Plurality and Polis Study Group

Talking about Plurality is too abstract, so I'll start with a more familiar theme.

We will delve into the specific technical component of Plurality, Polis, at the end (because we may run out of time if we start here).

Occurrence of hierarchical organization and changes due to technology

I'll summarize again what I've written several times.

https://gyazo.com/8ee1bf4b0b2ea910dfee7e89aa333290

There is a limit to the number of people one can communicate with.

If you try to communicate in a group of 100 people, if you speak one, you have to listen to 99 others.

As the size of the organization grows, it becomes harder and harder to communicate like a simple one-on-one conversation.

https://gyazo.com/c809ecc731b9a7b5441b363bbdd4e755

That's where the organizational hierarchy came in.

Create a group responsible for an area.

One person in the group shall be the representative of that group

Communicate only with that person.

This solved the "it's hard to communicate with everyone in the organization" problem.

But another problem arose.

By lengthening the chain of message games:.

Increased frequency of information being hidden or distorted during transmission

Increases the time it takes to gather the necessary information.

These are now recognized as major organizational problems

https://gyazo.com/9cfcddde776b9bf6a6b7e4798eaff276

The development of technology for reproduction and transmission of information has solved the problem first in one direction only.

Direction for communicating the president's thoughts to employees

President writes thoughts on groupware

As of 2023, this is often done in the form of Zoom + recording

But since this is a replication and transmission technique, it does not solve the problem of information transmission in the reverse direction

If 1,000 employees send a video message to the president for 10 minutes each, it would take the president 7 days x 24 hours to watch it.

Totally unrealistic.

This issue also arises with respect to a single employee.

https://gyazo.com/bce5b25b3d888673b421ade41f9c5716

A hierarchical organization would have been able to limit the amount of information to be processed by focusing only on the smaller organizations to which they belonged.

With a company-wide information sharing system, the total amount of information shared from all departments would be so large that it would be impossible to see it all

Individuals filter appropriately.

I guess I'll have to see if I get a menschon.

I guess I'll have to see what's within the same location.

I guess I don't need to look at the faraway places.

That makes it difficult to understand the company-wide situation.

Because most people try to look only at "information in departments close to their own".

Once information is gathered around the president, it is digested at a reasonable cost and then disseminated to all employees.

https://gyazo.com/01f286ba41e02b8bda44af91ea938882

The problem so far has arisen because the transmission and reproduction of information has "increased the amount of information

The solution will come when technologies to "reduce the amount of information" are created.

Broad Listening, where millions of people can hear the essence extracted from the distribution of opinions of their peers

The opinions of many people can be digested by a machine to obtain a reduced amount of

Conversely, for the same cognitive cost, you get to hear more people's opinions

Digital technology is enhancing "the ability to understand what many other people are doing.

This technology not only "allows the CEO to better understand the organization," but also allows each and every employee "to better understand the organization for everyone.

The role of maintaining a hierarchical network to convey information out of the president's business is no longer needed.

Role of the "hub in the organization's information network

Differences in knowledge, experience, and other attributes of each individual, or "diversity," rather than hierarchical roles, will become more important.

Decentralized and autonomous decision making, except for decisions that really need to be made by the president, will allow him to act more quickly.

This technology eliminates most of the reasons why hierarchical organization was needed

So the organizational structure changes.

Of course there are organizations that don't want to change.

It means fewer constraints for organizations that are trying to change.

So far, I have explained the topic in the image of a private company as a familiar topic.

Bandwidth too narrow

That's due to historical circumstances that once there was no digest technology available to handle the collection.

Digital technology should allow us to gather people's thoughts more efficiently.

In the years to come, they will merge and create something better.

Software assists in better understanding what members are thinking."

I'm sure there are many organizations among Cybozu's customers that would love to have this technology.

The needs are not verbalized now, and only when they are shown in a form will they say, "Oh yes, this is what I wanted.

vTaiwan is used for decision-making by the Taiwanese government because of Audrey Tang's strong top-down leadership.

In Japan, I don't see it being used for government decision making anytime soon.

Private companies with forward-thinking presidents and local governments with forward-thinking chief executives will move first.

I think a few pilot cases will be created and gradually spread out.

It is beneficial to expand the "experience of using this kind of thing" at the grassroots.

question

The need for that team to be static is reduced.

In particular, it reduces the need for a structure where "there is a fixed team of members, and one person on that team is the point of contact for communication with the rest of the team."

Plurality

What happens when the powers that be monopolize Broad Listening's "ability to understand what a lot of people are doing"?

There is a strong sense of urgency about this in the Chinese-speaking world.

Concerned that the government will use the "power of digital technology to understand what a lot of people are doing" for [surveillance

"Social Credit System" is a project launched by China's State Council in June 2014 under the banner of improving social norms. The target year is 2020, when 1.4 billion citizens will have their "social credit" scores in place....

Is it fake news to say there is an event that the government says there is not?

