# Group-based and individual-based knowledge seems to be different The extreme version of individual knowledge is something that only one person can do or knows. <[[What are the conditions for something to be considered part of human knowledge?]]> This ‘individual knowledge’ could either be completely isolated to the individual in the sense that it doesn’t produce anything that can be detected by other people — enlightenment falls into this category. It could also be detectable — say an incredibly unique skill — yet unreplicable or explainable. Individual knowledge isn’t quite [[Tacit Knowledge]] because tacit knowledge can be shared among groups through communities of practice. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that’s hard to make legible, so it’s *hard* for it to become group knowledge, but could be group or individual knowledge. The extreme version of group knowledge is classic [[Wisdom of Crowds]] or [[I, Pencil]] stuff — emergent behavior where you could say that a group (civilization, institution, etc.) “knows something” but no individual in that group knows it. Even for things that both individuals and groups know, we mean “know” in a different sense. I would argue that humanity knows how to calculate ballistic trajectories. I as an individual also know how to calculate ballistic trajectories. But what is entailed by each of them is different. In order for a group to know something, it’s clearly not sufficient for a single individual to know a thing. (I would argue that the answer to [[What are the conditions for something to be considered part of human knowledge?]] from a group knowledge level is no.) However, it’s also unnecessary for every individual in a group to know something in order for the group to know something. I’m tempted to say that for a group to know something, it needs to be *theoretically possible* for any individual in the group to gain the knowledge. But that doesn’t account for emergent group knowledge. Perhaps *all* group knowledge is an emergent phenomenon that isn’t causally connected to any individual’s knowledge, even on the surface. [[Emergent behavior happens when a system has properties that none of its subsystems have]]. One way to look at the scientific method as a specific mechanism by which individual knowledge becomes group knowledge. This is perhaps a reframing of the thesis of [[strevensKnowledgeMachineHow2020]] You can both have individual knowledge that isn’t possessed by the group, and group knowledge that isn’t possessed by an individual. One could perhaps imagine a [[2x2s]] with “ease of transfer” on one axis and “individual vs group” on another axis. ### Related * [[Individuals vs Collectives]] * [[Catherine Olsson conversation August 7 2021]] * [[Tacit knowledge feels opposed to Aristotelian legibility]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Group-based+and+individual-based+knowledge+seems+to+be+different) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Group-based+and+individual-based+knowledge+seems+to+be+different)