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An important reason why, despite the rise of asynchronous communication via services like [Slack](https://slack.com/), [Teams](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software) and [Trello](https://trello.com/), synchronous meetings remain so prevalent is that asynchronous dialogs often suffer from the same lack of thoughtful time and attention management that are necessary to make synchronous meetings successful. Approaches like Polis, Remesh, All Our Ideas and their increasingly sophisticated LLM-based extensions promise to significantly improve this, making it increasingly possible to have respectful, inclusive and informative asynchronous conversations that include many more stakeholders.
Plurality
E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and ⿻ Community
The people with the most accurate models of others tend to have diverse social networks
Summary:
To correct for this handicap, we need to listen to the oppressed in the population.
This includes laborers, students, and others who are usually not given a political voice. By expanding our social networks to include more diverse perspectives, policymakers can make better decisions based on a deeper understanding of societal trends and people's desires.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
But it sounds like this gives us a really clear pointer on how to correct for this handicap. And that we really ought to be like, perhaps when it comes time to make decisions on behalf of everyone, we should really be listening to whomever the oppressed are in that population. We should be really paying attention, for example, to laborers and students and people that are ordinarily not historically, not given a lot of political voice. And what you're saying, yeah, it's in other words, what we need to do is broader our social networks include in our social networks, those people who are typically not there. So if the policymakers who are making these important decisions should know as many different people as possible. And we show in related studies that people who have most diverse social circles are also best able to predict societal trends and to understand how the overall population lives and What people want.
Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-Making
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
Perspectives on Organizational Strategy & Coordination: Optimizing for Few Coherent Goals v.s. Many Incoherent Goals
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I think one of the things where the corporate world is actually much better at this than the academic world or the educational world, because their goal is profit. So it's very clear. It's much harder to say what the goal of an educational institution is. It feels like it should be obvious, but within the general goal of like we want to produce successful, well-rounded people, there's a lot of disagreement about what the goals are. And so shaping the institutional incentives around those goals becomes extremely difficult, because not only do we have to worry about perverse incentives, but we have to worry about Vigorous disagreement about the kinds of things that are valued in the first place. And I think exactly what you're talking about, T, is something that if you went to a bunch of university administrators, let's say, or medical school administrators or doctors, and You said, what is the point to what you're doing? Is it to produce wise, well-rounded people? Is it to minimize costs to insurance companies? Is it to increase donor contributions? What is it? And there are all these competing goals. And so there's this constant infighting about among different people who have different versions of what the best version of their institution is, and it's so difficult to articulate What that is.
Speaker 2
I wonder if we're in different sides of this, because are you like worried about the hardness of it? It sounds like you think it's a problem that it's hard to come to agreement and articulate a goal, where I actually prefer the university that disagrees, has many incuit and plural goals, And worry that when it articulates an outcome clearly and starts orienting around that outcome, that's when it starts shedding a lot of what was good about the kind of pluralistic more. So let me just give you this is like from my life, right? So a university I've been employed at has started moving toward orienting everything around student success, where student success is defined as graduation rate, graduation speed, Salary after graduation. When you define that outcome, it becomes really easy to target, and the people that are targeting it, as you say, the people that target it well tend to rise, people that are willing to Go all in on targeting that stuff instead of caring about all the other weird shit that education might be for, tend to have better recordable outcomes and tend to rise in the university Structure. So I actually am happier for something as complicated with education, in which different groups have different conceptions of values about what they're doing, and we don't actually Try to settle it, and we don't hold them all to a high articulability constraint, because I think the business school and the CS department have more easily articulable outcomes than The creative writing department, art history department. A lot of the stuff that I'm writing right now is about like this defense of the inarticulable.
Speaker 1
It's a hard question to answer because I think that there are multiple levels of organization going on here. There's like a top administrator level, because these institutions tend to be pretty hierarchical. I think at the top of the hierarchy, there has to be some sort of reasonably well-defined goal, even if it doesn't specify what every individual component of the organization or institution Would do it. And I think that that trickles down to those levels though, and creates incentives. Regardless of whether or not it's a good thing, I think there has to be some sort of coherence at the very top level, even if it doesn't dictate what each individual component is doing.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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