. With this in mind, The Center for Integrative Life Sciences (CILS) brings together speakers from both the humanities and natural sciences to address topics of social cognition at any level of complexity – from the activity of single cells and neurons to the behavior of individuals, groups and populations.
I'm impressed these folks are stretching the collective intelligence inquiry from the cellular to the whole-society scale, which is the range it needs to stretch, at least. Interesting that they use “cognition” rather than “intelligence”. I guess one is a phenomenon and one is a capacity, sort of like “creation” and “creativity”. I haven't sorted that out before.
One interesting difference between their *apparent* approach and mine is their seeming focus on “interacting minds” as the core phenomenon. I tend to focus on systemic factors (e.g., power relationships, group processes embedded in democratic institutions, etc) and collective analogs to various aspects of individual intelligence (e.g., satellite sensors and journalism as collective sense organs, pundits and sci fi novels as collective reflection, Wikipedia and libraries as collective memory, etc.). Of course there are interacting minds embedded in all these things I talk about, but I posit the collective intelligence as greater than / other than the interacting minds of its participants. Sort of like our personal intelligence is greater than / other than the interactions among our cells.
All of which would ideally be grist for further juicy dialogue and debate, should it ever occur. The CILS folks would definitely be good to invite to any future Collective Intelligence Convergence.
The Journal of Participatory Medicine has published an interesting piece on Self Diagnosis, subtitled A Discursive Systematic Review of the Medical Literature. It’s a complex subject – as patients become more informed and empowered, they are more liable to want to have a role in diagnosis, and more apt to question a doctor’s perception or framing of their condition. This isn’t new for some of us – thirty years ago I was disagreeing with my physician to the extent that he would prescribe to treatments, one based on his assessment and one based on mine.
The systematic review published in the JOPM turned up 51 articles, of which 38 were suitable for inclusion in the review. There are three assessments of self-diagnosis: that it’s reliable and desirable (31%), that it’s not reliable but still desirable (23%), or that it’s neither reliable nor desirable (29%).
