Interesting, but how's it work out when people believe in "alternative facts"? That seems to be a pretty big problem in many places.
I think I can find some common ground with people who have different views on corporate taxation if we both go over some data and economics and think about it and consider various tradeoffs. Especially if we chat face to face to avoid any 'keyboard warrior' effects.
I probably can't find much common ground with people that believe that condensed water vapor formed by the passage of airplanes is actually a mind control device from the planet Zargon.
> how's it work out when people believe in "alternative facts"?
People are free to believe what they want but when a platform is overrun with bots spewing this 24/7 (reddit, for example) we are giving a platform to those lies/falsehoods.
IMO that is the issue, we should make it difficult for those lies to spread, but the incentives are not aligned with engagement. If the platform provides measures to disincentivise spam, hate spread with low-effort there will be less of it. Just like spam. And less people tricked because of it.
Man the name really threw me for a minute. Polis is the correct spelling for police in my native Swedish and I got through the first 2 paragraphs wondering what any of this has to do with law enforcement.
Then it dawned on me.
Edit to add: I think the white and blue theme helps. Those are police colours in Sweden...
These are the genre of consensus tools I would like to see used in SM. Just imagine: a system that actually helps people exchange atomic, clear arguments and come to an informed consensus.
The internet could have really been a great tool to bring humanity together, if it was structured in that way for the common good. Instead we get SM where mud-battles and the resulting polarization are part of the perverse business model: engagement drives revenue, and there's no better way to keep people engaged than with a loop of extreme emotions and comments shouting the same shallow arguments at each other all over again without any meaningful progress.
Only imagine how quiet those platforms would become if discussions were actually structured for consensus instead of dissensus. I mean, yeah, a huge win for society - but a big loss of money, distraction and control for Elon, Zuckerberg and their BS billionaire friends.
Jokes aside, this looks interesting. I have my doubts about the grandiosity of the claims re: helping entire "cities, states, or even countries find common ground on complex issues," but I'm somewhat captivated by the idea of using it for local issues in cities or small towns like mine.
I don't understand the utility of this. Maybe it works for things like noise ordinances, but I can't imagine finding common ground with people who want me dead or imprisoned simply for existing.
What are some strategies a platform like this can take against spam or influence bots? Tying real life identities to users would certainly limit that(though identity theft and account selling could still happen), but that adds friction to joining, poses security risks, and many people might feel less comfortable putting their opinions openly online where backlash could impact real life.
I'm also somewhat curious about how "hateful content" is defined... I mean having a serious discussion on policies around children in schools and sport regarding trans issues has been labelled in some circles as hateful content if it doesn't blindly support the most progressive views.
I'm just using this as a specific example. Not saying that there aren't hateful sentiments or people behind comments or positions... only that depending on how such policies are interpreted you can't even debate sensitive issues.
How does it defend against corruption by the folks operating it? I'm especially thinking of biased seed statements, source bias, and burial of important items in irrelevant gublish.
Society is not ready for an AI world: any platform that does not guarantee anonymity will be of limited utility for social discourse in a world lurching towards authoritarianism, and any platform that does guarantee anonymity can no longer reliably distinguish human from ai; not that that should matter when it's ideas that are being debated.
But the bigger issue is the control of money: hierarchical institutions disintermediate workers from the way the fruits of their labor are put to use. Money spent or paid in taxes is aggregated and misused by third parties against the wishes and against the providers of that money. Essentially, your labor is used against you. This is true regardless of where someone is on the political spectrum.
A platform for debate or voting isn't going to resolve this fundamental problem.
Assuming this platform ever get popular, it will succumb to the same problems that we see everyday on social media, botting, shilling, manipulation, fear tactics, celebrity following, you name it, and I am not sure we can get rid of these on a technical level, rather, on culture and education levels.
Also, the graph feature, it seems a bit suspicious, it feels like it will be used to see where the majority of opinions about something then used by candidates to manipulate the public about the XYZ popular opinion, which is affirming our current politics right now, instead of actual leadership that changes the public opinion. It’s similar to those YouTubers who usually start with decent contents only later to change it to title clickbait cringy ones because they are following the audience.
I tried to see a demo after signing up, but that's probably for the other side of things. I was curious how this compares to what I submitted today as others said it's similar to some government stuff
This is the best way to look on this. Furthermore these surveys are susceptible to bias introduced by the varying degrees of participant engagement. One application I could see for such tools is distill some of participant generated proposals that could be rectified in a further surveys or referenda.
Love the idea, discussed doing something similar with a friend around the late 2000s but never did.
Hate to say it, but the concept needs to be gamified and turned into an app. This is the only way you’re gonna get the average citizen today to engage. Need to implement viral loops and gamification to even get peoples’ attention on something like this, much less hold it.
And a shorter video talking about plotting routes through "perspective space": every route is a chain of people with the most continuous chain of values (for e.g., from progressive left to alt right)... what might it be to host an event or conversation with the members of such a trajectory through perspective space? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v-SMbs1reE&list=PLMgSnvCsIgoF...
Soul weight diet plan where P(∆) determines the Kama strength in loss between parameters at distance ∆. Thus ∆=2log|t_2-t_1|+0(1) means system is correlated in hyperbolic metric.
Thirty years ago I was enthusiastic about what we now call liquid democracy. Elders, to whom I spoke that lived through WWII, saw dynamic+direct democracy as extremely dangerous. I now share their opinion.
To have a healthy world, we need to start with democratic engagement on every block, of every district in every city, in all counties of every province, in all nations across every continent of our shared planet. Critically, it must be completely human mediated, even if it is daily effort for most people everywhere. This is how we must spend our "great AI productivity boost".
I am responding to nested comments; this is not meant to diminish the importance of the linked effort.
