Yeah.

It’s easier if we just invite everybody who is not a troll to the face-to-face conversations. It’s what actually happened historically, but we did entertain with the idea.

We are not saying that just by nature of presenting a statement in the wisest way you’re automatically are identified as a wise person, because it turns out it doesn’t work that way because they could be just reading a statement from a magazine and pasting it or whatever.

Then again, we settled on the much easier to operate, and in reality, actually not at all prohibitive way of just filter out the trolls, the sheer duplicates, and the meaningless statements, and invite anyone who made a contribution at all. Which actually worked pretty well. We do that for ...

The general agreement within and globally to surface the agenda. Then we entertain the idea of inviting the people who contribute the most, as picked by Pol.is.

We identify the ones that are making original contributions, meaning that their raise points that nobody else has raised, and we just invite those people to form a working group. It soon becomes difficult to subjectively judge originality, and so then we move to Pol.is, and we use resonance.

Rather than just setting a threshold, which is what we end up doing. In the very beginning of the vTaiwan design, we entertained with the idea. We were still using foreign technology then, but the basic idea is the same.

Yeah, but to be honest it’s much easier to just filter out the trolls and send an invitation to everybody else.

Or everybody in a cluster at least. Their statements embody the consensus of their groups. We do send invitations.

We send invitations to people who achieve a high resonance in their conversations. Sometimes we just send the invitation to everybody who got into...

Good local time.

Oh. Hi, Martin.

That’s right.

It’s just at the moment, for example, climate change and carbon footprint, and global conflict, and things like that, we don’t yet have an exportable framework for direct action on these things. Not because we are not prepared for those things, it’s just it doesn’t arise naturally in my current ...

It is the thing that binds the admittedly very different focus of economic growth, and social and environmental growth together. That’s the main position I’m speaking about or at, but in a way that could be scaled I guess more deeply and more urgently if needs arise.

The 17 is global partnership and a focus on things as mundane as digital opportunity, wide access to ICT systems, and all the way to strategies and systems to enable cross-sectorial and multi-stakeholder collaboration. It is the most dynamic of the SDGs, and the one that basically enables people to ...

By focusing on SDG 17 almost exclusively in our work, I think the same methodology do have potential to escalate into a more direct conflict prevention or conflict reducing way. In Taiwan, of course...

Everybody kind of agreed that these are important things, but again, this is not framed as, we have to solve it within the next few years otherwise we better send spaceships out, kind of way. It is a more moderate framing of the existential, more planetary issues.

At this point, PDIS, maybe two percent intentional. That’s my situation. Back to the planet existential thing, I think the Sustainable Development Goals actually is a very good example because the SDGs they kind of the non-controversial essence. The parts that none of the country will fight over with.

Once it’s relatively peaceful and self-organizing, I go back and doing things like asking for higher bandwidth live streaming and things like that. What I’m saying is that it’s proportional to how much the existential threat or the organism is feeling that will determine the intentionality, and it is not ...

It’s a purely reactive role. If it goes really existential like the occupy, the first few days that the cops are threatening to go in and make everybody go away and so on, there is a lot of intentionality in the counter design, the counter surrounding of the cops, of ...

Right, exactly. It’s not like a traditional architect who holds in her mind the architectural integrity, or conceptual integrity as we say in computer science. Rather it is integrity of the functioning of the system and is always done in a minimally intrusive way. That’s how I see my role.

If there are any uncaught balls that will threaten the playing field, I just go and catch it, but otherwise, I do nothing. That’s the basic idea.

Yeah, as I said in the first conversation, if there is this trash that everybody is too busy to take out, I take it out. It’s not metaphoric, it’s real. If everybody’s too hungry, I order pizza, and things like that. I also do it in the ideas and narratives ...

Yes, so to go back to the beginning of your paragraph, the 90/10 thing. I see my main role in the intentionality realm as a spellchecker of sorts. [laughs] People do whatever, but it needs to not cancel each other, and it need to be coherent in some way.

Exactly. That’s the idea. The creative process starts now but is infinite in scope.

Right, but in a time...

The wisdom factor, as you said. It’s worth keeping in mind to think long-term more holistically, but it doesn’t prevent us from doing short-term interventions as needed as long as there is a mind toward continuing the conversation not necessarily controlled by the current people who hold the convention is ...

I think there’s nothing fundamentally different or opposite in the ways that we approach things. It’s more of the different way that we frame things.

That’s another dimension that I’m very focused on, is the public co-learning effect of this kind of rippling out. Whereas many other players in the current Taiwan political realm think in a more like, "We need a constitutional reform in the next few years," timeframe, I always think of the ...

By nature of highlighting their statement and sending out invitations for them to join a face-to-face, more deliberative setting and also by making available the methodology and toolkits and so on, that participant has the potential to be empowered and to take this wisdom-oriented thinking and be more inclusive in ...

I think one part of it is that to be inclusive by necessity, for example, say, there is a teenager somewhere who saw Pol.is as kind of game and they voted and contributed one statement.

One of the takeaways of previous conversation is that the scope of time. We talk about seven generations, but also existential threats to even have seven generations down the road, that requires decisive collective action. These two are not antitheses of each other. These two are different zoom-in levels of ...

Yeah, I think that’s definitely...

Yes, I completely agree.

You can measure a lot of proxies, but then it’s proxies, like how transparent, how inclusive, how participatory, and so on.

You have to hold it in your mind to engage in a process with the complete awareness that it can’t be ever attained in its pure form and it’s not even directly measurable. You can’t just look at a pair of friends and say, "Is their sincerity ratio dwindling or ...

The basic intuition is that, to quote Kant, "Even if there has never existed a completely sincere friend, sincerity in friendship is an idea that is still required for friendships to even form." That’s the kind of regulatory idea.

Regulatory idea is a philosophical idea of Immanuel Kant.

They’re like north stars, exactly as you mentioned, which is why it’s not usually appearing in these diagrams that I draw, because a regulatory idea necessarily is...

I think wisdom in my mind is like a regulatory idea, like Immanuel Kant, like reason or critical thinking or critical appreciation or aesthetics. We need to hold that in our minds to even begin to move to make moves. Like sustainable development goals, they’re not to be quantified along ...

And measure and quantify.

Mm-hmm.

That’s the constitutional monarchy idea, and it’s still practiced.

Yes, and then you earn back the expense through tourism, for example, of the monarch.

Not at all.

Coercive power, yes.

Which is why I put trust in the center and have those four pillars as the service of the trust. I think it could flow both ways this way, but that’s because I’m a Taoist rather than a Confucian. [laughs] It’s a different philosophical configuration, as well, is what I’m ...

Basically, having accountability, bastardized in a very top-down way, and then leveraging all these techniques or technologies, but only when convenient. We see this configuration a lot in dictatorship-to-democracy transitions in East Asia, and sometimes it’s a recession.

One can use, for example, transparency and accountability to establish this kind of Mandate of Heaven by saying that a ruler shares all the information with the people, and so on, and use participation as an instrumental means, not a value in itself, and therefore achieve a fake inclusion.