From f596aef9e4932b83a0e7e353101a6050b82a079a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jamie Joyce <43149999+JustTheJamieJoyce@users.noreply.github.com> Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2024 14:37:59 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] Update 05-04-augmented-deliberation.md Inputing addition of the Society Library based on notes sent via email exchange with Glen. Small errors amended. Commit does not equal endorsement of all ideas herein. --- .../english/05-04-augmented-deliberation.md | 36 +++++++++---------- 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-) diff --git a/contents/english/05-04-augmented-deliberation.md b/contents/english/05-04-augmented-deliberation.md index a1c59857..4d764e70 100644 --- a/contents/english/05-04-augmented-deliberation.md +++ b/contents/english/05-04-augmented-deliberation.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ # Augmented Deliberation -As we have noted above, one of the most common concerns about social media has been its tendency to entrench existing social divisions, creating "echo chambers" that undermine a sense of shared reality. Whatever one's evaluation of the extent to which this is true (relative to what counterfactual), it is natural to ask how these systems might be designed with an opposite intention. The largest-scale attempt at this is the Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) system in the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform. +As we have noted above, one of the most common concerns about social media has been its tendency to entrench existing social divisions, creating "echo chambers" that undermine a sense of shared reality. Whatever one's evaluation of the extent to which this is true (relative to what counterfactual), it is natural to ask how these systems might be designed with an opposite intention. The largest-scale attempt at this is the Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) system in the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform. Twitter Community Notes @@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ The omnipresence of verbal exchange in human life makes it daunting to classify, The next oldest and most common communicative form is writing. While far less interactive, writing allows words to travel across much greater space and time. Typically conceived as capturing the voice of a single "author", written communications can spread broadly (even globally) with the aid of printing and translation, and endure for sometimes thousands of years, allowing for a "broadcast" of messages much farther than amphitheaters or loudspeakers (though recorded audio and visual formats can rival this). -As this discussion illustrates, there have long been severe trade-offs between the richness of in-person discussion and the reach of the written word. Many structures attempt to harness elements of both through a network where in-person conversations and deliberations are nodes and writing acts as edges. the World Cafe [^WorldCafe] or Open Space Technology [^OpenSpace] methods, where dozens or even thousands of people convene and participate in small groups for dialogue, while the written notes from those small clusters are synthesized and distributed broadly. Other examples include many constitutional and rule-making processes, book clubs, editorial boards for publications, focus groups, surveys, and other research processes, etc. A typical pattern is that a group deliberates on writing that is then submitted to another deliberative group that results in another document that is then sent back, and so on. One might recognize this in legal tradition via oral and written arguments, as well as the academic peer review process. +As this discussion illustrates, there have long been severe trade-offs between the richness of in-person discussion and the reach of the written word. Many structures attempt to harness elements of both through a network where in-person conversations and deliberations are nodes and writing acts as edges. The World Cafe [^WorldCafe] or Open Space Technology [^OpenSpace] methods, where dozens or even thousands of people convene and participate in small groups for dialogue, while the written notes from those small clusters are synthesized and distributed broadly. Other examples include many constitutional and rule-making processes, book clubs, editorial boards for publications, focus groups, surveys, and other research processes, etc. A typical pattern is that a group deliberates on writing that is then submitted to another deliberative group that results in another document that is then sent back, and so on. One might recognize this in legal tradition via oral and written arguments, as well as the academic peer review process. One of the most fundamental challenges this variety of forms tries to navigate is the trade-off between speed and inclusion. On the one hand, conversations are long, costly and time-consuming. This often means that they have trouble yielding definite and timely outcomes, the "analysis paralysis" often bemoaned in corporate settings and complaint (sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde) that "socialism takes too many evenings". @@ -60,10 +60,12 @@ A range of recent advances have begun to push back the frontier of these trade-o As we discussed in the "View from Yushan" chapter above, one of the most successful examples in Taiwan has been the vTaiwan system, which harnesses OSS called Polis in English. This platform shares some features with social media services like X, but builds abstractions of some of the principles of inclusive facilitation into its attention allocation and user experience. As in X, users submit short responses to a prompt. But rather than amplifying or responding to one another's comments, they simply vote these up or down. These votes are then clustered