Re: can persuasive technology methods create tools/processes of radical neutrality.

I'm actively contributing to a tool called Pol.is[3]. It's designed to be consensus-building tech. It's part of some pretty rad democratic processes in Taiwan[1]. It basically just puts a more approachable visualization over some overwise intimidating (but basic) statistical methods of "dimensional reduction", like PCA or UMAP. This visualization lets any participant explore all the statements that each statistical group agrees and disagrees on together.

These "opinion groups" are just neutral statistical clusters. That feels important. It's just an integration of gut-feel statements that people perform a hot-take of: agree/disagree/pass. But it turns into this machine for everyone to independantly uncover the deep stories of each group. Once groups form, for complex but focussed issues, there are often 3-4 groups, even if you maybe thought it was just "us and them".

Light-hearted example: https://pol.is/3ntrtcehas

This tool does lots of interesting things psychologically.

One of my working theories of what makes it unique (I admit to having a few) is that it incentivizes the most passionate participants in a discussion to do the hard work of finding ever-more-nuanced "majority opinions" that everyone agree on under the differences. (These are elevated in the UI.) The nature of this incentive is up to the people who are designing the process in which the tool is embedded. For e.g., they might say that every "majority opinion" uncovered will shape an agenda item topic in a future livestreamed meeting of powerful people. So now you have the most passionate participants (who might otherwise shake apart concensus if their energy were directed otherwise), trying to craft clever statements to "manipulate" people in other groups to agree. But in essence, what this means is that those passionate people are exploring the consensus statements of opinion groups other than their own. They want to understand the group so that they can drop a statement into the opinion space between groups. But even if the intentions are not noble, and someone is just trying to "trick" others into agreeing, that participant is still doing deep work to delve into the theory of mind of the other groups, as evidenced through that groups consensus statements. Basically, the most active, passionate and potentially disruptive participants are encouraged to learn about their opponents in order to sway them, and in doing so, they accidentally indoctrinate themselves into empathic bridge positions. And these bridge positions are perhaps very important to stabilizing consensus and resolving conflict[2].

I'll admit that I wonder what a political or democratic system might look like if we used tools like this to elevate the voices of participants who straddle bridge positions between groups. Like what if we had democratic processes where instead of sending ambassadors from the center of opinion groups, we actually elevated those from the boundary spaces. (Maybe this was always the benefit of systems that use random sortition to elect leaders?) The selection of those people would be relatively politically neutral, as it's not a subjective choice, but a statistical one. Yes, one can probably "fake" being moderate, but to truly embody it, perhaps that changes you. And what effect would it have to send these bridge people (even transiently, for just one topic) into a position of power, to pass judgement?

[1]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi...

[2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_and_dan_ariely_how_...

[3]: https://github.com/pol-is/polis