Government... By Lottery?
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I think asking scientists to make the final decision alone, IT asks them to make a value judgment that is a really tricked position to put them in right. I know that certain is only one example of a way to create an explicit division of labor, but to me, that is almost exactly the purpose is to get a bunch of people together whose interests are truly affected in different ways, and have them learn from external information and then exclusively make value judgments ments.

Welcome to web three twenty sixteen. I'm Robert tacket. And today we're dusting off an ancient practice that has become trendy once again. The old but new idea of sorts san, or selecting representatives bilot y sortin was used in an ancient ethie democracy to elect public officials.

It's also been lately revived by tech companies like meta A I startups like OpenAI and anthropic to tackle some of their thornie policy making chAllenges. Our guests today are experts on sortin, including bai fani gan, a postdoctoral fellow at harvard who is joining MIT as an assistant professor next year and who has helped to develop selection algorithms for shortish that are in use today. Also joining is andy hall, stanford university policy professor, advisor to meta, and consult to a sixteen cy crypt to research.

In this episode, we discuss why not to rely exclusively on expert authority, how the process of deliberation changes people's minds, and how Scottish can apply everywhere from the governance of countries to the governance of crypto projects. And more as reminder, none of the following should be taken as tax, business, legal or investment advice. Please see a six teen z doc com slashed disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments. So okay, I want to start off and ask you, Bailey, what is sortin?

Yeah, the sedition as a concept to came about in ancient athens, as a way of selecting everyday people to participate in government. And there was this randomized process that was kind of like a union lottery, although I think historically was a little bit more complicated. But in principle, you can think of this as just a uniform, Larry, over the population. And you select some people via this method, and they come together as citizen representatives of everyday people, and they suggest policy, maybe they deliberate way in on existing policies. That depends on the application .

of all of the governance methods that are out there. Why would you want a bunch of random to be deciding things for you?

Literal randa s literal.

literal from a technical .

perspective there. And does I personally like IT because I think that IT lends see to government when you can say that you these are everyday people who have no political motives or incentives. They're not trying to get reelected or anything, and they don't even really have any political trading or priors.

And they come into the situation and they learn from, ideally, baLances of experts and information. I think people are really capable of making really good, reasonable suggestions under really good conditions in a way that I think it's pretty hard for our politicians to do, in some cases, because they are motivated by so many things other than just what people want. I also think maybe the public, in the end, if it's well executed, may trust the outcome more because they can get just a transparent or like, more transparent process.

I have a few things that one is that if you don't randomly select people and you allow them to be this process by which some people choose to engaged in government, others don't, you could have a problem where the people who stand up and want to be involved are precisely the people you don't want involved. So like a very great saying about this comes from Douglas Adams, one of his other books, now the hitchhiker s guide, ada parthenay, but basically says, the people who want to rule you are, if so, fact to unqualified ed to rule you. But the very fact that they want to be in charge, they shouldn't be in charge.

This also goes back to ancient increase. I forget one of the philosophers, saccades, maybe like he knows he's not wise and that makes me wise, whatever. It's like a paradoxical kind of thing.

circuitous, I think a big part of his view is that you needed experts to rule. And he has draws these extended analogies to, like you wouldn't ask random person to be a carpenter or to navigate a ship. He is a very famous analogy to the captain of a ship.

But others thought this could be a good part of the system for these reasons that you don't want to allow. Only the people who wanted do IT to manipulate everyone else and all is that IT doesn't need to be in all bal, like you can use IT for some things that not others. And I think most times in places where it's been proposed, including an ancient greece, the idea was not like all decisions all the time. What we made to this mechanism was a way to select certain offices for certain decisions, particularly ones where you don't think IT requires the specialized expertise of full time government officials.

Yeah, just that. I mean, add to that too. There's just a lot of people in the standard representative electoral government, a presentative.

I will put that in quotes because there's just a lot of people who will never have access to the credentials of the money required to gain influence. And that, to me, is a pretty significant problem. And this is one way to at least allow a much less filtered group of people to weigh on policy.

There are different kinds of, you know, organizations you could be running or decisions you could be making. I imagine bacon ation increase like, you wouldn't want random people designing and constructing, like trireme worships like that probably was a specialized test that you need to know how to like, you know, build a hole or whatever. What are the kinds of things that this is good for?

Here's like, I guess, the framework i've been thinking about now. I want to say out, i'm not sure it's good for anything .

like guy fighting ten words.

but other options don't seem all like good either. So so I think we don't really know is the first far of the answer. There are really not use a lot. There is no president for using them for like a high stake's decision that society is very concerned about where if you decided one, where the other major things would change. You can't really point at an example yet where that happened and personally, I doubt will ever .

get there on a personal level like probably place where people would experience this most in jury y.

which is .

is my .

that you know governing .

national .

policy? Yes, into this model, they're making a one off decision on a single piece of adjudication verses setting a policy that's going to affect the whole country. There's a White gap there.

So in terms of applications, I mean, what people usually point to, I think the most natural space is sort of like value late and judgments that are more about resolving fundamentally irreconcilable trade, ffs, that we can only appeal to values to decide on, like where we should set the line on abortion policy or something. Science is not going to tell us what to do. There is a values decision.