to highlight patterns of common attitudes which form what one might call user perspectives. Representative statements that highlight these differing opinion groups' perspectives are displayed to allow users to understand key points of view, as are the perspectives that "bridge" the divisions: ones that receive assent across the lines that otherwise divide. Responding to this evolving conversation, users can offer additional perspectives that help to further bridge, articulate an existing position or draw out a new opinion group that may not yet be salient. -Polis is a prominent example of what leading ⿻ technologists Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn call "collective response systems" and others call "wikisurveys". Other leading examples include All Our Ideas and Remesh, which have various trade-offs in terms of user experience, degree of open source and other features. What these systems share is that they combine the participatory, open and interactive nature of social media with features that encourage thoughtful listening, an understanding of conversational dynamics and the careful emergence of an understanding of shared views and points of rough consensus. Such systems have been used to make increasingly consequential policy and design decisions, around topics such as the regulation of ride-hailing applications and the direction of some of the leading large foundation models (e.g. Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's "Democratic Inputs" project and resulting "collective alignment" team).[^DemocraticInputs] They have also been central to inspiring related approaches, such as X Community Notes that we highlighted above, that have even greater reach and influence. +Polis is a prominent example of what leading ⿻ technologists Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn call "collective response systems" and others call "wikisurveys". Other leading examples include All Our Ideas and Remesh, which have various trade-offs in terms of user experience, degrees of open source and other features. What these systems share is that they combine the participatory, open and interactive nature of social media with features that encourage thoughtful listening, an understanding of conversational dynamics and the careful emergence of an understanding of shared views and points of rough consensus. Such systems have been used to make increasingly consequential policy and design decisions, around topics such as the regulation of ride-hailing applications and the direction of some of the leading large foundation models (e.g. Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's "Democratic Inputs" project and resulting "collective alignment" team).[^DemocraticInputs] They have also been central to inspiring related approaches, such as X Community Notes that we highlighted above, that have even greater reach and influence. -An approach with similar goals but a bit of an opposite starting point is one that centers in-person conversations but aims to improve the way their insights can be networked and shared. A leading example in this category is the approach developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Constructive Communication in collaboration with their civil society collaborators Cortico. This approach and technology platform, dubbed Fora, uses a mixture of the identity and association protocols we discussed in the Freedom part of the book and natural language processing to allow recorded conversations on challenging topics to remain protected and private while surfacing insights that can travel across these conversations and spark further discussion. Community members, with permission from the speakers, lift consequential highlights up to stakeholders, such as government, policy makers or leadership within an organization. Cortico has used this technology to help inform civic processes such as the 2021 election of Michelle Wu as Boston's first woman and non-white mayor.[^RealTalk] The act of soliciting perspectives via deep conversational data in collaboration with underserved communities imbues the effort with a legitimacy absent from faster modes of communication. Related tools, of differing degrees of sophistication, are used by organizations like StoryCorps and Braver Angels and have reached millions of people. +An approach with similar goals but a bit of an opposite starting point is one that centers in-person conversations but aims to improve the way their insights can be networked and shared. A leading example in this category is the approach developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Constructive Communication in collaboration with their civil society collaborators; called Cortico. This approach and technology platform, dubbed Fora, uses a mixture of the identity and association protocols we discussed in the Freedom part of the book and natural language processing to allow recorded conversations on challenging topics to remain protected and private while surfacing insights that can travel across these conversations and spark further discussion. Community members, with permission from the speakers, lift consequential highlights up to stakeholders, such as government, policy makers or leadership within an organization. Cortico has used this technology to help inform civic processes such as the 2021 election of Michelle Wu as Boston's first woman and non-white (Taiwanese-American) mayor.