Save chat. What do you think, Martin? Isn’t this an existential trip and a half? [laughs]

You can chat if you want it. [laughs]

I value the connection with you immensely.

OK. I think we’re there. Blessings on the Journey.

All right.

Oh, OK.

Yeah, I recorded it.

Will you send out your link when you get it for this thing, or should I send out...?

OK. I have been sufficiently complexified on that question. [laughs] I should probably wrap up.

[laughs] Right, your big-picture view again.

I go, "But Wikipedia is this entity that just sits here, and Pol.is is something that comes and goes." It doesn’t have the capacity because of its temporariness to build the level of community that could facilitated it in this level of...

I guess part of the problem...I keep thinking of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has these discussion spaces. Wikipedia has this background community that’s handling all this stuff.

It enters into that system so that somebody who comes can go through the quick motions of rating these things and then get the top ones which will educate them quickly about what’s going on with this topic without there being the trolls able to surface visibly. That’s an approach ...

The software is, like, throwing up random statements that have already been made. It is creating a neutral rating space and then showing you the things that are currently highly rated. Then you can put in your two cents.

When you go click on the discussion section, you get, let’s say, four points to consider that you rate. Then it shows you what everybody has rated in order of how many people rated it. You’re going there primarily to get more information and see what other people may be ...

This is another version like I was mentioning to Colin earlier. I can imagine where the discussion space is another version of Pol.is, but in this case, anybody can enter a point to consider. The points to consider are thrown up.

Holopolis? I’ve never heard of it. [laughs]

Holopolis?

There’s a way in which I originally said, "Oh, well, that starts to produce the level of the substance that a regular deliberation has, but if it’s not facilitated, it starts to introduce the bullshit that Pol.is was explicitly designed to get rid of." [laughs]

I was wondering what it would be like in Pol.is to have...In any statement in Pol.is, there is a tag you can poke that will take you to a discussion space about that.

There’s a streamlining oversimplification, but it offers this consensus-extracting power. That bumps into another thing that I suggest in my earlier 10-page thing that we haven’t talked about but wondering if...In Wikipedia, there’s discussion dimension to each page which is not on the front. The front is just the statement, ...

People are responding to that level of detail and complexity with their own version of detail and complexity, that’s an advantage that face-to-face deliberation has from a deliberative quality perspective.

In faith, I’m trying to figure out what’s the difference in the deliberative quality and, to a certain extent, the idea of if you have responsive avatars that are really representative avatars -- you can get facial expressions and all that, emotions and all that -- that dimension of it ...

In the Pol.is, I guess, what the interaction is based on is these restrictively brief statements.

That’s related to but somewhat different from what I’m looking at. I’m extracting meaning from it, but I want to refocus it. There’s...

There’s a funny way in which it mimics face-to-face deliberations. That was a revelation for me. I go, "What is the fundamental difference between Pol.is and face-to-face deliberations?"

Yeah. I’m still trying to understand the difference...One of my big realization, I think I told you, was the fact that when people in Pol.is -- many people, not all people -- mark disagree, they will then submit an item that is their proposal for resolving their disagreement, adding their ...

That’s what Pol.is is particularly skilled at presenting as you can get lots of people...

You just gave your mention of the merger of the numbers approach and the diversity approach in a sense that if you have a way to extract the relevant diversity from a group, the bigger the group is, the more adequate you will have the diversity represented from within that ...

OK, I will check that out. I just realized one of the challenges in diversity-based councils is the...Diversity is infinite. Every entity, every person is unique. Every entity has multiple, infinite dimension. [laughs] Which standard are you going to use? Demographics is a great starting point, but it’s barely...That is ...

I don’t know if you have or have run across -- you’re a more trained theoretician than I am -- a theory about this. I have barely articulated it in my own writings, but it seems a fundamental paradigm shift in participatory, deliberative activities to think that way.

It’s reducing the system to its diversity. I think it’s Ashby’s Law. The solution work that you’re doing must have the diversity in it that exists in the system you’re trying to solve. The focus on diversity and integrating diverse perspectives is fundamentally different from the numbers perspective.

I’ve found, in talking, I can’t remember whether it was you or Shu Yang, that if you have the same votes on the agree or disagree things in Pol.is...

When you’re dealing with diversity -- not demographic diversity, which is what the word means to most people nowadays, it seems -- but the full range of cognitive diversity, experiential diversity, all these different diversities, different perspectives, if your trip is trying to generate wisdom out of diversity, if you ...

If you’re going to have a representative group of people to make a decision, and you’re going to say this is a cross-section of the population, you need to have the right number of black people, the right number of white people, the right number of Asian people.

Public opinion surveys and elections and all these things focus on the number of people. From my theory, that’s a natural focus when you have a competitive scene, where the more soldiers in your army or the more money you have, this makes the difference.

One other thing on my note, my page of questions [laughs] that I had for this. I keep picking from all different places. One of the things that I have found different in my thinking from most of the other democracy thinkers is specifically regarding the issue of a focus ...

I just noticed one...Go ahead, finish your...

It’s an interesting...

It turns out Audrey is relatively fluent as a reader of German.

I think we may have walked as far as I can go. This is three hours. Gee, I can’t even make the next half hour like I did the first time. [laughs]

There’s a thing called Threshold, which is a similar network of wealthy people that have a foundation branch, but mostly are a, "Hey, Joe. Have you looked at this? This is an interesting thing you might be interested in," network. Their center of gravity is progressive. It may or may ...

There’s people, millionaires, billionaires, who choose to create some impact relatively directly. Does anybody come to mind who is like that -- since I’m kind of out-of-the-box, I’m not an easily described innovator -- people who might go, "That’s interesting. Tell me more?"

Are there individuals you know of, individuals of wealth, as they say, rich people, who this kind of thing...You know a lot about my kind of thinking and the kinds of innovations that I focus on at this point.

You can apply for loans from Omidyar, or for grants from Omidyar. Can you?

Really fast. [laughs]

As it is, I have to think twice about going to Seattle.

We can see the...

No, you’re still sharing.

This is an existing show that you’re thinking of riding along, having a version of, a program of, or this is...?