# Collective Intelligence — The Theory

What collective intelligence IS, how it works, and the theoretical foundations for designed emergence. Domain-independent science — the TeleoHumanity-specific interpretation lives in core/teleohumanity/, and alignment-specific applications live in domains/ai-alignment/.

## Intelligence Foundations
- [[intelligence is a property of networks not individuals]] — the core premise
- [[collective intelligence is a measurable property of group interaction structure not aggregated individual ability]] — CI is structural, not aggregate
- [[collective intelligence requires diversity as a structural precondition not a moral preference]] — diversity is functional engineering
- [[centaur team performance depends on role complementarity not mere human-AI combination]] — conditional, not unconditional
- [[partial connectivity produces better collective intelligence than full connectivity on complex problems because it preserves diversity]] — network topology matters
- [[collective intelligence within a purpose-driven community faces a structural tension because shared worldview correlates errors while shared purpose enables coordination]] — the core tension

## Coordination Design
- [[designing coordination rules is categorically different from designing coordination outcomes as nine intellectual traditions independently confirm]] — rules not outcomes
- [[Ostrom proved communities self-govern shared resources when eight design principles are met without requiring state control or privatization]] — the empirical evidence
- [[protocol design enables emergent coordination of arbitrary complexity as Linux Bitcoin and Wikipedia demonstrate]] — the existence proofs
- [[trial and error is the only coordination strategy humanity has ever used]] — the current limitation
- [[Hayek argued that designed rules of just conduct enable spontaneous order of greater complexity than deliberate arrangement could achieve]] — the Hayek insight

## AI Alignment as Coordination (domain-independent theory)
- [[universal alignment is mathematically impossible because Arrows impossibility theorem applies to aggregating diverse human preferences into a single coherent objective]] — the impossibility result
- [[RLHF and DPO both fail at preference diversity because they assume a single reward function can capture context-dependent human values]] — why current approaches fail
- [[scalable oversight degrades rapidly as capability gaps grow with debate achieving only 50 percent success at moderate gaps]] — the scalability problem
- [[multipolar failure from competing aligned AI systems may pose greater existential risk than any single misaligned superintelligence]] — the multipolar risk
- [[the alignment tax creates a structural race to the bottom because safety training costs capability and rational competitors skip it]] — the race dynamic

## Moved to other layers (foundations audit 2026-03-07)
Claims below were moved because they are TeleoHumanity interpretations or alignment-domain claims, not domain-independent CI theory:
- → core/teleohumanity/: collective superintelligence as alternative, three paths to SI, alignment dissolves with continuous weaving
- → domains/ai-alignment/: AI alignment is coordination problem, safe before scaling, no research group building CI alignment