Mandevillian Intelligence is an idea where the (wise?) people in charge subtly manipulate incentives so that peoples’ individual dumb choices add up to the collective good.

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive vices (i.e., shortcomings, limitations, constraints and biases) are seen to play a positive functional role in yielding collective forms of cognitive success. The present paper introduces the concept of mandevillian intelligence and reviews a number of strands of empirical research that help to shed light on the phenomenon. The paper also attempts to highlight the value of the concept of mandevillian intelligence from a philosophical, scientific and engineering perspective. Inasmuch as we accept the notion of mandevillian intelligence, then it seems that the cognitive and epistemic value of a specific social or technological intervention will vary according to whether our attention is focused at the individual or collective level of analysis. This has a number of important implications for how we think about the design and evaluation of collective cognitive systems. For example, the notion of mandevillian intelligence forces us to take seriously the idea that the exploitation (or even the accentuation) of individual cognitive shortcomings could, in some situations, provide a productive route to collective forms of cognitive and epistemic success.

Synthese

I don’t have much faith in the wisdom of the average individual. But if there is one thing we should have learned in the last 20-odd years, we can’t have automatic faith in the wisdom of our leaders either. I’m probably naive, but I like to think system thinking education could help address this. It could make the average person much more wise in their conclusions and decisions about the world around them, and it could help them select wise leaders through a democratic process. I won’t go to that worn out Churchill quote, but I can’t think of any other system of identifying and choosing wise leaders that would reliably work better. The one that sometimes seems to work better is when existing wise leaders choose their successors and put rules in place making it hard for outsiders to break in. But the problem, of course, is that the wise rulers are self-proclaimed, and even if they are in fact wise, if unwise people manage to break in at some point they will be able to manipulate and abuse that same set of rules to keep themselves and their unwise cronies in power.