It’s not group think if the individuals don’t interact. It’s the wisdom of crowds.
This may interest you.
Group think has a specific definition, and this isn’t it.
I seem to remember some scientist doing something similar with memes or keywords on the Internet and having amazingly good luck with it. Anyone remember that from a television show?
Reminds me of the 1970’s and the Trancendental Meditation idea of 1% meditating for world peace and the lowering of violent crime in major US cities
Heard the CIA guy testify that he relied on Langley experts for information rather than agents on the ground in Benghazi. Brilliant!
Stanford Research Institue did some interesting research on a thing called Remote Viewing that is similiar to the subject of this article.
They supposedly used ordinary people asking them to visualize various locations unknown to them resulting in some fairly acurate descriptions of what they were asked to view.
It’s not groupthink. That’s a specific -thing- and it’s a different psychological affect of people operating in groups. This is more properly “crowd think”.
It’s the flash mob of geopolitical prediction. Get a bunch of reasonably plugged-in people to all sit together and process their guesses into a stack of fair estimates based on some current set of facts.... And chances are pretty good that all of the most probable outcomes will be guessed. Once the list of guesses is defined, those guesses are ranked by crowd-sourcing again into a short list of most probable to least... And shazam. Predictions. Maybe even some pretty good ones.
Gestalt Psychology in a different wrapper
Remember “Intrade”? (shuttered by US online gaming laws) https://www.intrade.com
Similar idea is back & funded with BitCoin: https://www.predictious.com
(GOP currently favored to win back Senate)
Make money if you are good at predicting!
The “Foundation Trilogy” by Asimov had as its basis the study and mathmatical mapping of history to predict the future
Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History, a part of the UC system, continues to publish pieces on this subject
It sounds like a meeting of freepers.
The CIA is busy staffing gays and wondering how to staff illegals than making predictions.
lmao
“So You Think You’re Smarter Than A CIA Agent”
I know that I’m smarter than a Pres_ent.
And damned smarter than a Vice President.
This just reinforces what I've been saying on the stump, the citizens of the United States are better at deciding issues, especially those affecting their local communities, than the "experts" in Washington are.
James R. McClure Jr.
Jeffersonian Anti-Federalist Democrat candidate for IN09
Also, in their infinite wisdom, could they not hire a web designer who would drop the haute couture light gray font for something legible?
What stock should I pick so I can retire in two years instead of 15 years?
The CIA is a joke and always has been. It should be disbanded as a waste of taxpayer monies. They rarely see anything coming and provide useful intelligence. It has become a Presidential ass-kissing agency with more polidiots than spooks.
Their success shouldnt really be a surprise. Much of the purported intelligence gathering by “diplomats” ( = spooks) has historically consisted of culling ordinary news sources and putting that together with astute personal observations.