Even if it may seem obvi­ous, this is a pretty deep MP. I was reminded of by this pre­sen­ta­tion of David Wein­berger. What made me notice and reflect was two pieces.

First, his mailing-list. You sub­scribe to lots of mailing-lists. On each, there’s at least one true expert, even the lead­ing one, who con­tributes. And yet, even though he or she is the best, each con­tri­bu­tion is fol­lowed by a bunch of “Yes, but did you notice that…” or “Yes, I agree, and what do you think of the inter­ac­tion with…”. So, plain and sim­ple, the mailing-list is smarter than the best expert, no mat­ter what.

The sec­ond piece was his men­tion of the dis­con­nect between the real­ity that knowl­edge has become social (kids do their home­works socially, etc.) and the no less real real­ity that our edu­ca­tion sys­tems eval­u­ate indi­vid­u­als in a non social con­text. And that’s what make this an impor­tant MP.

Because we might indeed won­der whether eval­u­at­ing stu­dents on their indi­vid­ual mer­its is the best pub­lic pol­icy to pur­sue. Since most of the skills they will have to rely on in their work envi­ron­ment are social, why eval­u­ate them indi­vid­u­ally ? Who’s the best employee, the one that is the best in his field or the one that moti­vate the ten best in the field to work together to achieve one com­mon goal ?

Of course, eval­u­at­ing indi­vid­u­als based on their indi­vid­ual mer­its works as a sig­nal to find the best and bright­est. The only prob­lem here is that this assumes the dis­ci­plines tested by the edu­ca­tional sys­tem func­tion as a valid prox­ies for all other activ­i­ties, an assump­tion never proved.

At the very least, some degree of social eval­u­a­tion should be built into the edu­ca­tional sys­tems, in order to par­tially com­pen­sate its his­toric biases.

The impli­ca­tions are no more super­fi­cial for invest­ing pur­poses, since the abil­ity of orga­ni­za­tions to draw on social tools to grow their col­lec­tive knowl­edge can dis­crim­i­nate them pretty abruptly (those ban­ning Face­book and those digest­ing it, to take the FB exam­ple). Inter­est­ingly, Gold­man Sachs employ­ees appear to be using FB the most among the big i-banks, just a coincidence ?

Down­load D. Wein­berger presentation

MP: Knowl­edge is social