Social credibility will be disadvantaged if it is lowered → Cannot speak against the government's wishes

Surveillance camera to [image recognition

Chinese media reports that in 2018... Popular singer... Suspects who were wanted in various cases and whose whereabouts were tracked down by the authorities were detained one after another at various venues on a national tour. A total of about 60 people were detained nationwide after AI matched the faces of the suspects captured by surveillance cameras installed at the venues with the police's own mug shot data.

This is what happens when digital technology allows the government to know "who is where".

Implicitly assumes that the "culprit" is a "bad person" who is "not like you.

Trusting that "my beliefs" will not affect the government's definition of "culprit"

The reason Japanese are not very familiar with the fear of losing democracy in Chinese-speaking countries is largely due to the language barrier.

China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan can understand each other's spoken language quite well.

Most Japanese do not understand Chinese.

Taiwan is geographically close to China and Hong Kong, so it is easy to feel close to them.

https://gyazo.com/07762a676e4e4a24a4ca1024545d1ccd

Taiwan and China are closer than Fukuoka and Korea.

In terms of geographical distance, Hong Kong from Taiwan is about the same distance as Kyushu from Tokyo.

Like the demonstrations on Dejima Island in Nagasaki.

We share a common language, so I feel very close to them.

Concerns and Countermeasures

Concerns that linking AI to government will increase the power of government

We need to consider using AI to make the people more powerful to balance the situation.

implementation method

elemental technology

For example, when Uber came in, they have a track record of using it to make policy decisions, using it to discuss "should it be regulated or not?"

Since this is already an available technology, it would be beneficial to know this better and be able to apply it to the purposes we want to use it for!

Simply put, a non-centralized method of personal identification.

Non-Centralized: i.e., without dependence on the government

By creating a Galapagos standard, improvements can only be made with domestic resources, so by standardizing, we are relying on resources from all over the world.

Simply put, the mechanism of income redistribution

Decision-making on "how much resource to allocate to what?"

A method to uniquely identify people is needed to achieve this

For example, a naive majority should not allow a single person to have multiple accounts

The current Polis allows anonymous voting and personal identification by social networking accounts, so multiple accounts can vote.

It's just not done because the incentive to do so is not that high.

Need to address the increased incentive to create multiple accounts as money starts to move.

There are two ways to achieve this: using a government-verified ID or using a DID, and Taiwan is pushing for the latter.

Cases that do not go as far as income redistribution

The DID story doesn't seem very familiar to the Japanese.

I think they have a high degree of trust in the government.

He thinks the government won't say to him, "We're not going to issue you a passport.

I'm assuming it won't be, "Let's stop my number from being integrated with the health insurance card of anyone who makes a critical Tweet against the administration."

If this concern were to arise, we would be atrophied and unable to speak freely.

Use your driver's license to open a bank account,

Use that bank account to debit your cell phone bill,

If you use that cell phone number for two-factor authentication when creating a social networking account,

Of course the government can figure out who the social networking accounts are tied to!

...and few people in Japan are afraid.

Side note: I had a hard time trying to create a Weibo account because it required a mainland China phone number.

Very peaceful compared to the situation in Hong Kong.

I think it's obvious why Taiwan is trying to focus on this technology.

nishio.icon

Talk about being able to detach the verifier at this stage.

I think "I don't feel like I can" is probably one verifier, an image that identifies "humanness" at 0% or 100%.

However, there are other approaches that can be considered to increase the reliability of personal identification by linking multiple verifiers together.

In this use case, we don't need a 100% human guarantee, just a vote count based on humaneness.

If the cost of a bot account acquiring human-like characteristics becomes high enough, there is no practical problem.

empathy

Trying to solve a problem by claiming that people don't think it's a problem is hard to get sympathy.

I suspect that many people in Japan at present DID not sympathize.

Because they don't feel the issue of "untrustworthy government" is personal to them.

In Japan, there is a cultural tendency to value everyone's consensus over top-down decision making.

On the other hand, many people want to avoid confrontation and don't want to speak their mind.

https://gyazo.com/16e6ee4613d836798ba1ae35f78ea58b

It is easy to recognize that making decisions with a large group of people is difficult, a problem that is personal to you.

PS: I wrote this section in more detail after this study session

After all, the core of my interest is "strengthening human capacity", so I'll leave the DID talk to others and focus on broad listening!

A vision of "singularity is coming, not here and now, plurality is important."

Polis is the name of the software

To use an analogy, "Source code should be version controlled, right?" is the vision, and Git is the name of the software.

The Polis story and the DID story connect in a way that "both are useful components to realize the vision.

And I'm interested in the Polis side.

How Polis Works

Open source, licensed under AGPL

There is a pre-deployed server pol.is, so anyone can quickly try it out for a bit.

I think it would be beneficial for Japan if more Japanese people use Polis after seeing this.

If a company is using it for internal use, they'll want to set up their own instance.

Docker service is up and running in about 2 lines of command after cloning from Github.

