I think there's already traditions of radical transparency, that's to say transparent from the proceedings and the drafts onward, not just publishing the conclusions in the other branches. I'm just bringing those ideas into the administration.
The administration mostly practices this less transparent fashion not because we're ideologically against it but because as a simple logistic challenge.
If all the drafts and all the meetings and interviews, journalists need to be managed and transcribed, there are simply too many of these in the administration compared to the parliament and the judicial branches.
Nowadays, we understand the assistive intelligence, the AIs, can help simplify most of the transcribing work. It only requires 10 working days for all the participants to correct any lingering misspellings or adding their own references to expand some acronyms.
It's a veritably lower threshold as compared to the previous days when we have to have dedicated personnel after each meeting in order to take real-time notes.
Technology, I believe lowered the threshold of radical transparency and the trust that we place in the citizens, especially journalists, and especially investigative journalists. I believe it's well worth it.
Previously, if you worked in investigative journalism and you do not have the context, you have to rely on your sources and interviews. Usually, that they tell their side of the story, you never know whether their side of the story is the full side of the story.
Whenever people want to publish the inner workings of the cabinet, three newspapers may tell three very different stories like in different worlds depending on the source they got.
If we publish the entire proceeding in radical transparency, then all the investigative journalists can work out their angle of conversation to bring in the actual focal points of their investigation as well as the societal expectation into the conversation in a way that's productive, right.
Instead of just getting the scoop or spending time back and forth like, "He said that, she said that," we can get to focus on the matter of the report.
I believe data journalism, investigative journalism, these are the workers that I consider my natural allies and most of the radical transparency publications, I think are first read by data and investigative journalist in order to further the public debate.
Yes, definitely. I would add to that because it's not just about the daily press conferences, the toll-free number 1-9-2-2, the very effective contact tracing system that people voluntarily join and store in their telecoms. Not any third-party data processors that reduce the contact tracing from 24 hours to 24 minutes.
These are the individual parts of our tool kits to tell them or do that jurisdictions around the world did look at and adapt to their own needs. That is all very well.
I do think that the fundamental thing is about competence. It's about, instead of a handful of experts understanding epidemiology and pushing dictates for what to do, we maximize the individuals in the society's common person's understanding of epidemiology.
We structure our daily press conferences, much like long-running television shows that serve an educational purpose.
Instead of pushing any mandates from a top-down fashion, we explain the science behind it so that people will understand a little bit can then turn around and make those educational materials into memes or whatever to educate the people who are less informed about epidemiology.
When new variants came, the Alpha, the Delta, the entire societal resilience is built upon people understanding the science of it, and therefore, discovering new social innovations locally in their neighborhood to counter the pandemic in a way that works for their neighborhood.
Otherwise, we'll have pockets of population that follows blindly the top-down regulations and policies without understanding that their vicinity needs different treatment. There will be pockets of infections if we did things that way.
I believe one of the most potent thing is this toll-free number, 1-9-2-2. Anyone can pick up their land line and call toll-free and speak for hours if needed, and ask everything that they fear or they hope that the government can explain to them.
Last year alone, there's more than two million calls and this year, probably more.
My counterparts in other countries sometimes ask me, "Oh, you must use this very advanced voicemail AI analysis, or robotic call center technology."
I'm like, "No, they're staffed by the professional call center people from, not only our largest telecom, but also the CG charity, the largest social sector that also helped in disaster relief like post-earthquake work, as well as getting the BNT vaccine from the Germany.
They're donated those purchase vaccine to the government along with the Taiwan semiconductor and folks come, and so on.
We have this very well-trusted charity, a social sector that people simply placed their trust in more than, maybe their municipality, or even the central government.
We have varied people with a lot of empathy and previous experience working in SARS, in the large earthquake, in floods, and typhoons, and so on, listen with empathy to people's real phone calls. They're all real people.
Our work in assistive intelligence and machine learning serves not to intermediate between people and people, but working behind the scenes so that we can lower the time required for those call center people and supporting charities to locate factual information and dispel the rumors, but the interface is always somebody else with empathy and active listening skills.
