What is it? Synanym. It’s spelled S-Y-N-A-N-Y-M. It was years ago, I talked to the guy who started it before he put it into private use. Part of its logic was it had groups of 10 people who were doing proposals and then reading each other’s proposals, and then revising ...

You have to go soon, I know, too, but I remember there’s another methodology called...

There’s...You have to go soon.

As the consensus gets stronger and stronger or more solid, it’s like 80 percent of both sides like it and stays there, 100 people vote, 1,000 people vote, it’s still the same. Does it go 80, 70, 60, 100, bla, bla, bla, it dances back and forth? I don’t know.

I was wondering if a consensus comment shows up, if you track the consensus comment over time, does it drift in and out of consensus? I have no idea, but it just occurred to me that would be possible.

I was thinking that the people who gave comments later would be disadvantaged. They’re trying to counter that with part of their algorithm.

They’ve been thinking about these different dimensions and trying to weave them into the algorithm?

Is the system random, or is it pushing up comments that haven’t been voted on so much? What decides which comment I’m going to see in order to vote on it?

The system says, "OK. Here’s a comment for you to vote on. Here’s a comment for you to vote on." You don’t see all the comments. You just see the one in front of you the system gives you.

That raises two other issues I had about pol.is, questions I had. What decides what the person who’s going to say agree or disagree sees? Did they have the list of comments and they pick one and they say, "I want to agree or disagree with this" or do they ...

It’s very much in a deliberative conversation people are individually saying their piece in an effort to address what other people are saying, that is, in fact, a deliberative conversation.

[laughs]

Right, right, but they’re saying that, when somebody sees a comment, they can disagree with it and they tend to. There’s some people who will disagree with it and then submit a comment that handles their disagreement.

That can happen in a subsequent discussion. That’s part of what the saving grace of pol.is in the context of vTaiwan is that there’s all this discussion before and after the pol.is exercise happens. The pol.is just helps focus things.

What happens in pol.is is the best things that somebody comes in the room with get picked for their consensus value. There’s nothing to redesign any of those things so that they’re even better than they were before.

In any kind of conversation, interaction, discussion, deliberation, is what you come up with at the end as a group better than anything anybody came into the group with?

Yeah, one of the definitions I’ve had for collective intelligence, or standards I’ve had for collective intelligence, which doesn’t fit the pol.is experience as it’s currently organized is that what comes out of it is something that no one in the room came in with, and that is better than ...

You think that that’s part of what’s they’re planning on anyways, somewhere in there is having people working together figure out a way to...

That’s my suggestion to that.

It’s a trade-off thing rather than let’s figure it out and make it better. In the system where you’re planning to put pros and cons, that’s fine but I would say, "Have a place for concerns and things to address those concerns." [laughs] That’s my suggestion.

The way we think of pros and cons comes out of the adversarial debate system. I want to highlight the fact that concerns is an example of something that is not part of debate logic. A concern is an invitation to figure out how to deal with a concern, whereas ...

"You want to work on this issue? Here’s a lot of stuff to work with." Is that where you...

What would it be like to have a discussion page, a discussion dimension of each item? When you put an item in, not only do people vote yes or no, but there’s also a whole discussion that can unfold on it. People might read the discussion before they vote their ...

I can’t even envision what that would be. One of the other questions was what would it be like to have a comment section attached to every item that shows up in pol.is, like Wikipedia? Each Wikipedia page has a discussion section attached to it, automatically, even if nobody’s done ...

I was trying to say let’s try and privilege ideas that are actually wiser than other ideas. We can make a game. It’s a serious game, but it’s still a game. You are in competition. It’s more like Olympics. I haven’t thought of framing it as a deliberative Olympics, but ...

B-R-I-G-A-D-E. It’s a military term for a level of military organization. In the political world, it’s like you’re organizing your brigade to fight in the political world for your favorite idea.

There’s a billionaire in the US who’s created a thing called Brigade, which is a way for people to talk about issues and organize to advocate them. I was thinking of this as a game that is attached to the Brigade citizenship software. Ideas which come out as winning ideas ...

Then your solution is posted in the larger field of participants in the gaming community. Other people can give you points for how good your solution is and all that.

The more different you are and the greater level of agreement you come to, both of those give you points. You’ll get 10,000 points if your team is the most diverse that the algorithm can possibly design and you come up with 100 percent agreement.

