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arts. Pretty much everyone agrees that the Beatles are better than some random boy band. But in comparing the Beatles to Bach, reasonable people may disagree. In making that statement I’ve no doubt offended music snobs all over the world. But the point is that I’ve offended both the classical music snobs, who can’t believe the Beatles begin to compare to Bach, and also the pop music snobs, who believe that Bach belongs to a tradition that has since been surpassed. When such traditions coexist, it is extremely difficult for people in the two traditions to collaborate, because they have no basis to agree on when they’re making shared progress. This isn’t a negative judgment about such fields—great musicians, painters, and politicians all operate near the limits of human ability—but it is an important limitation on when collective intelligence may be used.

It’s not just politics and the fine arts that don’t have a strong shared praxis. Many academic fields lack one as well. Think of criticism of English literature. Critics are not going to one day put down their quills and arrive at a common understanding of Shakespeare. Indeed, arriving at such a common understanding isn’t the point. In such fields a plurality of points of view is a feature, not a bug, and a new way of understanding Shakespeare is to be celebrated. But this same plurality of points of view makes it difficult to recognize and integrate the best insights from a large group of people. Any such attempt at collaboration inevitably gets bogged down in discussions about basic values, and questions about what makes a contribution worthwhile. In such fields, agreement doesn’t scale, and that severely limits our ability to convert individual insight into collective insight, and so prevents application of collective intelligence.

Some fields sit near the cusp dividing fields where it’s feasible to scale collective intelligence and those where it is not. In economics, for example, there are many powerful methods of reasoning that are agreed upon by most economists: an understanding of how trade can make everyone better off, the idea that printing more money usually causes inflation, and so on. But economists don’t agree on some of the most fundamental questions of economics. As the old joke goes, if you put five economists in a room, they’ll give you six wildly differing opinions. US President Harry Truman is supposed to have asked for a one-armed economist, one who couldn’t say “On the other hand.” So while there is a shared praxis in economics, it’s not as strong as the shared praxis in fields such as mathematics, computer programming, and chess. As a result there are many questions in economics that can’t be attacked by the methods of collective intelligence. It’s only in a few parts of conomics, such as the study of some mathematical models of finance and the economy, where a strong shared praxis is available. It’s in those parts of economics where collective intelligence can be scaled.

The availability of a shared praxis isn’t the only challenge in applying collective intelligence. There are many other practical problems. An example is groupthink, where members of a group may be more interested in getting along with one another than in critically evaluating ideas. Or groups may become echo chambers, with group members merely reinforcing each others’ existing opinions. In some groups, basic norms of civil behavior breakdown. This sort of breakdown has destroyed many open source software collaborations, and bedevils many badly designed forums on the web, which may become havens for internet trolls, and other antisocial behavior. The projects we’ve discussed have overcome these and similar problems: some have succeeded with flying colors (the Polymath Project), while others just barely succeeded (World Team deliberations sometimes teetered on the edge of breakdown because of lack of civility). Similar problems also afflict offline groups, and much has been written about the problems and how to overcome them—including books such as James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of