So for one, you can see groups of people and opinions. So you can now see “different camps” and “count opinions”.
This could be valuable and hard to achieve. In much social media, voting doesn’t take advantage of granular, individual preferences, so it’s hard to unravel deep opinions between groups, say on LW or the EA forum.
But counting camps is just the beginning, and probably isn’t the most valuable thing from this approach.
For one, under certain conditions, this granularity allows you to understand deep differences in opinions. This can improve communication and understanding in ways not available right now.
To see this, look at what actually happened on the page.
There’s two groups. For Group A:
The broad overview is that group A wants to see broader involvement of longtermism and ideas, in a public process.
However, Group A does not support the Bill, though I guess they have sentiment for something in this direction.
There’s also oddball questions that group A reacted to. You should be skeptical about the signal to noise of information from these questions, but the implication might be that group A has positive views on the role/size/value of government.
For the other group, Group B:
Group B has different preferences and do not want to involve government, not in a broad way that has the government highly engaged or powerful in longtermism or vice versa. One explanation *might* be that it distrusts government entry or control on the issues (presumably related to dysfunction, misuse, capture, drift, and dilution).
However, much of Group B also has “different preferences about x-risk”. This suggests other interpretations about their views. There’s a bit of mischief here, but this isn’t that important.
Again, the groups might not be real. It’s unclear what the groups represent. This might be a flaw that is endemic to this approach, or it could be fixed in some way.
There’s more:
Instead of naively embedding preferences and creating the groups, you can “take actions that encourage grouping along an existing structure or ontology”. If done correctly, the consequent content might be more useful and even more truthful.
I think this system like most approaches, requires high quality interpretation. One implication is that this probably puts pressure on or cuts out a niche for “punditry”. This can be good or bad.
All voting in some sense flattens complex issues into a simple, literally one dimensional axis. Because it builds on voting, Polis can’t completely escape this issue, but tries to alleviate them by interrogating the space with more questions. Doing this runs into other issues, e.g. curse of dimensionality. I think this is why question design and UX choices are deceptively important.
Implementation involves other sensitivities/issues (e.g. flavors of panopticon a la Bentham, Foucault or something). It will be interesting to talk to some informed people about this.
So why do this?
Here’s the actual results.
So for one, you can see groups of people and opinions. So you can now see “different camps” and “count opinions”.
This could be valuable and hard to achieve. In much social media, voting doesn’t take advantage of granular, individual preferences, so it’s hard to unravel deep opinions between groups, say on LW or the EA forum.
But counting camps is just the beginning, and probably isn’t the most valuable thing from this approach.
For one, under certain conditions, this granularity allows you to understand deep differences in opinions. This can improve communication and understanding in ways not available right now.
To see this, look at what actually happened on the page.
There’s two groups. For Group A:
The broad overview is that group A wants to see broader involvement of longtermism and ideas, in a public process.
However, Group A does not support the Bill, though I guess they have sentiment for something in this direction.
There’s also oddball questions that group A reacted to. You should be skeptical about the signal to noise of information from these questions, but the implication might be that group A has positive views on the role/size/value of government.
For the other group, Group B:
Group B has different preferences and do not want to involve government, not in a broad way that has the government highly engaged or powerful in longtermism or vice versa. One explanation *might* be that it distrusts government entry or control on the issues (presumably related to dysfunction, misuse, capture, drift, and dilution).
However, much of Group B also has “different preferences about x-risk”. This suggests other interpretations about their views. There’s a bit of mischief here, but this isn’t that important.
Here is the full report: https://pol.is/report/r8ef5zucaxxvtzkiym69b
Also Charles, let’s have a call some time! https://calendly.com/nathanpmyoung/omni (anyone who reads this far is also welcome)
Again, the groups might not be real. It’s unclear what the groups represent. This might be a flaw that is endemic to this approach, or it could be fixed in some way.
There’s more:
Instead of naively embedding preferences and creating the groups, you can “take actions that encourage grouping along an existing structure or ontology”. If done correctly, the consequent content might be more useful and even more truthful.
I think this system like most approaches, requires high quality interpretation. One implication is that this probably puts pressure on or cuts out a niche for “punditry”. This can be good or bad.
All voting in some sense flattens complex issues into a simple, literally one dimensional axis. Because it builds on voting, Polis can’t completely escape this issue, but tries to alleviate them by interrogating the space with more questions. Doing this runs into other issues, e.g. curse of dimensionality. I think this is why question design and UX choices are deceptively important.
Implementation involves other sensitivities/issues (e.g. flavors of panopticon a la Bentham, Foucault or something). It will be interesting to talk to some informed people about this.