They share their concerns about each other’s statements, and then their job is to collectively try and handle those concerns and come up with an agreement that covers all their concerns. Of course, the more different they are the more difficult that is.

There’s a way I designed it. I have a feeling there’s a pol.is version of this that would be even simpler than what I’m thinking of. In my design, you have 10 people on a team, and they’re all different. They each write a little statement of how they would ...

The algorithm of the game helps you decide how diverse a team do you want to be a member of. Do you want to be a member of a team that basically believes like you do? Or, would you like to be a member of a team that’s really different? ...

There’s a "Using Concerns" section on the eighth page that I talk about the different things that could be done with pol.is and about an online game. Talk about designing for fun. It’s a mixture of competition and cooperation. You take an issue and you get to pick the issue ...

Did you see that 10-page thing that I sent to Audrey before the first conversation?

If you could talk to those people and say, "What are your concerns?" and have teams of people who work specifically trying to figure out how to address those concerns, you could increase the percentage of agreement around that item and make it more wise. That’s part of how I ...

When I look at pol.is, my instant thing with pol.is is here’s the agreements, here’s the disagreements. You end up with something that is 90 percent of the people on both sides of the two major disagreement camps like this item, but there’s still some people who have concerns about ...

Part of my theory of shared wisdom is the better you do that job of trying to take into account differences and disturbances, the more ground you’re going to cover and the wiser your decision’s going to be. You can’t necessarily, in all circumstances, take that kind of time. Ideas ...

The whole idea of concerns, when you have a concern, it means there’s something you’re not taking into account, or some of the group’s not taking something into an account if a member of the group has a concern. Do you take the time to try to take that into ...

What I’m used to, in terms of consensus, is largely based on concerns. "Here’s my proposal," and people go, "Oh, yeah. Let’s do that." Then the facilitator goes, "Does anybody have any concerns about that?" It’s related to the rough consensus idea, which has a whole categorizing of what kind ...

There’s the person who has a brilliant idea that nobody else thought of, that happens to cover more ground than anything anybody on any of the sides thought of and is simple enough to recognize that fact. That could surface in a pol.is exercise, and that’s a more wise, deeper ...

One is a very shallow consensus that avoids the kinds of things that cause people to be conflicted, "Everybody should have a right to breathe." Of course everybody’s going to say that. Who’s going to say you don’t have a right to breathe? That’s a shallow consensus.

One of the things I’ve concluded, without having enough evidence to really conclude it, is that there’s two kinds of consensus that pol.is facilitates. If I knew Chinese, I could evaluate this better, because I could look at some of the actual results.

I’ve got that you’re making clusters of groups of shared belief, and then you’re looking for, among these diverse communities of shared belief, what do they all agree on. That’s a brilliant shift. I love that. I don’t know it’d maybe become too complex to have shades of agreement. How ...

One of my questions was what would happen if you had a -5 to +5 scale that you voted on? What are the things that would be good about that and what are the things that would be problematic about that? I don’t know how to think at that level.

There’s no interaction, people talking together, in pol.is itself. You have people talking together before and after pol.is, but pol.is itself, you don’t have any back and forth nuance, "Let me take into consideration what you’re thinking." You just have, "Do I agree or disagree with this?" Out of that, ...

Yeah, it’s a low form of participation. It’s a low form of collective intelligence. Part of what’s so amazing about pol.is is it is generating wisdom out of voting.

Most of the kinds that you’ve named have, at their center, voting. If you’re a liquid democracy, you get to delegate your vote to somebody else. If you’re a direct democracy, you get to vote on every policy that’s being made. For me, compared to deliberation, voting has a very ...

What you’re doing is definitely that, but I still have my roots in this other frame of reference. Because diversity is a resource for better decisions, I’m interested in how those two frames of reference, which are very different, fit together.

Now, I’m extending that. One of the definitions of democracy is that the people who are affected by a decision participate in making it. That’s much more of a stakeholder perspective, so I’m now really interested in what’s happening in the world of stakeholder stuff.

It’s in the constitution, "We the people of the United States." That’s a meme that is part of our culture. I have been thinking "we the people" is behaving stupidly, at best, if not insanely right now. How could you help "we the people" collectively be wise? That’s been my ...