You don't need a lot of expertise to decide that. You need deep understanding of what society feels about this issue. That's the first element, I think.

And if you look, everything I just said is often used to justify referendums or ballot initiative. Some kind of a pressure will outlet where you go around elected officials and let the voters speak directly. We've a lot of reasons to think those don't always work very well.

A big reason why we think they don't work very well as because of low rates of participation and low rates of attention. Sorting is than a tool where you undo the low participation. You're worried not very many people can vote on this referendum. And the people who do, we're going to have very weird, unusual views because .

these of the people who are .

motivated to actually and then a very logical thing you might say is, instead of a referendum, let's Randy sample a group of voters we know as representative, get them all to think about this thing and then make a decision together that might be Better than a referendum.

And in particular, one point we have talked about you is IT might be especially good if you think that at baseline, people don't have well formed preferences or views on this issue. And so when you just have a vote on IT, they don't vote in ways that are actually consistent with their underlying values. They have to sit in the room and talk about IT and learn before they can actually figure what they think. And that's like you have to deliberate before you can form views. And so you can see that as a mechanism to just replace referendums.

Did the founders, like the american founders, founding fathers today, have different ideas about representative democracy in the way to achieve IT today, consider sorted or government billows teri at all funny purposes. Or was that just too mad?

My impression is that sentiments were more toward, we need experts to govern.

Yeah, people really, through the classical era, up to the founding of america, people looked back on a senior democracy, not as this unallowable success that everyone should model. The whole of you is, this thing was a shit show. There is a really cool idea underlying IT that we want to bring back and IT entrance some values that we like.

But IT did not work at all and IT LED athons to make truly catastrophic decisions, particularly the decision to invade cessile. And they looked instead much more to rome, which had built this more hybrid system that had a lot of mechanism we would recognize today as suppressing the views of many people and being undemocratic. But that also tried to make this system function much more effectively. And IT did for a much longer period of time.

I had its own set of issues, though.

more than a few. But when you look back at the history and you look at the founding, like the debates over how to design IT, IT was much more like we are not building some WC doodle european society where everyone decides on everything. We're like building a system that's gna work. And IT was not motivated by things like exordium. They would have been of a small, small part of the discussion.

So why use sortin today? Why are reduction off this old concept and try use IT?

I'll use that question as an opportunity to kind of go back to what kinds of questions is sorted in good for you. N the example you gave about building a warship, that's a good example of something where you pretty much need to be guided exclusively by the scientific method. And then there's questions that are like purely value judgments, like you've got two people's welfare and you just have to choose how to trade them off.

You can't satisfy everyone and so you need to make a really difficult trade off. But there's also like a lot of issues that kind of fall in the middle of those like they have both components regulating ai algorithms, have technical underpinnings, but they also have human implications and trade. Ffs, how do you teese those apart to allow a group of everyday people who maybe doesn't understand a lot of the technical aspects to still weigh on the value judgments and then use those value judges to inform the technical components and maybe vice verse as well? I think there's a huge design space actually here in designing the deliberative process to allow the outsourcing of the scientific method.

But still just still those value questions, I actually work kind of project on this right now, and it's a super difficult. And I think a lot of people have tried to do IT, but they haven't necessarily thought about the the formal process of distilling these two components and truly separating them because you don't want people to be implicitly guessing at the scientific method, and you also have to deal with the fact that the scientific method leaves uncertainty. And so then you have to ask the value question of as this assembly, who do you want to bear the risk of the uncertainty that the scientific method has left? So you've got risks, you've got values, and you've got science.

And these two things are like very different and you have to think about them in really different way. It's so you this is something i'm thinking a lot about, actually. And I think hopefully one thing that will come out of IT is an understanding of which issue should this be applied to and how do you apply IT.

You said you're working on a project right now to .

this ah in its infancy. I mean, I think one application called environmental justice metrics, it's basically how you measure environmental risk. Of different communities based on like a lot of factors.

And people tend to kind of aggregate these factors into scores, but they do so in a way that I think hasn't really been waited on by people. It's usually kind of like a combination of maybe caul inference, but um there are opportunities here for the science fc method. They're certainly uncertainty and there's also value judgements about which factors are most important. So that's one example maybe of the kind of like first application that would be interesting.

So I mean, for this example where you were talking about trade offs and getting people's opinions and stuff is IT, like maybe some people care less that they have a chemical plant and there are backyard or something. Like is that the kind of the input that you've getting out of this IT could be?

I mean, I think you are looting to something like lived experience, which is when you are the person who will bear the cost or bear the benefit of like what decision gets made here? What does your lived experiences say about what you think is best for you? That would be example that.

please, one hundred percent doesn't. I think it's something society is doing a very bad job on right now. There's a huge separation between what we can use science to decide and what we need to decide via this value tradeoffs. And just to jump to the most controversial possible topic, because I do I like COVID policy, had this problem and there's this attitude, like what is going to do whatever the science tells us to do .

science is a lot of work.