In essence liquid democracy makes votes a transferable currency bringing it fairly close to what money already is. It would be really hard to prevent existence of an exchange rate between money and vote transfer making that a capitalist dream (until markets themselves gets monopolized).
While I'd hesitate to call the people behind the project out for fraud, they certainly are great at obtaining funding while delivering negative value and then presenting these experiences in a positive light. The linked site promotes their use in Germany's "aufstehen party" which wasn't actually a party but whatever if it sounds better and as I was intimately involved with that experience (being brought in to consult on recovery) it was a disaster that ended that NGO before it really begun. The Pol.is platform was supposed to be the central decision making interface of that distributed movement supported by figures from different leftwing, social democrat and ecological parties, it wasn't just that they failed to scale but they were completely unwilling to deploy on our infra or even open source critical components while maintaining publicly that their system was completely open source. The question of whether to replace it (remember its use was the key innovation of this movement) and if so with what ended up not only splitting the NGO but making one sub-group create a new party that is "neither left nor right wing" and voting with the right-wing AfD in (state) parliaments helping them secure anti-migration majorities.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 49.8 ms ] threadI think I can find some common ground with people who have different views on corporate taxation if we both go over some data and economics and think about it and consider various tradeoffs. Especially if we chat face to face to avoid any 'keyboard warrior' effects.
I probably can't find much common ground with people that believe that condensed water vapor formed by the passage of airplanes is actually a mind control device from the planet Zargon.
People are free to believe what they want but when a platform is overrun with bots spewing this 24/7 (reddit, for example) we are giving a platform to those lies/falsehoods.
IMO that is the issue, we should make it difficult for those lies to spread, but the incentives are not aligned with engagement. If the platform provides measures to disincentivise spam, hate spread with low-effort there will be less of it. Just like spam. And less people tricked because of it.
Then it dawned on me.
Edit to add: I think the white and blue theme helps. Those are police colours in Sweden...
The internet could have really been a great tool to bring humanity together, if it was structured in that way for the common good. Instead we get SM where mud-battles and the resulting polarization are part of the perverse business model: engagement drives revenue, and there's no better way to keep people engaged than with a loop of extreme emotions and comments shouting the same shallow arguments at each other all over again without any meaningful progress.
Only imagine how quiet those platforms would become if discussions were actually structured for consensus instead of dissensus. I mean, yeah, a huge win for society - but a big loss of money, distraction and control for Elon, Zuckerberg and their BS billionaire friends.
Jokes aside, this looks interesting. I have my doubts about the grandiosity of the claims re: helping entire "cities, states, or even countries find common ground on complex issues," but I'm somewhat captivated by the idea of using it for local issues in cities or small towns like mine.
I wonder what algorithms they are talking about? Can't find any papers referenced :(
Looking at the clustering code it looks like they are using kd-trees with knn. Old skool!
- Not having just upvote or downvote, but upvote as funny or insightful (slashdot)
- Not allowing to vote or comment until some karma has been reached (new accounts inflame topics and disappear later, having influenced).
- Invite only so one can block while chain of accounts.
- Not allowing to vote or comment every day or every hour, but randomly (more difficult for bots)
- Automatically downvoting posts with grammatical or low-effort errors.
- Having a way to allow replies only from the account you are answering to (so that bots do not switch places while moving the topic).
- Post history public (on reddit it can be made private, so a bot is posting hate in many communities and one cannot cross-check)
- Some sort of graph of statistics of accounts that comment together.
- Paying a small amount as friction for bots (linked to card, etc.)
I guess with AI there would be even more. These are some from the top of my head.
I'm just using this as a specific example. Not saying that there aren't hateful sentiments or people behind comments or positions... only that depending on how such policies are interpreted you can't even debate sensitive issues.
(Disclaimer: I'm on the board of the org that runs Polis.)
The moderation stuff seems targeted mostly on keeping a lid on trolls and tempers.
But the bigger issue is the control of money: hierarchical institutions disintermediate workers from the way the fruits of their labor are put to use. Money spent or paid in taxes is aggregated and misused by third parties against the wishes and against the providers of that money. Essentially, your labor is used against you. This is true regardless of where someone is on the political spectrum.
A platform for debate or voting isn't going to resolve this fundamental problem.
Also, the graph feature, it seems a bit suspicious, it feels like it will be used to see where the majority of opinions about something then used by candidates to manipulate the public about the XYZ popular opinion, which is affirming our current politics right now, instead of actual leadership that changes the public opinion. It’s similar to those YouTubers who usually start with decent contents only later to change it to title clickbait cringy ones because they are following the audience.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46993774
Hate to say it, but the concept needs to be gamified and turned into an app. This is the only way you’re gonna get the average citizen today to engage. Need to implement viral loops and gamification to even get peoples’ attention on something like this, much less hold it.
I'm working on a Google Maps for human perspectives, that extends polislike vote data: https://patcon.github.io/polislike-human-cartography-prototy...
A presentation on my old prototype, describing my philosophy behind extending the tool: (the first 15 min gives the gist) https://youtube.com/watch?v=sSqo_m4cL2Q&list=PLMgSnvCsIgoFrV...
And a shorter video talking about plotting routes through "perspective space": every route is a chain of people with the most continuous chain of values (for e.g., from progressive left to alt right)... what might it be to host an event or conversation with the members of such a trajectory through perspective space? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v-SMbs1reE&list=PLMgSnvCsIgoF...
To have a healthy world, we need to start with democratic engagement on every block, of every district in every city, in all counties of every province, in all nations across every continent of our shared planet. Critically, it must be completely human mediated, even if it is daily effort for most people everywhere. This is how we must spend our "great AI productivity boost".
I am responding to nested comments; this is not meant to diminish the importance of the linked effort.