[laughs] Take care, Audrey. Bye-bye.

I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. If anyone is watching, and is interested in being involved, we’re working on this in Taiwan. The movement’s called Radical Exchange, and you can find me @glenweyl on Twitter. We can be in contact.

Thanks. That sounds great. We’ll follow up, maybe by email, and find the best way to coordinate collaboration.

Yes. Just let us know, and we’ll connect you to people who would be interested in being engaged.

We have hundreds of people who are organized around these ideas. Probably thousands, in the Ethereum community and different communities. We’d be happy to find people to collaborate with you, if you need support in trying to build a prototype.

I think that’s a great...Yeah. I would like to do something like that with QV. If you guys have relevant developers, and you can do it on your own, that would be great. We’re happy to consult. Also, there’s now a whole movement.

Yes, that’s true as well.

Yeah, sort of, yeah. It has some similarities. Except, of course, it privileges people who happen to be able to shout loud.

It’s a little bit like the clapping thing you were saying. Whichever side shouted louder in total, based on what you could hear, would win the vote.

It’s very interesting what you say, because actually, one inspiration for us calling it voice credits is the physical voice. In ancient Sparta, the way that they used to do the vote, was to try to incorporate intensity of preference, they allowed people to shout in favor or shout against.

Oh, cool, from Sandy Pentland.

We’d love to have you participating in it, and to find any place where you can experiment and collaborate with us on experimenting with these things. I think that would be very exciting for all of us.

That sounds great. I hope you can also participate. We’re going to have a conference in Detroit in March. We’ll be in touch with you about that.

We want things that are not just experiments, but experiments that ordinary people can feel, can get a sense for, and can come to incorporate into their notions of what’s fair.

We have dozens of clubs all around the world that are forming around these ideas. We’re working with entrepreneurs to experiment with them. We’re talking to folks like you, who can try experimenting with them in participatory democracy.

If they do, do that, then anything that the state does will have to follow that. Otherwise, people will be upset. That’s why, rather than taking the usual economist approach of, "We just talk to the central bank. We just talk to the IMF," instead, what we’re trying to do ...

We believe that ultimately, these ideas will be successful if and only if they are able to become part of people’s widespread notion of legitimacy. If they don’t do that, then they’re imposed by a state, and they’ll be rejected.

That’s the most important thing, is that there’s a notion of social legitimacy around the ideas. That’s the reason why what we’re trying to do with this ideas is not just to go to government bureaucrats, but very much like the approach you’re taking, of trying to be open, trying ...

The secret ballot was introduced into the United States by Henry George.

And the secret ballot.

Exactly. The book is very connected to these ideas of Henry George. Taiwan, Scandinavia, and Singapore are the countries that have been most influenced by those ideas. There’s a natural affinity, I think.

There are many elements of policy in Taiwan which actually come from the ideas of Henry George.

Most of his ideas were based on the work of another economist named Henry George. Henry George has a very deep relationship to Taiwan. I bet most people in Taiwan don’t know about it. George inspired the ideas of Sun Yat-sen almost as much as Karl Marx inspired the ideas ...

Another very interesting resonance that I wanted to mention is that many of these ideas in the book came from someone named William Vickrey. William Vickrey was a famous economist who won the Nobel Prize.

Exactly.

Exactly, but for us, that’s good. GQV, government by quadratic voting. You should revise the original one, but for a different purpose.

Yes, exactly. That’s exactly what ours looks like, too.

Yes, except it has it going to the right-hand side, so it looks a little bit like a Q. That’s quadratic, you know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly.

No. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it credits. I would just call it voice. You can just think of it about a unit. In fact, in the book, we used to denote the currency marker, rather than a dollar sign, we use a voice bubble.

No, it’s just a different word for the same thing.

Exactly. That’s why we call them voice credits, is we think voting is a voice argument, or a sort of voice. All these things are sorts of voice. We’d like to have a token that can represent a currency for that voice, rather than just a currency for buying things.

Exactly.

I think that’s another potentially interesting thing. In principle, you could even unify the two systems together, and say that both the signatures of the petitions and the up and down votes for the arguments could be part of a unified system.

That’s interesting. I think this is another area where something like quadratic voting could be interesting, because it could make it costly to just censor. On the other hand, it could allow you to flag borderline hate speech. You know what I mean? That you don’t have time to actually ...

Do you have some text analysis that can help you process that?

So, they succeeded?

In some politics, for example -- this doesn’t happen, I don’t think, in the Taiwanese system -- in the United States, there’s often something that happens where a politician that’s very not popular will do well, not because they’re popular, but just because people are afraid of the other alternative. ...

Exactly.

It also can be a little bit more complicated for people. Without downvotes, if you have things that are genuinely harmful, for example, a petition that might be hate speech, or directed, targeted against some group in the population -- it’s actually quite important that you allow downvotes on that ...

Absolutely. There’s complicated trade-offs between those. On the one hand, if you have downvotes, you have the possibility of censorship. That may not be desirable. I think that that’s a problem.

They didn’t realize that they cared so much more about this thing than the other thing until they had to actually make the trade-off between them.

That’s also true. That’s a very good point, which is that actually, one thing that we found when we used this survey with people, is that because they have a constraint, and they have to make these trade-offs, we often get comments from people that they learned a lot about ...

They created a set of incentives that created a two-party system, in spite of themselves. Once you have plurality vote, one first-past-the-post, it creates a two-party system. I think that some of these incentives can filter back into the way that the politics is organized.

I do think that the voting mechanism can help create an environment where the incentives are aligned with that. It can actually be pretty powerful, because if you think about it, the founders of the American Republic, they didn’t want a two-party system.

The cost of the votes goes up the more votes that you get, in terms of the units of the credits that I was just showing. I don’t think that the voting mechanism itself can solve all these problems. Of course, education is hugely important and so forth.

That creates an incentive for people to talk to more diverse sets of people, rather than just the people who they could have a chance to get to truly agree with them. You see what I mean?

Unlike in much standard voting, if you take somebody who you really disagree with, and you cause them to disagree a little bit less, even if you don’t completely change their mind, that still makes a difference in political outcomes.

What I was going to say is the voting mechanism itself can help shape the incentives, people out to get information, under Quadratic Voting, having very extreme opinions is very expensive to do. Having more moderate opinions is cheaper.

Sorry, it shut down. I don’t know what happened.