[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[jon zingale]

Included is a link to the "Undivided Attention" podcast where the guest is
Taiwan's Digital minister. She discusses the progress and successes that
Taiwan has made in producing *digital democracy* software, implementing
*radically open transparency* at the government level, and building search
engines whose underlying dynamics combat *political polarization*. Since the
discussions up until this point have been desperately lacking for working
examples, I hope to move the discussion out of the speculative with this
offering:
https://your-undivided-attention.simplecast.com/episodes/the-listening-society-yZ1PBlPF

A year or so ago, Nick and I were discussing what could be done to
incentivize individuals to engage others across their ideological/political
boundaries. While Nick was in favor of implementing a *richer* notion of
*moderator* into debate platforms, I aimed to change the underlying dynamics
of our suggestion engines. Suggestion engines today are known to facilitate
silo-ing by identifying others like one's self and offering the individual
more of the same, and a good deal of the literature supports the observation
that iterating on this process leads to dense delta-like concentrations of
what an individual tolerates or believes. An approach that I find actionable
is to extend the suggestion process to model individual tolerances, suggest
content at individual tolerance boundaries, and incentivize the extension of
those boundaries.

Tang explains that in Taiwan, they built suggestion engines that promote
content more when the content is agreed upon by individuals that typically
disagree. While I cannot speak to the efficacy of this approach, I am happy
to see similarly dynamical attempts to solve the problem. For those that sat
through the 3-hour anti-trust senate hearings, it is clear that without such
a sophisticated approach, the government will attempt to solve the problem
by demanding *case-by-case* that *such-and-such* result be *more fair*.
Additionally, for those of us in the tech business, it is clear that such
platforms are capable of what they do exactly because they are automated. To
hire 100,000 individuals to moderate Facebook is simply not a solution, and
to Nick's point, especially not a solution under the current
poverty-stricken conception of *moderation*. This means that solutions will
need to be implemented at a systems level and through studying the dynamics
which arise from a platform's actionable behaviors and policies. I am
thankful that some nations are taking the problem seriously enough to take
action and that soon we may have working examples of *digital democracy* at
scale.



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