And idiotic way to choose policy, like the policies certainly need to be informed by that. We need to know, for example, you know, what are going to be the implications for societal health if we close schools versus we open them that essential input to the decision.

But once we have the inputs from science, the actual policy decision is a value trade off, informed by science about how much we want to prioritize the health of different groups, the education of our children eeta. The idea that that's a decision that could be made by science is an extraordinary, misguided and stupid belief that a large number of american elites hold today that is completely crazy. And I think tradition is just a healthful example to show you why the two things need to be separated, and why having a group of people not weigh on the science, but informed by the science, weigh on these difficult value. Trade, ffs, is precisely the right kind of division of labor we would like to set up.

So instead of taking IT on fia at from some elites that are saying, like, okay, your schools have to be shut down instead, maybe like pulling the people who would be affected by this, the kids, the parents, the administrators asked them what they want to do, maybe they want to keep the scope le open. Maybe there are good reasons .

for that and yeah and I think asking scientists to make the final decision allows IT asks them to make a value judgment and and that is a really tRicky position to put them in, right? Because that is the expectation in people. I think they don't quite realize that there is really these two different steps, as you very clearly laid out. And I know that tradition is only one example of a way to teese those apart and really created a an explicit division of labor. But to me, that is almost exactly the purpose of sortin is to get a bunch of people together whose interests are truly affected in different ways by the decision, and have them learn from external information to the greatest degree exists, and then exclusively make value judgements.

So how do you make sure that you get a representative group of people OK?

Well, it's really, really, really hard in the practice of sortin has IT exists today? The participation rate that I often hear quoted is about two to five percent of people will respond to an invitation, participate in legal citizen assembly.

That's quite low. Is the outrage usually by email or something?

IT depends. Sometimes it's by phone, sometimes it's spy letter, usually like a uniformly random sample of the population that .

you get from speaking personally like I basically don't click links in emails and if I don't know the phone number that's calling me and not answering IT.

So yeah, I am possible that will be dressed as citizens and they get more institutionalize ed or publicly known. Maybe that will get Better because you won't be like, what is this why i'm getting the friend of you email away? But the other problem is that the people who do say guess kind of seem to be very self selected, I would call IT, which is very, very skewed on many demographic and belief related attributes.

This seems very related to the like weird issue in social sciences. The western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, like all these social psychology studies feature a particular sampling of the population that psychology educated students who are willing to get paid some money to participate in the study. And so IT just excuse the research that IT comes out of IT.

yeah. And so there's been a lot of work done recently, and I think there's a lot more to do to try to say OK, if you're given a pretty self selected group, what is the best way you can randomly choose the final assembly in a way that kind of restores some representation on observer able characteristics? But the unobservable characteristics are just such an enormous problem, and you can't really do much about that until we understand what the filtration looks like from the population to those who actually agreed to participate in the first place. So no, it's a pretty thorny problem. Why I hadn't .

thought about this before, but I guess he's putting to all the Roberts point from before of years like one solution which would not work when it's a one off project by a organization. Jury duty is Mandatory, and people do respond to those invitations and the participation rate. I somehow i've never and I never get on, and I would like to always .

get kicked.

Are you even gotten in the room? I've never gotten to get kicked up. I get the letter, i'd check online and then i've always told, like you don't even to same. So but anyways, if you really in shine the system within a broader governmental system, then you could get people to do because you could require that they do.

I do think it's true that I would probably be a lot Better, but I do think there is still like self election and who goes to jury duty, right? Because there's a lot of exemption criteria that you can meet. And I was just actually reading about this because I was trying to understand whether Mandatory jury duty is a good case study for of what would happen to self election by us if you Mandate participation and sortin.

And there are still issues related to certain groups basically not appearing on juries like pretty much ever or just extremely low rates and that there's actually concerned that, that affects the quality of the decisions, particularly about surging groups. So it's not a perfect system. I still think you need to think about how do you really ensure representation when you select the final family, even if I were a Mandatory, but I do think that would go a long way.

Yeah, there are countries, you know, they have compulsory voting, which is not something I based on my physical hc principles I am uncomfortable with. But IT works surprise .

antia subjective to voting.

you know? Yes.

we do know.

but IT works I say this gradation ally is someone who doesn't like to do the government forcing me to do something that I might not want to do um but when you voted.

you know you like somebody who's going to not force you do that to undo and going to have you if you look.

there's greatly great research on australia in brazil, and there are few other countries that have these laws. And people in the countries tend to like IT. Compliance rates are quite high. If you really want to get out of that, you can. But vast, vast, vast majority of people do countries .

that enforced Mandatory vote.

Yeah, yeah. So it's a pretty it's interesting. yeah.

So IT actually goes over pretty well.

but you just are not a fan IT. There's something about amErica in the american government telling me I have to vote that would about me, yeah. Bother me. Great deeply. yeah.

Do you think that people who are required to vote really think about the decision? What you mean? Well, I mean, if if I like forced to vote on every issue that comes up, I mean, am I really gonna the research on every issue and think about what I really believe? Like, I worry that people will just respond. Maybe the turnout is really good, but like, aren't thinking about the decision that much?