[^RealTalk] The act of soliciting perspectives via deep conversational data in collaboration with underserved communities imbues the effort with a legitimacy absent from faster modes of communication. Related tools, of differing degrees of sophistication, are used by organizations like StoryCorps and Braver Angels and have reached millions of people. + +A third approach attempts to leverage and organize existing media content and exchanges, rather than induce participants to produce new content. Organizations like the Society Library collect available material from government documentation, social media, books, television etc. and organize it for citizens to highlight the contours of debate, including surfacing available facts. This practice is become increasingly scalable with some of the tools we describe below by harnessing digital technology to extend the tradition described above by extending the scale of deliberation by networking conversations across different venues together. Other more experimental efforts overlap heavily with the approaches we highlighted in "Immersive Shared Reality", aiming to push the richness of remote deliberations towards that possible in person. A recent dramatic illustration was a conversation between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and leading podcast host Lex Fridman, where both were in virtual reality able to perceive minute facial expressions of the other. A less dramatic but perhaps more meaningful example was the Portals Policing Project, where cargo containers appeared in cities affected by police violence and allowed an enriched video-based exchange of experiences with such violence across physical and social distance. Other promising elements include the increasing ubiquity of high-quality, low-cost and increasingly culturally aware machine translation tools and work to harness similar systems to enable people to synthesize values and find common ground building from natural language statements. @@ -73,13 +75,13 @@ Other more experimental efforts overlap heavily with the approaches we highlight Some of these more ambitious experiments begin to point towards a future, especially harnessing large language models (LLMs), where we go much further towards addressing the broad listening problem, empowering deliberation of a quality and scale that has henceforth been hard to imagine. The Internet enables collaboration at an extreme scale by reducing the possible space of collaborative actions, such as to buy/sell market transactions, and by utilizing a similar reduction in information transmission, i.e. to five star rating systems. An effective increase in our ability to transmit and digest information can result in a corresponding increase in our ability to deliberate on difficult and nuanced social issues. -One of the most obvious directions that is a subject of active development is how systems like Polis and Community Notes could be extended with modern graph theory and LLMs. The "Talk to the City" project, for example, illustrates how LLMs can be used to replace a list of statements characterizing a group's views with an interactive agent one can talk to and get a sense for the perspective. Soon it should certainly be possible to go further, with LLMs avoiding participants being limited to short statements and up-and-down votes, instead allowing them to fully express themselves in reaction to the conversation, but with the models condensing this conversation and making it legible to others who can then participate. Models could also help look for areas of rough consensus not simply based on common votes but on a natural language understanding of and response to expressed positions. +One of the most obvious directions that is a subject of active development is how systems like Polis and Community Notes could be extended with modern graph theory and LLMs. The "Talk to the City" project, for example, illustrates how LLMs can be used to replace a list of statements characterizing a group's views with an interactive agent one can talk to and get a sense for the perspective. Soon it should certainly be possible to go further, with LLMs avoiding participants being limited to short statements and up-and-down votes, instead allowing them to fully express themselves in reaction to the conversation, but with the models condensing this conversation and making it legible to others who can then participate, while also potentially retrieving facts to enrich the conversation from graphs like those the Society Library creates. Models could also help look for areas of rough consensus not simply based on common votes but on a natural language understanding of and response to expressed positions. -Furthermore, while the current discussion around collective response models focuses on identifying areas of rough consensus, another powerful role is to support the regeneration of diversity and productive conflict. On the one hand, they help identify different opinion groups in ways that are not a deterministic function of historical assumptions or identities, potentially allowing these groups to find each other and organize around their perspective. On the other hand, by surfacing as representing consensus positions that have diverse support, they also create diverse opposition that can coalesce into a new conflict that does not reinforce existing divisions, potentially allowing organization around that perspective. In short, collective response systems can play just as important a role in mapping and evolving conflict dynamically as helping to navigate it productively. +Furthermore, while the current discussion around collective response models focuses on identifying areas of rough consensus, another powerful role is to support the regeneration of diversity and productive conflict. On the one hand, they help identify different opinion groups in ways that are not a deterministic function of historical assumptions or identities, potentially allowing these groups to find each other and organize around their perspective. On the other hand, by surfacing representing consensus positions that have diverse support, they also create diverse opposition that can coalesce into a new conflict that does not reinforce existing divisions, potentially allowing organization around that perspective. In short, collective response systems can play just