Comment by Jensson
3 years ago
> Individuals are smart, committees are dumb.
But a human isn't a bunch of individual cells, it is a cell that cloned itself many times. Those cells all have the same base code and can thus become an intelligent committee.
So the more identical the committee members are, the smarter the committee?
At least a committee of 10 identical members wont be dumber than a single member most of the time. A committee of clones is just scaling up compute in order to solve larger problems. Imagine if you could clone yourself with your knowledge and mental state, much more useful than trying to cooperate with another human.
According to Condorcet's jury theorem, a committee of 10 identical members may be smarter than a single member.
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I always felt that the decrease in intelligence is a side effect of the necessary consensus mechanisms.
10 genius clones would still take on various roles/positions in the system, requiring some optimization with respect to alignment under time/energy constraints.
But the committee-thinking is still constrained by the language. Any committee-thoughts must be coarser and slower than the member thoughts.
We're trading depth for breadth, or something like that.