I don't know what. I I had a friend who during standardized tests in high school, would just do guitar hero in the multiple choice, like, you know, like for out A C, like for one whatever was whatever song he is playing at that time. So yeah, I think you could get some uninformed voting if you tried to do that.

Yeah and wondering how widespreading think that is.

is something concern. A few things I would say. One that compulsory voting to typically the way it's implemented only for these know high sallies national elections that don't occur very frequently.

So the shopping asked to shoulder that much of a burden is in the context of vigorous campaigning. And while you are required to vote again, you can not doubt in australia, you can pay a relatively small fine. Most people choose not to, you think the Turnery or and eighty seven percent or something, you are completely welcome to just cast a blank ballot.

And so if you really feel like you don't know, you don't have to put something that you know. And I think that actually helps because most there aren't that many people who are going to like straight up trowl if they're really comfortable and they feel like they don't know very much, they can leave in blank the realities in the context of a vigorous ous national campaign. It's not that hard and the like figure out which party you think you should vote for.

And so most people do vote. Australia also has ranked choice voting. With that, the whole of the rabid .

hall is next podcast.

yeah, yeah, yes. Random ten general question. We referred to secret ballots as australian voting is not like a thing. yeah. Do you know the history there?

There are people who know Better than me, but basically there was this key time in the nineteen late nineteen century where a bunch of democratic countries, australia, the U. K, the U. S, became quite concerned. We would cut today, we would call this clintonism.

And you recognize that today, in in many democratic countries still, where voting is organized around networks of patronage, and there is a sense that IT was verifiable who you voted for, and that then facilitated systematic vote buying. Where a party could observe you voting for them and then reward you for doing so in small ways by, like buying you a beer at the polling place, or in big ways by giving new jobs when they are in office. Not everyone considers a bad thing.

And in today, not everyone considers about things like there are context in which that might be the way you think politics should be organized. But these sort of different use of the word progressive than we would use IT today, these like progressive ideals were growing that sort of like we need a more scientific in business like approach to politics. IT was the air where we are building these stories about everyone gets informed and then we make the best decision and its not about things like getting jobs in the administration and so like that.

And the australian ballet was implemented in australia, as I recall. I think the main motivation was to short circuit this process of vote buying in the U. S. Implemented IT. And there's some evidence that IT reduced the power of these local parties because they weren't able to reward people for revoting for them anymore.

I would guess to that I would lower participation rates.

but that's just yes, that's a major claim is made disciple tion rates in the U. S, first of all, are generally higher than people say. I always start by saying that and really bothers to me like I tell them partition and done like low in the us. two.

And like it's actually really ty in percent is IT that high? Is high? Yes, imagining when people claim it's low, I understand why they say and you can certainly point to elections were at lower than seventy percent, but our presidential turn rates are pretty done high.

In the one thousand nine hundred hundred, they were super high. And a retrospective claim on one claim on that is that it's about IT was an era in which highly organized, very professionalized partisan organizations were systematically getting people to vote in ways that we don't see today. There is a lot of other factors. So i'm not like confidence that that the explanation of IT seems like a part .

of IT that was attention.

something we didn't talk about, which I know Bailey has thought a lot about been involved in, is sort of like using this tech um and I think the appeal to using there is that we don't have access to these other mechanisms. I was involved in an effort to design one for meta, which is now being used for A I related issues in the motivation we had.

Was this a very valuable decision? The first one they met, a ran, was on, how should you define climate misinformation? As I said, I was like to go straight the most. And in the view was, this is a great one because it's super important, it's super valuation, its super controversial.

And then unlike for government, a tech company just doesn't seem like the right entity to make a decision on something like that and see you have this real need to go out and perhaps to get your users, the people living in your online community, to tell you what they think the rules should be. And then if you accept that premise that that's how we should do this, and that's Better than having a CEO decide this, then you have to start asking these practical questions about, like, well, how would you get the users to decide? And you could ask the users to vote.

That's like the first idea people had, like marcsa berrian a reference on facebook in the late the odds, uh, two thousand eight or so. And I just didn't work because you couldn't get enough people to vote. And so now thinking about this, you circle twenty, twenty.

We were like, okay, you wanted give this decision out to the people, the users. You can ask them to vote. The logical conclusion is you should use tradition.

And so I think it's a cool area for this because with a government you can construct arguments for why you're elected officials in battle initiated referendums. Injury duty are already kind of occupy in the space. I'm a little bit more of skeptic on like where the rumors for sortin there maybe there is some. But for a tech company making a decision, IT seems like it's the obvious right way to do IT because they don't have access to these other options.

Another question in the tech companies fear that I think would be super interesting from a research perspective. You i'm from computer science. A lot of people, they are think a lot about recommendation algorithms and what they're doing and what are their impacts.

And I tried to work on this ones, and where I got stuck was the question of what constitutes harm. That's a very subjective question, right? Because some people would say that facilitating a riot if IT allies with their political beliefs, for example, is not harm.

