This is a three‑tier system, but still, only the professional players get to continue their work during this kind of alternate service, so we’re not rewarding video game players. We’re rewarding professional athletes.

If you qualify for that ‑‑ there’s a few competitions for LoL that qualifies for that ‑‑ if you win the first three places or so, that also qualifies. Then, after that, it was about a national level competitions which still has to have some kind of structure.

The next thing of course is the alliances between the different countries. We’ve set a basic criteria that says it has to be regular, and it has to have at least this many people in its regional and this many people in its national level, and so on.

There are 10 spots with a firm criteria. Of course, if you win an Olympic level competition, that automatically qualifies, but even from a sport like LoL, there is actually no frequent Olympic level competitions.

Everybody knows that’s when all the three lights here goes from yellow, which means it’s in progress, to green, which means it’s resolved. We have resolved this policy case, and it’s one piece of the puzzle, it’s the military service, but there is also the educational aspect and also the ...

This is very important, because then everybody, that use for athletes or the stakeholders, look at our conversation and deliberation records and let us know over the Internet where we have missed, where there’s legal precedent for that, and so on, and so they were contributed, and I quote them ...

Starting from the public hearing, down to the classes, down to the military service, down the national tax breaks, and so on, we have all the ministries and all the decision makers in our internal meetings taken as a transcript ‑‑ was real time transcript ‑‑ and everybody, after editing ...

The other thing that we used during the e‑Sport thing is that we have on our previous website a accountability trail where you can have this QR code that lists the entire decision making process for how exactly this policy was formed.

An e‑Sport athlete being a cultural performer, and which has international competition and so on, shouldn’t really be discriminated against. That was just the basic idea, so we’re not actively promoting in. We’re just saying this is like other sport.

As for the alternative military service, it is true that it’s already the case for Go, for 圍棋 players in Taiwan. They can have alternative military service if they win some international or national competition awards. The same applies for any other sport as well as like symphony conductors and ...

My favorite argument in this conversation is that I think Go (圍棋), the board game, is now a eSport, because most of the competition and training happens online, and also because machines now play better than human, [laughs] so this is mostly for two human beings to enjoy each other’s ...

Right. First, it’s not about computer games. eSport is a sport. It just happens so that the stadium they use is a virtual one, not a physical one, but the point here is the computational sport aspect.

In the Uber survey thousands of people participated, but only around one thousand or so logged in so that we can see their avatars, and they have answered more than nine questions so we can determine their position. It’s about, I would say, about one thousand active players, but about ...

Mm‑hmm. The most high profile of course was the Uber case, but we also use the same for the Airbnb case, for Internet sales of alcoholic beverages, and so on. Just today, Uber announced that they will bind themselves to the consensus that’s made here, and they will change their ...

That’s exactly right.

That’s exactly right. We started this development before the Sunflower, but we were not many people, a hundred or so, but after the Sunflower it was just exploded in interest.

After the Occupy Wellington, the New Zealand people would join, and after the Occupy Wall Street...Every time after an Occupy, people start thinking, "OK. Democracy can take another form," and then these people will join this development.

It is actually a community effort started by some Seattle hackers, but it is open source so everybody can contribute, so I also contributed to its development. It was contributed usually by people who participated in an Occupy or a protest movement before.

This system has a name called Pol.is, P‑O‑L‑.‑I‑S.

People are basically competing to first convince people who think like them, and gradually to convince people who doesn’t think like them, and we only take the supermajority as the agenda.

That’s right. You can change your positions anytime here, and then you can state a more nuanced feeling, because we only take as finding things that you managed to convince everybody. If it’s a disguised or if it’s a non‑authentic feeling, if people don’t share it, it doesn’t have any ...

No. We just ask people to start the sentence here with 我覺得, which is, "I feel that..." and then that’s it. We’re not passively monitoring. We’re actively asking people to write their authentic feelings, and then, this is an open‑ended survey, so people can feel anything.

After you answer a few yes or no questions, you can also type in your own feeling, which then gets voted by other people. What we said before the deliberation was that if by the end of the process we have a set of agreements, more than 80 percent of ...

Yes. The thing here is that you can press consensus and see there’s nevertheless 91 percent of everybody agrees the importance of checking of the driver’s credentials are protecting the passenger, so there can be consensus among disagreements.

The second thing is that in Internet forum it’s very easy for these to politicize, to dominate all the discussion, and these people are silent because they’d shout...

This interface has two very important thing. First, it shows your Facebook and Twitter friends first, so you can see if people having very different idea than you, they are not anonymous enemies. They’re still your friends. It’s just you haven’t talk about this over dinner, so it’s not your ...

[laughs] Yeah, exactly. Then, our software is an open source software. Basically, ask people one yes or no question, and based on their yes or no question, they get clustered. After you answer a question, whether you think insurance is important, whether you think it’s public safety, your avatar moves ...

Even though five people say at least the same thing or they vote the same way, maybe they do it out of different subjective feelings. What we have outsourced before was people’s feelings, for example, around one concrete issue like you own a private car and you don’t have a ...

Yes, of course. There are these very important principle, in the idea that we use the Internet to deliberate people’s feelings, not their suggestions, not their decisions. Because if you jump into suggestions, people will not reveal the feeling they have behind the suggestion.

Yes.

Basically, listening, as the key to deliberation, does not scale. Meaning with more people it actually loose it’s magic. We use ICT, information communication technology, to scale the experience of listening. That’s our main contribution.

The problem with deliberation is two. First, it’s messy. Meaning that every time you run it there’s no established way to get high quality deliberation. Second, it doesn’t scale. Meaning, if it’s 20 people, maybe you can get deliberation. If it’s 200 people, it’s impossible. If it’s 2,000 people, people ...

The thing with the deliberation is that it’s magical, because when people enter into a high quality deliberation, everybody walks out changed. Then people respect each other and they will become immune to the rumors, to the propaganda, after deliberation.

Yeah.

It is still running. It was like an angel investment by a lot of Taiwan companies, and then we continued part of our operation in Mainland China and part of it in Taiwan. It’s still running (benqguru.com), but I’m no longer in charge of it.

That’s correct.

For adults the IQ test only gets to 160, above which the WAIS Test cannot reliably test. I am 160 or more but I don’t really know how much more. I’ve tested twice and there’s no way to know.

My height is 180 cm. It often gets confused.

That’s just a rumor.

15.

Yeah, I dropped out of junior high school when I was 14.

In the world.

Right now, I’m the youngest, at 35.

At the moment, but not historically. There was a Minister of Youth Affairs, 鄭麗君. When she went into the Cabinet a few years ago, she was 34.

Go ahead.

Oh, you asked them to?

Yeah, I don’t know whether it will be simultaneous, or...

Just Audrey.

Yeah, of course.

Thank you for interviewing.