as important a role in mapping and evolving conflict dynamically as helping to navigate it productively. -In a similar spirit, one can imagine harnessing and advancing elements of the design of Community Notes to more holistically reshape social media dynamics. While the system currently lines up all opinions across the platform on a single spectrum, one can imagine mapping out a range of communities within the platform and harnessing its bridging-based approach not just to prioritize notes, but to prioritize content for attention in the first place. Furthermore, bridging can be applied at many different scales and to many intersecting groups, not just to the platform overall. One can imagine a future where different content in a feed is highlighted as bridging and being shared among a range of communities one is a member of (a religious community, a physically local community, a political community), reinforcing context and common knowledge and action in a range of social affiliations. +In a similar spirit, one can imagine harnessing and advancing elements of the design of Community Notes to more holistically reshape social media dynamics. While the system currently lines up all opinions across the platform on a single spectrum, one can imagine mapping out a range of communities within the platform and harnessing its bridging-based approach not just to prioritize notes, but to prioritize content for attention in the first place. Bridging could be applied at many different scales and to many intersecting groups, not just to the platform overall. One can imagine a future where different content in a feed is highlighted as bridging and being shared among a range of communities one is a member of (a religious community, a physically local community, a political community), reinforcing context, common knowledge and action in a range of social affiliations. -Such dynamic representations of social life could also dramatically improve how we approach representation and selection of participants for deeper deliberation, such as in person or in rich immersive shared realities. With a richer accounting of relevant social differences, it may be possible to move beyond geography or simple demographics and skills as groups that need to be represented. Instead, it may be possible to increasingly use the full intersectional richness of identity as a basis for considering inclusion and representation. Constituencies defined this way could participate in elections or, instead of sortition, protocols could be devised to choose the maximally diverse committees for a deliberation by, for example, choosing a collection of participants that minimizes how marginalized from representation the most marginalized participants are based on known social connections and affiliations. Such an approach could achieve many of the benefits of sortition, administration and election simultaneously, especially if combined with some of the liquid democracy approaches we discuss in the voting chapter below. +Such dynamic representations of social life could also dramatically improve how we approach representation and selection of participants for deeper deliberation. With a richer accounting of relevant social differences, it may be possible to move beyond geography, simple demographics, and skills within groups that need to be represented. Instead, it may be possible to increasingly use the full intersectional richness of identity as a basis for considering inclusion and representation. Constituencies defined this way could participate in elections or, instead of sortition, protocols could be devised to choose the maximally diverse committees for a deliberation. This could be devised by, for example, choosing a collection of participants that minimizes the marginalization of representation of the most marginalized participants, based on known social connections and affiliations. Such an approach could achieve many of the benefits of sortition, administration and election simultaneously, especially if combined with some of the liquid democracy approaches we discuss in the voting chapter below. It may be possible to, in some cases, even more radically re-imagine the idea of representation. LLMs can be "fine-tuned" to increasingly accurately mimic the ideas and styles of individuals, as we discussed in the previous chapter. But there is nothing special to individual humans about this approach: it is simply based on a body of text. One can imagine training a model on the text of a community of people and thus, rather than representing one person's perspective, it could operate as a fairly direct collective representative, possibly as an aid, complement or check on the discretion of a person intended to represent that group. @@ -94,18 +96,15 @@ Most boldly, this idea could in principle extend beyond living human beings. In ### Limits of deliberation -The centrality of natural language to human interaction makes it tempting to forget its severe limitations. Words may be richer symbols than numbers, but they are as dust compared to the richness of human sensory experience, not to mention proprioception. "Words cannot capture" far more than they can. Whatever emotional truth it has, it is simply information theoretically logical that we form far deeper attention in common action and experience than in verbal exchange. Thus, however far deliberation advances, it cannot substitute for the richer forms of collaboration we have already discussed. - - -Furthermore, and on the opposite side, talk takes time, even in the sophisticated versions we describe. Many decisions cannot wait for deliberation to fully run its course, especially when great social distance has to be bridged, which will generally slow the process. The other approaches to collaboration we discuss below will typically be needed to address the need for timely decisions in many cases. +The centrality