But other people would say that that is. And so if you want to like measure and study recommendation algorithms, you kind of need a determined notion of what constitutes a harm in a benefit. And that would be another example of something that I actually think people should weigh in on, because a lot of the harms and benefits that people think about our inherently political and very personal and reflect trade, ffs, in people's well being.

meet a lot about this with respect to the overstay board, which is, you need the science, in this case, to tell you, if you rank content, this wavers, is that way what actually happens? Because IT turns out our intuition about that are completely wrong. Every just like the age old old thing, like everyone thinks that ranking content chonodemaire is the solution to all their problems. And then any time you actually give people chonodemaire interference, they hate them, yes, and says, I got about what do with ranking are completely useless. You have to study IT.

And then given those facts, either than making highly valuation decisions, and I really like the example you use on riots because it's a perfect one where people form these views, that there's just a uniform principle you can apply and IT just doesn't work because and this happened after twenty sixteen, I became accepted by a large body of elites in amErica that the thing you needed to do was, like any time cordon cal violence was called for social media, you must remove IT. And the problem is there's lots of context in the world where the government is horrible and it's not good to say i'm sorry, you're not allowed to talk about your government in table. You not allowed to coordinate to meet somewhere to protest your government.

That's dangerous. That's obviously not what people in amErica had in mind when they were saying we should remove this kind of content. But IT was a huge, unforeseen, though obvious, some of us problem that came out of that.

And so IT, again, there are no easy answers. They are really hard trade, ffs, to make. How much do you want to prioritize protecting the status quo versus encouraging disruption, which might be dangerous? That's an unbelievably difficult trade, often not an obvious one to resolve.

Yeah, this is exactly the conversation that we had. What we got stuck. And then there are good riots and there are bad.

right? Everybody in ot thin, right? So precisely.

there's other harms too. I mean, there's, of course, the whole free speech, violent speech thing that's going on. And I think there's real arguments on both sides.

I am always surprised when you look at these kinds of questions about speech in content, all that. And you just look at the survey attitudes of americans IT is remarkable how wise and reasonable and moderate their views are relative to the right away and left wing. The lead conversation about these issues yeah and I think had the average american had more say in the twenty sixteen to twenty twenty four period over the conversation about social media content moderation, we would be in far Better place than we are. That's my totally great.

My survey of my uber drivers reflects that the average person is extremely reasonable.

This is a formal survey .

or a formal survey under everything. Is the other thing that I am kind of interested in potentially using assembles for as government accountability, but i'm not exactly sure what the right application of this would be. But I think there's a lot of cases where there's institutions in the government that you kind of want to audit.

What are you doing? How are you doing IT? Like is this really in line with the values that we think our government should have? And I don't think that there is a lot of accountants in some of those cases.

And so I think IT would be cool to see assembles there may be ranging from like involved with the F. D. A to like actually involved with governmental committee is just because I think there's a lot of distrust of these institutions among people. In part of the reason is because you can .

really see what's going on and because I think people are .

pretty good at looking at something in being handled that doesn't pass the sniff test. Know what I mean?

Yeah for sure for sure.

I've got a question about these citizens assemblies. Do you just want to get the snapshot view of all these ranking people from hopefully disperate backgrounds? Or is there lake in education process too? Maybe lag, you give people more information and then they change their views.

Is that measured? At what point does IT become like reeducation? And you're sort of programing people's minds differently through the process? I don't know.

My a personal view is that there needs to be a lot more research on what kinds of opinion change is caused by deliberately because right now, there isn't really even that many repeatable protocols for deliberation like they're all organised by different people. They are done in different ways. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence. There's some empirical evidence. I mean, I think jim fishkin has written at least one paper about opinion change that resulted from a deliberative pt, which maybe know about there.

But I think I think of like the famous I think IT was a play first, the book of twelve angry men, where.

you know.

yeah right. Like, you know, twelve people go in. Eleven people think a certain way, and by the end, have strong in the other direction.

Well, this raises a different issue, whether like one person, the way to persons aside. But then, I mean, in that case, that was a good thing. But IT may not always be.

But I think there's like a lot of ideas also about not just the information changing people's opinions, but the idea of kind of developing a collective identity, the idea that when you communicate with people who are different from you, from all walks of life in your society, you developed this collectivist attitude. When you start to care about the interest of your entire society, because you kind of identify as a part of IT. I do think there needs to be more research on that as well. I have attempted some, but it's pretty difficult to measure. So I would like .

just a couple of things on this. So one, that meta community forums had embedded in them some extremely interesting data that you can view its publicly available.

And what they did was basically survey the participants beforehand on a bunch of stuff like their view on the particular issue being discussed, as well as their views other things, as well as like that abuse on whether this thing was going to be crazy here, rather, is going to work or not, whether they were worried about getting the arguments with people during IT and so forth. And then they measured bunch of itself again afterwards. And they have in their report these really interesting graphs and tables of how people's views change changed before to after.

I think some of the learnings that I took out of IT, at least, were that people's opinions change quite a bit in the U. S. Part of IT.

Is pret bipartisan? Like people on both sides were learning, when people showed up in work in the social situation, they were much less adversarial, much more open minded than I think I would have expected. And they came out saying they'd liked the process itself too.

That's pretty compelling to me. You can go look at the data for yourself. I just want to raise.

