Meta Intelligence as a concept, project and web presence came into being over more than thirty years of intense discussions between Supratik Bose and Richard Melson of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The phrase “meta-intelligence” immediately informs you that you are somehow in the realm of meta-analysis and metadata, words you most likely have encountered.
Meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies. Meta-analysis is possible when multiple studies address the same question, with each study reporting measurements that are expected to have some degree of error. The aim is to use statistical approaches to derive a pooled estimate closest to the unknown common truth based on how this error is perceived.
Metadata is data that provides information about other data but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message (e.g., who sent it) or a photograph (e.g., the date or location taken).
Put simply, Meta Intelligence is always “fossicking” for an overview, asking both “where am I in all this?” and a very deep version of “so what?”
How does the world happen? How do I? Is there a “connective skein?” How do I deal with the riddle that “everything in the world causes everything else?” Are there any “prequels” to the concept of meta-intelligence?
Here’s an example from perhaps the greatest French historian, Jules Michelet (1798-1874) who says:
“Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest….All science [i.e., knowledge] is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather, they all form a single system.”
(quoted in To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1940, page 8)
Meta Intelligence is a quest to make the educational journey from fragments surrounding you towards holism. We avoid labels such as mashup, collage, pastiche, quilt, mosaic, bird’s eye view, the big picture and rather think of Meta Intelligence as a new kind of omnidirectional “overview smarts.”
The next step will be to create an explanatory Meta Intelligence e-book that would explain and explore the website to establish a kind of “overview” creation “meta-field” outside of all “silos.”