Let’s do the screen share thing.
It’s OK. It’s more human. It proves that we’re not all exocortexes.
There we go.
Well, yes. Ah, that screen.
Fang, do you have any thoughts about how applicable, or where, it could be applicable in our process? I’m very eager to prototype it.
Raising awareness.
Hello?
No, it’s fine.
Just to follow up on that, very quickly, because when you talk about trade-offs, the interface you just showed has upvotes and downvotes that cancel each other out. The crowdfunding experiments this spring is entirely up-vote only.
It carries no notion of compensation. Are there tangible differences in those mathematics and also in psychology, when you design things in an upvote-downvote kind of way, versus an upvote-only way?
It’s like signal blockers.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
I see. That’s a powerful argument right there. I’d like to show you the real interface of petitioning that we are talking about, because I think that will help massively. That’s something that Fang-Jui can carry on in the conversation afterwards.
This is machine translated, but very quickly, just to give you an idea, for example, there is someone who is Mary X, who we know the SMS number, but we don’t reveal it. They don’t have to be under a real name. They can be a pseudonym.
It’s quite like Ethereum voting in this sense. They can choose a nickname, basically, but that’s consistent over time as an identity. It’s not mapped into a real world identity, only that we know there’s an SMS number behind it.
Then they proposed to amend the provision of our public service leave rules. At the moment of petition, it was at least half a day for each vacation. They wanted to change into by hour, which by the way, takes effect this week. I took an hour off yesterday.
Yes, right. It’s a successful petition. As you can see, there’s a timer that says two months. Within the timer, there has be 5,000 signatures, this check passed, and the response is done. There’s agency response in each and every step.
You can see the supporting argument of each person participating. Of course, nobody has the time to read through the 5,000 people’s commentaries. That used to be Fang-Jui’s largest headache, reading through those 5,000 people’s commentary.
Sometimes, people just copy and paste whatever, and mobilize them to countersign the petition. Sometimes, people just write a lot that has no relationship whatsoever with the petition.
That’s right. Instead of text analysis, we just did crowdsourcing. This is the actual interface now that saves Fang-Jui a lot of time. Basically, we have two columns underneath every petition that people can post their supporting arguments on the left-hand column, and the not exactly counter, but other arguments, on the right-hand column.
What we are now doing is something that is out of the playbook out of Better Reykjavik. I don’t know whether you know the Icelandic experiment from the Better Party. The Better Reykjavik has the same design.
We took a page by not actually showing the bars in a proportional to their number of comments, because that only encourage spam, and nothing good happens. You can see there’s 46 supporting arguments and 11 counterarguments.
Then each one can receive any number of upvotes and downvotes. Of course, there’s a flag button for truly hate speech stuff. Otherwise, we just sort. We discovered very early on, of course, exactly as you mentioned.
Although it takes the troll away, because they cannot really reply to anything. There’s no reply button, so there’s no incentive to attack people. Still, people just casually use downvotes to censor the good arguments.
We changed the rule now, that we take the absolute number of either the upvotes or downvotes. This one, having more downvotes, actually, makes it show on the top.
Like you can cost some credit to downvote something slightly.
Or you can cost some credit to add a supporting argument. It’s the credit pool everybody receive anew every month. Then it’s used basically just to sort the signals, not the substantial deliberation which will happen afterward, according to Fang’s road map.
Why voice credits, instead of voice tokens, or whatever, because credits is more fungible, more square root dividable?
You don’t have an attachment to the name?
Ah, OK, like literally a speech bubble?
Like this one, the speech balloon?
This is very cute. The g0v movement, which I’m a part of, used to have the first version of its logo shaped like this.
OK, wow. It’s an interesting independent invention. Of course, we eventually shifted to this logo, just because everybody types GQV when looking at this logo. [laughs]
That logo is currently unused. Happy to donate that to your purpose.
I think the V here, which is the shape of a vote, really actually carries the idea of quadratic voting also. It’s basically a stamp of approval on what your voice matters like. We can make the dot here proportional, exactly as you visualize.
So this original logo has some uses. Yay for recycling. [laughs]
Yes, like the least-bad tax.
I think, aside from single tax, which is less related, there’s also the idea of the citizen’s dividend? I think that’s also a George idea.
And the secret ballot.
Ah, OK, right. I think all of those are very relevant nowadays, because we’re essentially building a code-based normativity around the same ideas. That is, legal by design, instead of by interpretation.
In George’s time, it would have to have a lot of post-fact interpretations, negotiations, and whatever to make the system that he designed actually work as intended, instead of as people just randomly interpret it to be.
Nowadays, we get to code those algorithms into code. The communication effort, of course, is the most important. That we can find the intuitive interface that makes people get it, so that it becomes the social norm. Then we compile that into code so that...
Instead of fighting the system, fighting the existing reality, you’re building a new model that eventually makes the existing model obsolete... which is a Buckminster Fuller quote that Fang-Jui always uses in her slides.
That’s great. I am happy to donate to your cause, starting with a GQV domain. [laughs] We can see where it goes from that.
That’s awesome. March is parliamentary inquiry period, but I have a way of appearing through telepresence robots, double robotics, holograms, and the sort. I’m happy to virtually be there. There’s also a very quick prototyping system that we work with the g0v movement called vTaiwan.
Basically, every Wednesday, anyone can come up with an idea of saying, "Oh, how about let’s do an experiment this way?" Everybody just tags along. Literally, I think this week’s experiment is the social physics tags from Sandy, from Alex Pentland.
It also is a kind of voice credit, voice token, so to speak, because it only measures the volume of your voice. Although voice is not -- strictly speaking -- quadratic, but if you count the distance, it’s just the proximity.
How loud people are speaking, and how much attention they’re monopolizing, so to speak. We can distribute it more fairly in a physical space. Even if the physical space has its own attenuation parameters, we can change those parameters. It’s almost like speculative...
It’s inverse square, right? [laughs]
Yes, [laughs] and also, I imagine, people who stand in a more strategic position.