There is a broader downside to this process, which I think is why would never ever makes sense to like use IT for everything not advocating for you, to be clear, but like uh, which is that we think a huge part of running a government and making collective decisions for society is the accumulation of expertise and knowledge and experience over time. And that can be a bad thing. Certainly in america, you can counter up these, I think, reasonable concerns that politicians become insured.

They become career politicians. And so but it's also under ably essential for getting stuff done, figuring out what he needs to be done, who wants what. And these citizen assembly are a very bad tool for that, because they meet once and then the people disappear.

They don't gain that experience. You're sacrificing the in exchange for something else of value, which is this representative veness. And then two, like elected politicians, they want to win reelection.

This is like the formal definition of accountability. And political science is like they are now worried about winning real election. And that the engine that drives them to go figure out what needs to be done, the people participating in the citizens assembly do not have that incentive.

They're already there. They've already gotten recruit or whatever, other than their own sense of civic duty or the social norms of being in the room, which I think are quite effective. There is no long run. I want to do the best job I possibly can so I can win. And there maybe lots of settings where that's actually quite problematic, where defected in some things, they have no skin in the game IT might be great when they just need to wait in on the issue of value. But if its a super difficult issue where you have to go wait in the weeds and listen to breaths from a bunch of boring scientists and stuff, the fact that there's really nothing on the line for you is a huge concern.

The ideal situation in my mind is that you have this group of people, and they have this wonderful property that they are not politically motivated. And IT also has a significant downside side. But suppose you could just put a bunch of scientists in the room and some policymakers in the room, and the people can say, europe, this is what we want.

These are the values that we have. You know what the form of the output is, I think, is really important. And if you could design the process of that, their output could then direckly say, okay, here's what we need to know from science in order to inform what we would recommend.

And then you talk with the policymaker and they say, you know what? This is not going to get past for these kind of complicated reasons. What do you think about this? IT sounds like a messy process, but I think you can think of IT in a pretty organized way of kind of clearing experts and getting feedback in computer science, this kind of like online learning. If you want to think about IT that way, I just think that there might be away to get everything you want.

Interesting.

should there be incentives for people to participate to help motivate people to make good decisions as well?

These like eyes stations see .

something like and maybe they'd have to pick a different word, think people they were to.

I mean.

I think you're getting up like a broader question of public trust in these processes, which maybe sounds unrelated. But I think and think that i've also been thinking a lot about leader of what information needs to be provided to the public so that even if they disagree with the outcome, they still trust that the process was done in a way that represents their entire society. And they would be either compliant if that's relevant with the chosen policy or maybe they're supported in referendum, even if IT wouldn't have been their first choice, especially if it's put the referendum after the assembly, which sometimes happens. That happened in canada, IT happened in ireland.

And when you think about what you need to release for the public, you have to start to ask yourself, what do you need to ask the participants of the process to report? And that starting to get at like ice station and kind of reflecting on maybe like what was your experience in the process? Did you listen to other people? Did other people listen to you? Was a truly deliberative as of a political scientists who would ask that question. And so I guess like injecting mechanisms of accountability and public transparency into the process may build in some of those incentives because what happened in the process will, to some extent, be public. Yes, preserving anonymity .

every time about yesterday is there's also downsides to identify the participants. A definite concern is that if you were to empower this body on a highly controversial in high stakes issue, then all kinds of powerful actors would have incentives to threaten, cajole, be the participants, and then having their identities public would be potentially bad. Yet at the same time, letting them be anonymous leads to doubts about whether the assembly was really even run at all, was IT run barely as well as then you lose this social value to the participant of getting to talk about IT after, I mean, jury duties. These are exactly the trade, ffs.

Yeah, this is like when you're trying to maybe charge a mob boss or something, and the people jury are afraid for their or something.

Yes, unfortunately that recently there's been quite a few these type of issues in the U. S, which has been pretty worrying. But i'd like to posit this moment to put in a plug e, for the T, V showed jury duty?

No.

oh yeah. The province of the show is absolutely incredible.

Is a Better than judge duty.

Well.

that's a the first show .

that shows is essentially reality T, V show, but not spoiling IT by telling this in which a real member of the american public was recruit for jury duty. And the only thing that he wasn't told was that the entire thing is fake. And all the other people, actors, this, just think of IT. They did fantastic job. And the trial just keeps getting .

the reasons this is going to destroy people's trust institution will be one giant cat fishing.

And so when you have to watch the show, it's amazing. It's amazing.

Speaking of TV, when we were all at dinner last night and much, if you notice.

but beneath cover, bash was at .

the table next. Are you kidding?

definitely.

And I looked him again .

with my eyes. So now I trust you.

deduction. The power of deduction .

watch .

I I so map that did not make us .

my .

table yeah anyway.

you never know you might serve .

on a jury with benedict now.

you punk. I want to take things back to the tech sector with these new technologies that are coming online between A I and web three, how might a governance system like this apply? What experiments are being run with shortage? With respect to these.

there are a bunch of experiments, as I mentioned, and i'd like to point out, that was the first one. Mata ran a community forum and having to do with A I guard rails and IT was very much a pilot so like the company received in public input from the, but though assembled people did not have binding authority to make any decisions, so as in that city, very much pilot. So that's true of most citizens in the real world too.

