Making big sense of big data: The quest to improve human reasoning

Seventeenth century German polymath Gottfried Leibniz said ruefully that if we had a set of scales to weigh the merits of competing arguments, we would have something more valuable than any miraculous science for making gold.

In what may be one of the largest research efforts aimed at improving human reasoning, the US Government is putting real gold behind a global effort to find Leibniz’s wished for scales. But they are not looking to artificial intelligence or to highly-trained experts. They hope to find the answer in the crowd - you and I.

“We all know different things, and different people think differently. The challenge is to work out a way to improve reasoning by tapping into the diversity of knowledge and expertise out there,” says University of Melbourne cognitive scientist and philosopher Associate Professor Tim van Gelder. He is a co-leader of one of only four international research teams tasked to come up with platforms for enabling groups of intelligence analysts to collaborate on complex analyses.