You can turn on machine translation of posts, so you can use it with a community of people who speak different languages.

How hard is it to customize?

I could read the source code and rewrite the UI.

Client side is React

But there's quite a bit of jQuery-based code.

It feels like it was made in a college lab.

The process of determining the next voting target to be displayed on the server was not random.

I previously answered "randomly selected," but I was wrong.

Yes, and the actual implementation was further ahead, designed to ask the questions in such a way that even if you stop in the middle of an answer, you can still get as much information as possible in the process.

getNextPrioritizedComment

Roughly speaking, it looks like they multiply the PCA by the PCA, and then determine a probabilistic priority based on that.

GPT-4.icon

This getNextPrioritizedComment function is used to obtain the next comment with the highest priority.

Three functions, getComments, getPca, and getNumberOfCommentsRemaining, are called asynchronously. Each function retrieves the comments, the result of principal component analysis, and the number of comments remaining.

The selectProbabilistically function is used to select comments probabilistically. The function is passed the list of comments, the priority of the comments, the total number of comments, and the number of comments remaining as parameters.

So I guess it's called getPca, but it returns "priority calculated using PCA results".

This implementation is just taken from the DB.

The visualization part is polled by a PolisMath server, written in Clojure.

The getPca above would also read the value this created.

In essence, there is a "visualization server" that reads and updates statistics as soon as it is available.

If it's crowded, the update interval will increase.

Dimensional reduction is UMAP

Mapping higher dimensional vectors to lower dimensional space by nonlinear mapping

The opinion groups were clustered.

It says the clustering uses Leiden graph based community detection.

This is a graph-based method

So we need to convert distances into graph connectivity relationships.

I wonder how they do it.

You mention that you are using the above method, but you don't seem to be using it as a Python library? Maybe you're implementing it all in Clojure?

question

It is also the origin of the words police, policy, politics, etc.

Polis provided the context for democracy to develop, and the institution of polis facilitated the functioning of the democratic system.

For example, the agora, the central public space of the polis, was used as a place for citizens to gather and discuss public issues.

This was a practical expression of the democratic ideal of open debate and public decision-making.

In Athenian democracy, each citizen of the polis had the right to participate in the ekklesia (assembly), where he could speak and vote on public matters.

The Boulez, composed of 500 citizens elected by lot, was also an integral part of the polis, playing an important role in the democratic process by setting the agenda for the ekklesia.

Modern Japanese democracy is an indirect democracy in which "first we elect representatives, and then those representatives make decisions.

Audrey Tan pokes at it, "That's too little bandwidth, isn't it, just the way it was to achieve democracy in an era without digital technology, and digital natives are not happy with that slow upload speed."

People should be able to upload more information.

Answering 30 questions in Polis is 30 bits, more information than an election.

Directly express approval or disapproval of individual agenda items

Digital technology has lowered costs.

Useful as a tool to help elected representatives better gather and understand people's views

Opening the agenda-setting authority to the people would return the people's approval or disapproval of each agenda to the people. Public officials no longer have exclusive ownership of the agenda. --- Audrey Tang

It is important to release the people to decide what questions should be asked

Instead of bureaucrats and the media deciding what questions to ask and then asking them, people post what they think should be discussed on this point, others agree or disagree with them, it is visualized, and then it is repeated

That's the difference between this and today's so-called "polls".

There's an argument that if a newspaper or some other company calls you and polls you, claiming that they're doing random sampling to avoid bias, you're already biased at the time whether or not you get such a call.

I think it would be better to allow anyone to participate on the Internet.

Of course, even if we did it in that form, there would be another bias, specifically the suppression of the opinions of the elderly who don't do the internet, which I would prefer.

Even if you write an agenda, you will not get good answers if the intent is not understood. The good thing about indirect democracy is that it allows legislators to spend time studying. With direct democracy, people have to study.

In today's indirect democracy, we give our legislators 100% delegation on every agenda item with a "you study it for me."

You can express your opinion on the issues on which you want to express your opinion, and deligitimize those that do not, as in the past.

In the current indirect democracy, everything is delegated to a single person regardless of the theme, but I would like to decide who to delegate each theme. For example, in my case, I would like to be involved in policies involving digital technology, but I am not a party to the issue of married couples' surnames, so I would like to delegate to someone who is actually disadvantaged by the issue. It would be good if we could decide who to entrust with each agenda item. Well, if people can't be bothered to choose, they throw the whole thing to one person, but that's the baseline of indirect democracy we have now, so it would be better than that.

Taiwan's case is also in the form of "the Taiwanese government gathers everyone's opinions and decides what kind of law to make.

So, in other words, Polis is not a decision-making tool by itself, but a tool to gather opinions from a large number of people to guide better decisions.

It could be a tool for safe brainstorming on controversial topics.

A mechanism that prevents "disputes between A and B who have different opinions" from occurring.

It is difficult to become a person-to-person confrontation because it is abstracted and seen as an "opinion group" made up of many people.

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