Yeah, there are people who worry about specific types of vaccination. There are people who would love to get B and C, but not on AstraZeneca. There are people who would love to get AstraZeneca.
I, myself, got two shots at AZ, but would worry about our home brew. Our homegrown vaccine, the Medigen. There are people who only get Medigen and nothing else.
There's this intense loyalty in vaccine preferences, which is why we develop one of the world's only system where people just tick the vaccines.
They accept and they received the SMS precisely at a point where the vaccines arrived that lowers to their age brackets. We utilize this vaccine preference in a way like a market.
If you are not picky about vaccines, you get vaccinated very quickly. If you are picky about vaccines, you know that there is a fair queue and you know approximately when will be your turn. It's sought through essentially mechanism, design or market design, and it's all open data.
Anyone can see each other's preferences in five-age groups like age this to that, age this to that. In real time, anyone can analyze that data, and then make up their own minds on vaccine preferences.
If we mandate that people need to get vaccinated regardless of type, then all the fears and doubts around specific vaccines will band together and feel conspiracy theory about vaccination itself.
By making the conversation about individual preference and people who prefer not to get vaccinated will simply wait a little bit so that younger people can get vaccinated sooner.
We not only make sure that we can get the vaccines jabs to people's arms as soon as they arrive, but we diffused this whole conspiracy theory because if you don't prefer, well, somebody else prefers it, and we can show through open data exactly how many people prefers that.
It renders the preference into a social object that people can talk about like today's weather, or the stock market price, or something like that, and this pro-social conversation dwarfed the conspiracy theories.
It's about fast, fair, and fun. It requires a lot of preordained configuration in a society, and we don't have the capacity to mutate as fast as the virus do. I think whether it's about countering the epidemic or the infodemic, the principle needs to be simple, because early, simple ideas travels faster than the crisis itself.
If we require very complex setup, then at the end of the day is just a few experts that were able to explain why exactly we take this measure and even fewer people have the capacity to adapt a measure when the situation calls for a different measure.
Sure. Yes, I believe that the process, which, of course, you already read about, the constitutional interpretation, the two referenda, and things like that, I think one of the memories that stands out is the name of the act itself.
We already know how to solve this through legalizing the bylaws, the rights and duties, but not the in-laws, the family to family relationship.
What to call this particular Act? There's this very fierce debate. If you call it union or companion, or wedding, or marriage, or whatever, every word carries a different connotation. The point is to make sure that people can interpret in a way that's comfortable in their local culture.
We've had this fiercest debate internally within the administration on what you call the Act. Finally, we call the Act and I quote, "The Enforcement Act of the Judicial Branch Interpretation 748." This name is completely neutral. It says, "There's a constitutional interpretation, and we're making Act that enforces this interpretation."
Basically, making a neutral ground that can carry the different cultural interpretations. I believe this is a transcultural innovation that maximizes the respect that the cultures can have with each other.
If we choose a wording from any particular culture, it will be sacrificing essentially the perspectives from the other cultures. I think this is one of the search innovations that stood out to me.
Yeah. Even before 2020, we have already been cited as a country most exposed to external disinformation operations. Of course, as mentioned, the attacks largely came from and still coming from the PRC regime in Beijing.
We know their motivations. It's to destabilize our democracy and institutions in order to impose their particular branding of authoritarianism. If we turn authoritarian in response to disinformation operation, well, they won.
Because their point is to show that democracy doesn't work and only authoritarianism works. Whatever counter-measure we take need to deepen not take away the freedom of speech and democracy.
That's very difficult, but I think we did manage to figure something out. One of the ways that we deploy, again, before the pandemic for 2020 is called "notice in public notice," instead of taking away any speech, we add context around it.
For example, during the anti-ELAB protest leading up to our presidential election, there was a trending message that made its round across the Taiwanese social media who said that, "How come protesters and so-called relatives who allegedly paid $20 million to murder the member of the Hong Kong police force?"
That, of course, was wrong, like a gross misinterpretation, but the intention of the campaign was very clear. It's to lessen the influence of the Hong Kong situation on our presidential election. It only gets trending in Taiwan.
