📚 Quinn's Highlights

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Adversarial instead of truth-seeking engagement is baked into so many aspects of our society Summary: Our society often relies on adversarial advocates for decision-making, but this approach doesn't lead to the truth. We need a cooperative effort where people are open to changing their minds and acknowledging different perspectives. This applies to civic organizations, legal systems, political systems, and even neighborhood associations. We tend to punish those who disagree with the established opinion, leading to a lack of pluralism. We should strive for diverse viewpoints and a cooperative search for the truth. Transcript: Speaker 1 There's a thing wrong with our society which is we have even the institutions that work reasonably well in our society are still often built around adversarial advocates in which the Idea is i will argue as passionately as possible for one side you will argue as passionately as possible for the other side we will deploy whatever resources we can rhetoric money etc And somehow we like to think that by i don't know interpolation that will arrive at the truth and that's totally not true right i mean i we know that there are lots of types of decision-making Where that's a disaster where what you need is not these two sides each of which are deliberately undercutting the other as effectively and including viciously as they can but you want Everybody to be willing to change their mind openly publicly to be willing to publicly acknowledge the point that the other person is making and you want to sense that people are cooperatively Working together toward the truth but that's not how most civic organizations work it's not how our legal system works it's not our political system works nowadays maybe there was Some golden age in the past but it did probably not it's not even how neighborhood associations work right i mean there may be some diversity in how homeowners associations work internally Although i regret to say i don't think that's usually true because they're usually very self-selected groups of people who are quite vocal but once they arrive at a decision they're Like good old-fashioned Maoist democratic centralists you know like well we represent the neighborhood and this is our monolithic opinion and if somebody shows up and says well i Live in that neighborhood but i i actually don't agree then they they get piled on and punished and if somebody says i'm an environmentalist but this environmental organization doesn't Speak for me or i belong to this racial or ethnic group but i don't necessarily agree with what the claimed representatives of that group say that group wants they get punished again A lack of pluralism but i think it's not just a lack of diversity it's this notion that the way to get make decisions is for everybody to hammer their stake as firmly into the ground as they Can

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

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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

the depth of social problems is largely derived from the “stickiness” of power. Power is the ultimate positive feedback loop: simply put, people in positions of power use their positions of privilege to stay there.

The Systems Work of Social Change

Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici

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