I am very pleased to observe that other A I companies have learned from that and so both OpenAI and anthropic have used whether its so tish on is not exactly clear, clearly inspired by mea's community form on A I and the way they work is different from one another. So in open a eyes case, they framed in a sort of getting democratic inputs again, for garden rails. And IT was a little bit, I would take closer to the communities.

M, in the sense that IT was about recruiting a representative group, I think IT was just americans. That is pretty interesting because IT was across a number of countries which required solving thorny linguistic issues. And seven or just pretty ool, the opening was similar in that sense, but IT was a little bit closer to like there's like a fine line that you can't really actually tell the difference sometimes between like sortin transparency and like a focus group which counts less fancy yeah, the anthropic looks quite different in the sense that I was sort of like integrated into their technology in a kind of fast way.

Were essentially this group of representative people again, I think there's was only americans was asked to help brainstorm a list of principles, a very long list like fifty principles. So one would be like make sure when you answer questions, keep in mind that some people might have different abilities and that you shouldn't answer. Assuming that a person can walk everywhere someone like that, it's a list of like fifty of those.

And then those are actually fed into the system prompt. Essentially, they're just like copy painted in the like system prop for claude and like the meta is a very early palette. It's not actually that amazing to like end up adding a few sentences to in from in the same way.

That is not that amazing to have a focus group, makes some recommendations and then the company can do what they want. But like these are early experiments and is cool to see them. They're sharing some properties in terms of randomly recruiting, represent people and then they are taking the outputs and in bring them into the systems in different ways.

I think something to add here is one huge chAllenge that we not solved is the deliberation takes place in plain text and then the output is currently playing tax. But in the end, even if the algorithm takes in plain tax like claud, when we go to actually measure if that intervention worked, which you're going to get as a bunch of metrics, you have to distal things into numbers and functions and statistics.

And as soon as you have to do that, you started to have to make trade, ffs, that were not even considered by the people in the process. And so the question is, how do you get the process to produce an output that is so close to the algorithm that like there is just not much gap that has to be filled in by technical people because any gap between where the assembly leaves off and the actual metrix that are going to be used to evaluate the system will have to be filled in undemocratically. I think this is a huge chAllenge when we have people wing .

in on technical systems. Yes, this is a huge and is an ongoing area of interesting evolution with the overside port. So the oversight is not a serial mechanism, but IT shares a lot of these features.

That is, a group of people. They actually have binding power over meta, which I think makes them especially interesting relative to these pilots. So they have the illegal authority to overrule the company on pieces of content.

And so they might order a piece of content to be removed, and meta is legally application to do that. But then there's this insanely complicated technical issues about like about this other thousands of piece of content that are a lot like this one, but a little bit different. It's the same video, but it's been tweak.

It's a similar image, but it's a little bit different and it's been a big area of pushing poll with the board is sort of like do we have access to the technical know how and data that we need to be able to judge whether the company has complied with our order or not? I think we're learning a lot from that given take that will teach us for A I and for these citizens assembly how you might go about doing that. So one idea that come out of that is like the oversight board should have access to its own team of engineers and data scientists who can actually check.

And the thing is they're work for the oversupply now for the company. And so those people will not have economic incentives to like, say, whatever the company wants them to say is the claim. So you could imagine replicating some those features for a citizen assembly .

in A I or on any topic, I mean, having those experts in the room kind of go back and forth and say, OK, this is how i'm translating your words into the technical inputs. Here's the output that happens when you do that. Are you satisfied with this or wrong with that? And kind of iterate in that process, I think that would be useful for many, many different topics.

And I just A, T, L is always details. I, an if at our political process, everybody generally wants the same thing, prosperity, fairness, liberty. But republicans and democrats have a different way going about that. It's all in the implementation details.

There's a huge debate that I don't think anyone has brought.

I don't know how you would study IT that needs to be studied, but there is a very deep question in online governance, which applies to aid social media to everything else, airbnb, spotify, paypal, any platform that's governing itself, which is if you're making decisions that are too consequential to society for you as a company to even want to make yourself, because it's actually in your interest to get out of the trap of having to make these really difficult decisions, is IT more important with the goal of getting society to trust that this process is fair? Is IT more important to give out the power to set the policies, which is pretty much almost citizen assembly are headed? Or is IT actually more important to give out the power to enforce, to decide whether the policies been enforced correctly or not? And if you talk to different people in tech work, in the people, deepen the reads, you will find people with super strong views on both sides.

So just to take medicine, its writing, medas, community standards and content policies. That's where the power lies. That's where you decide what counts is what in the other people equally deep, pending ids to be like? No, it's all about deciding how you're going to enforce in its scale.

The rules are not. The key thing is the enforcement at scale. And it's a huge deep question. Which of those is more important to give out? I actually don't think I haven't seen any academic work really show us the platform. Like how would you even go about figuring out which of those is more important? IT may be different for every platform .

in every problem. Um my sense personally is that you maybe want to give both because part of specifying the rules that you think should be followed is actually making sure that they are followed in a way that reflects your values that you are trying to communicate, usually in tax. I mean, what is the point of specifying what you want if you don't then get to hold the company accountable for enforcing IT?