of natural language to human interaction makes it tempting to forget its severe limitations. Words may be richer symbols than numbers, but they are as dust compared to the richness of human sensory experience, not to mention proprioception. "Words cannot capture" far more than they can. Whatever emotional truth it has, it is simply information theoretically logical that we form far deeper attention in common action and experience than in verbal exchange. Thus, however far deliberation advances, it cannot substitute completely for the other richer forms of collaboration we have already discussed. +Furthermore, and on the opposite side, talk takes time. Many decisions cannot wait for deliberation to fully run its course, especially when great social distance has to be bridged, which will generally slow the process. The other approaches to collaboration we discuss below will typically be needed to address the need for timely decisions in many cases, though many of the sophisticated forms of deliberation we have described have greatly sped up the process. -Furthermore, many of the ways in which the slow pace of discussion can be overcome (e.g. using LLMs to conduct partially "in silico" deliberation) illustrate another important limitation of conversation: many other methods are often more easily made transparent and thus broadly legitimate. The way conversations take inputs and produce outputs are hard to fully describe, whether they occur across people or in machines. In fact, one could consider inputting natural language to a machine and producing a machine dictate as just a more sophisticated, non-linear form of voting. But, in contrast to the administrative and voting rules we will discuss below, it might be very hard to achieve common understanding and legitimacy on how this transformation takes place and thus make it the basis for common action in the way that voting and markets often are. Thus checks on the way deliberations occur and are observed arising from those other systems are likely to be important for a long time to come. +Also, many of the ways in which the slow pace of discussion can be overcome (e.g. using LLMs to conduct partially "in silico" deliberation) illustrate another important limitation of conversation: many other methods are often more easily made transparent and thus broadly legitimate. The way conversations take inputs and produce outputs are hard to fully describe, whether they occur across people or in machines. In fact, one could consider inputting natural language to a machine and producing a machine dictate as just a more sophisticated, non-linear form of voting. But, in contrast to the administrative and voting rules we will discuss below, it might be very hard to achieve common understanding and legitimacy on how this transformation takes place and thus make it the basis for common action in the way that voting and markets often are. Thus checks on the way deliberations occur and are observed arising from those other systems are likely to be important for a long time to come. -Furthermore, deliberation in the democratic process is also limited by the ability for humans to practically survey more capable LLM (scalable oversight). This poses a unique limitation for model evaluators where supervision is not sufficient, due to overly powerful AI Systems. LLMs have also been demonstrated to adhere to instructions blindly; this can raise issues around LLM censorship as a factor that can undermine the democratic process within AI systems[^LLMCensorship]. +Deliberation in the democratic process is also limited by the ability for humans to practically survey more capable LLM (scalable oversight). This poses a unique limitation for model evaluators where supervision is not sufficient, due to overly powerful AI Systems. LLMs have also been demonstrated to adhere to instructions blindly; this can raise issues around LLM censorship as a factor that can undermine the democratic process within AI systems7. - -Furthermore, deliberation is sometimes idealized as helping overcome divisions and reach a true "common will". Yet, while reaching points of overlapping and rough consensus is crucial for common action, so is the regeneration of diversity and productive conflict to fuel dynamism and ensure productive inputs to future deliberations. Thus deliberations and their balance with other modes of collaboration must always attend, as we have illustrated above, to this stimulus to productive conflict as much as it does to the resolution towards active and away from explosive conflict. +Also, deliberation is sometimes idealized as helping overcome divisions and reach a true "common will". Yet, while reaching points of overlapping and rough consensus is crucial for common action, so is the regeneration of diversity and productive conflict to fuel dynamism and ensure productive inputs to future deliberations. Thus deliberations and their balance with other modes of collaboration must always attend, as we have illustrated above, to this stimulus to productive conflict as much as it does to the resolution towards active and away from explosive conflict. [^InformationWealth]: Simon, Herbert. (1971) Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, _Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest_ @@ -117,7 +116,8 @@ Furthermore, deliberation is sometimes idealized as helping overcome divisions a [^LLMCensorship]: David Glukhov, Ilia Shumailov, Yarin Gal, Nicolas Papernot, Vardan Papyan (2023). LLM Censorship: A Machine Learning Challenge or a Computer Security Problem? https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10719 -[^WorldCafe]: [World Cafe](https://theworldcafe.com/) +[^WorldCafe] [World Cafe](https://theworldcafe.com/) + +[^OpenSpaceTechnnology] [Open Space Technology](https://openspaceworld.org/wp2/) -[^OpenSpace]: [Open Space Technology](https://openspaceworld.org/wp2/)