📚 Quinn's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .

Pol.is: An Example of Tools for Facilitating Non-Adverserial Debate at Scale Summary: A twitter-like system in Taiwan guides conversations towards consensual outcomes by using k-means clustering. It's a simple proof of concept for fact checking and has been effective in large-scale conversations. The science of plurality can advance to help navigate complexity in diverse opinions. Transcript: Speaker 2 Pol.is i don't know if you guys are familiar with that but it's a system used in Taiwan it's a twitter like format but it deliberately guides conversations towards consensual or partially Consensual outcomes while highlighting the differences that exist in the conversations in a non-judgmental way and it's just a wonderful system and at the same time it's like the Most simplistic proof of concept of the general direction it uses k-means clustering of stated opinions it doesn't use any natural language processing it's like the bargain basement Version of what it's trying to achieve but it still has been transformatively effective for these types of conversations at scale in Taiwan and is being adopted if it survives by the Twitter bird watch folks as the foundations of what they're trying to do for fact checking so i do believe that there is a science here that can advance dramatically i think that we have Not chosen to apply ourselves to it because we've been seduced by oh we're going to do the unbiased algorithm that's going to predict the truth the right way rather than saying no people Are diverse you have a lot of different opinions how do we actually help people navigate that complexity so i really am hopeful that this science what i would call plurality really can Advance and and help us do these things much better and again i'll put in the plug if you're a researcher interested in these things we're trying to build an academic community that really Wants to work on them right to me at when at pluralitynetwork.org

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Balancing Intellectual Exploration and Action • There is an anti-pattern in certain podcasts that overemphasizes intellect and underemphasizes action. • Consuming knowledge from brilliant people can be stimulating, but it may lead to overthinking and under-practicing. • It is important to balance intellectual comprehension with taking action, initiating projects, and practicing. • Encouraging agency, initiative, entrepreneurship, and proactive energy is crucial. Transcript: Speaker 1 One piece of the puzzle, I think, is that there's an anti-pattern of podcasts, especially in the game, B space and related sort of sense making intellectual philosophical spaces, Which is I'm concerned about an overdoing the intellect and an underdoing the action. You know, there's all of the people that you interview on your show. They're brilliant people. You know, and it's like, every time I can get a new episode of my favorite podcast and listen to this person and be like, wow, they're so smart. And it's really stimulating to listen to these smart people that can communicate really clearly. And the concern that I have is that people get into a habit of just consuming knowledge, just listening to more and more different people and assembling this sort of like pristine map Of how they think reality works. And maybe they start a little bit to think about how they might initiate some kind of community or some project or something that they're interested in, but still they do this thing of Like way over engineering and overthinking it and under practicing, under experimenting. And so my energy is to try and interfere with that tendency and push people more towards their agency, more towards their initiative, their entrepreneurship, their get up and do it Kind of energy.

EP51 Richard Bartlett on Self-Organizing Collaboration

The Jim Rutt Show

The Tension Between Organized Behavior at Scale and Individual Needs Summary: Large-scale organizations aim for legibility and coherence, but this may lead to a lack of diversity and individual needs. The educational system's emphasis on GPA overlooks other important skills and qualities. Transcript: Speaker 2 One of the most influential ideas for me recently has been from James South's book Seeing Like a State. And Scott has this idea that like what large-hill organizations wants its legibility and legibility is a kind of clear coherence that's aggregatable to a kind of higher level view. So a simple version might be like look if you're a CEO you can't have every department have its own obscure little value system. You need a single collective value system or something close to it so you can get production and profit measures and aggregate them in what Scott says is bring the whole organization Into view. So one way to put my worry is that what would be good for human life is an incredible diversity of bottlenecks which work on different often non-metrified systems. If Scott is right large-scale institutions will tend towards is a kind of monolithic measurement system that moves towards let's have a small number of bottlenecks and let's have A unified measure. And so like the heart of my worry is that organized behavior at scale is inevitably in tension with what a diverse population of individuals needs. And that's just an unfixable problem. Let me just give one quick example. In the educational system the dominant measure is GPA. You can add other like I can write in my notes all kinds of other shit about what students are good at. That barely matters because that's not aggregatable. When a law school admissions officer is doing their spreadsheet to do the first main cutoff nothing in my weird little notes is going to make it into that first level cutoff. The big moving forces just look at GPA.

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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