I think the chAllenge is that people say writing these policies requires insanely deep knowledge and expertise, and you think they're easy to write in their unbelievably harder write, which is clearly true the same way. Like if you don't understand these M L systems, you can't possibly develop enforcement at scale in a way that's gonna any sense in the assert s information, a cemetery, I think what what dogs the the discussion of what to the give out yeah.

I think my optimistic view is that we just need to find new ways to work together, which is super hard. But I mean, talking to someone as a really technical person who in the weeds, trying to communicate with someone who is non technical. I mean, this happens in all spheres, like working with practitioners.

As the computer scientists, you're bring such different things to the table. And part of that is learning to value the contributions of the other group really seriously, even if they're different from your own and they don't speak your language. And you know, maybe sometimes it's harder you to do IT more work and more math, but it's just so fruitful.

And I think it's just an investment took learn to communicate across. And maybe we haven't really figured out how to do that yet because the incentives haven't existed. But I don't think it's impossible.

No, I don't think it's impossible either, is just hard to figure where to start. If you're running like a trillion dollar online platform, its a little bit risky like give these things out. If there's some risk, it's going to go catastrophic ally wrong because people don't understand how the systems work. That's the problem.

But maybe it's possible to nail the process in a load test cakes. I mean, because the process is not entirely separate, but somewhat separate from the stakes of the decision.

Yes.

this is an opportunity to an experiment and web three. And in surely there are lots of platforms that are securing lots and lots of value, but there are also you know million experiments blossom ing that are doing all sorts of crazy things and just seeing what works. I think that.

all right. No, I think and I think we're already learning a ton from those. I think there's a whole deep conversation.

We should have a baid on how you would implement sortin for web three because IT seems very, very interesting and not obvious how you duct the civil problem, which means that you can't sample people all that easily. Obviously, one area which people are working on is like creating notions of identity. They get you around the civil problem, at which point we could just apply Normal tradition tools perhaps. The other question is like, could you design civil resistance satiation in a way that would be useful?

I would be really interested in trying to understand other mechanisms that allow you to at least learn something about who is who, even if you don't have a perfect understanding of, you know, this wallet corresponds to this person or something. Maybe you would have a little bit more information. And what are the trade, ffs, between getting that information and what you can do with IT later because they think there's a lot of benefits to representation and power distribution if you know things about people. But in order to illicit that information in incentive compatible way, you may need to actually distorted power in ways that you don't want to say.

what do you mean by to store power if .

you want to incentivize people to reveal information about themselves? People in the system are represented just by coins or wallets. Are these things that are not really tied to an entity? And there's this problem where you don't want people to be incentivised to spread out all of their assets across many different wallets and pretend to be many people because then that makes them entitled to more power.

And you also don't want incentivize other kinds of dynamics like that. And so one way of may be doing this would be to actually incentivize people to consolidate their assets into one place, which would require maybe creating like really deep rewards for having more assets like steeper than what I colline's. And so that is like really distorting power to and people who have a lot of assets. But IT doesn't .

sound like I would go over quite well.

probably kind of bad. I personally am pretty allergic to that idea. At the same time, you can learn something about who people are because they've consolidated their assets, at least to some degree.

So now you can see entities a little bit Better. And so you gain information. And with that information, can you now, in an incentive compatible way, rebaLance ed power and maybe even do Better than you could have done with no information at all?

I like that sort of a precor. Before we would think about certain, let's think about whether we can create the conditions for incentivising the development of these kind of like stable identity is via these incentives to collect your stuff under one address.

You can think about in the strange wave, almost what act like an auction or something. If you want to create an auction for the opportunity to participate, if you structure the auction in a way that puts people in the position that they want to consolidate their assets, you can then learn about who is in the auction.

And the nice thing about sortin and then the subsequent process of decision making in web 3 is that in web 3 is totally viable to reweighting tes。 It's already being done. And I mean, the default, you have the power commensurate to the amount of wealth that you have because of the civil problem.

And so you now have two levers to tune, right? You can tune the probability or the opportunity to participate. And once people are in the room, you can tune the voting power that people have. So you've have two levels now, chance to participate and the weight that your vocal with. And both of those are just waste to talk power. And maybe there's some way to use both of those in order to do something Better than just Randy sampling uniformly the coins of the wallets, which will just allocate power proportional to the money that you have. So it's not clearly whether IT will work.

but this sounds like I could potentially be a perfect sort of area where Z, K, S, your own knowledge photography could come into play where you could prove that you are the owner of a number of addresses, but without revealing that necessarily till l, the broader public that .

and so you .

could maybe prove to the system that you are, who you say you are, you own these addresses, but you don't have to reveal yourself.

That would be even Better if IT. We're possible to just get information like that, not for free, but with, like, very clever photography and algorithms. I mean, the more information you can get for free, the Better. But if you can't get any, how do you incentivize its revelation?

I am, maybe we have to do another part.

okay. Well.

thank you both for joining. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

All right.