282 - Cognitive Distance

An easily forgotten factor that dominates our lives is the "Cognitive Distance" between any two people, which I'll define as including Differences in:

• Accumulated: Training and Experience

• Perspective: Language, Culture, and Philosophy

• Baseline: IQ and Health

One study discovered that someone with an IQ of 130 has just as much difficulty communicating with an average person as someone with an IQ of 70. This illustrates the concept of Cognitive Distance, where the difficulty is proportionate to distance within reasonable thresholds.

This distance also includes many separate and distinct variables, as it can have many dimensions within any given challenge, some near, and some far away when considered for any two people. While people tend to intuit this distance to varying degrees, it remains too complex to calculate casually. More intuitive people can also develop a sense of direction (as well as distance), such as recognizing differences in mental health, IQ, experience, or culture even under high levels of uncertainty.

For purposes of Collective Intelligence, the goal isn't to gather some elite and groomed subset of high-IQ individuals, as they'd inhabit a very small set of edge cases, most of which tend to be separated by even greater cognitive distances than the separation of any one of those individuals from the average person. While there is sure to be an optimal level of granularity for any given use case, the space between those edge cases requires coverage along as many of those dimensions as possible in order to effectively reduce cognitive biases to minimum levels.

Different domains also have very different "Hard problems", as demonstrated by many innovation platforms having the Hard problems of one domain easily solved by experts from an entirely different domain. Likewise, cultures around the world show very different patterns of adaptation to various global challenges, each culture with its own respective strengths and weaknesses.

Collective Intelligence (CI) is synonymous with "Collective Superintelligence" specifically because effective systems of CI substantially reduce cognitive bias. Even dominantly unconscious systems making use of groups of enthusiasts rather than experts have reliably outperformed experts in this manner, such as the Swarm Intelligence method that Unanimous AI became known for with their sports betting.

The earliest versions of our 8th-gen ICOM-based systems are strongly influenced by and built around CI research, with many related use cases in organizational management and governance. These systems may become the first to truly map and bridge cognitive distances at large.