What is the bare minimum a citizen needs to know in order to have a reasonable, informed opinion on a major public issue? This is not a trick question. Boiled down to the basics, a citizen needs to know what the issue is, the basic facts, and the key arguments for and against.

Consider negative gearing of real estate investments. Perhaps you think it is wise economic policy, or perhaps you think it an expensive rort. Either way, you really ought to know what negative gearing is (not everybody does.)  You should know critical facts such as how much it costs the government each year, who gets the benefits, and what other effects it might have, such as making rental housing more available and affordable. You’d need to be aware of the best arguments for keeping it on one hand, and the best arguments for abolishing it on the other.

Of course, having the bare minimum knowledge does not automatically lead to a reasonable opinion, and ideally a citizen would know much more than the bare minimum about the merits of negative gearing as one component of an efficient, equitable and sustainable taxation system.  My point is just that unless you have at least the bare minimum then your opinion is seriously ill-founded.

The trouble is, citizens often don’t have this kind of minimum knowledge. Choose an Australian adult and a major public issue at random and chances are that if they understand the issue at all they will be ignorant of key facts,  or misinformed and unaware of major arguments.

For example, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of negative gearing; indeed I’d even negatively geared the occasional investment. But when I sat down to draft a succinct summary of the pros and cons of negative gearing as a tax policy, I immediately discovered how incomplete and uncertain my knowledge was. It took the better part of a day of reading online, filtering, digesting, sorting and drafting to come up with a short written summary of what I needed to know. Only then did I really appreciate how half-baked my previous views had been.

Now, I will not rehearse here the reasons why this kind of ignorance is a problem for democracy. Nor will I heap blame on the usual suspects. Nor will I hand wave about how the schools, or the government, or the media, or someone should be doing something about it. Finally, I will not indulge any utopian fantasy of a fully informed citizenry.

Rather, I’ll make a simple suggestion.

It is not too hard for someone with suitable expertise to assemble the bare minimum information on a given issue in a short article with a fairly standard structure. You could call this a “backgrounder,” or an “explainer”. I like the phrase “issue clarifier”.

The suggestion is that for all major public issues, these clarifiers be produced and made easily accessible. Then, any interested citizen could rapidly obtain the most essential information on any issue whenever they wanted it. This alone wouldn’t solve the ignorance problem, but it would surely help.

An issue clarifier is a journalistic product. Writing issue clarifiers is a kind of journalism. Doing it well requires broad awareness of the political landscape, the ability to research, analyse and synthesize, and to write succinctly and clearly for a wide audience.  In our democratic system, we usually regard journalism as having a special responsibility for keeping the citizenry informed. Since issue clarifiers would obviously be useful in this regard, they should already be a mundane feature of the media landscape.

In short, my suggestion should be redundant. But it is not. Nowhere in the major media can you easily find such clarifiers. Very occasionally, something along these lines appears, but it is quickly lost under the torrents of news, the deluges of opinion, and the tsunamis of mass distraction such as sport, cooking, fashion, celebrity gossip, and so forth.

Why? Partly because issue clarifiers can be a bit  dull. They aren’t breaking news; they don’t exploit our appetite for the latest, freshest and most titillating.  Unlike opinion pieces, they don’t incite our tribal instincts. Being even-handed, they don’t comfort by stroking our prejudices, or enrage by challenging our convictions. The media survive by attracting attention, and issue clarifiers will generally struggle to compete.

It might also be argued that issue clarifiers are superfluous. The media already provide far more information and debate about major public issues than could ever be conveyed in a short issue clarifiers. Why add to this abundance?

It was once said that there are two ways to keep decision makers in the dark. One way is providing too little information; the other is providing too much. Similarly, the vast quantity of fast-changing news and vigorous debate in the media may actually be counterproductive, with respect to the goal of helping the public be basically well-informed on most major issues. Rather than educating, the net effect may be to bewilder and alienate; or to leave people under the illusion that they have much better knowledge than they do.

This can be seen as a market failure. There’s an obvious public good, the provision of issue clarifiers, not being addressed by “business as usual” in the Australian media. So, following the adage that a problem is merely a situation which has not yet been turned to your advantage, there is also here an opportunity. Can a new media player t this empty niche?

This is one way of looking at the YourView project…

Further, a clear majority of Republicans rejected the plan put forward by their own leadership in House.

These results indicate a kind of mis-alignment.  On this issue at least, a substantial portion of the US population supports the Republican party even though their own views conflict with the party position. Crudely put, they’re supporting the wrong party on this issue.

What about alignment more generally?  To what extent do voters support – and vote for – the parties whose platforms are the best overall fit to their actual views?

I’ve been searching for data on alignment in the Australian context.   For example, how many Liberal voters have sets of views which are in fact more similar, overall, to the platforms of Labor or the Greens?  Or would have, if they had a chance to systematically consider what their views were, independently of how the parties stand on those issues?

This being the real world, where nothing is perfect, we can assume that there is at least some degree of mis-alignment.   At least some people, probably unknowingly, vote for the “wrong” party.

But how many?  And in what direction, if any, does mis-alignment tend?

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any data on this.  However I did find something which provides at least a clue.

The above-mentioned survey uncovered a second kind of mis-alignment.   The Balancing Act plan had received the least attention in mainstream media’s coverage of the sequestration issue.  So the national public debate was framing issues in a way which tended to exclude the option which voters found most attractive.

What about Australia?  How well do the political debates in the national mainstream media  accommodate the range of views held by the public?

On his Pollytics blog, Scott Steel wrote a very revealing post about this, called “What Australians Believe.”  After a lengthy and nuanced discussion of polling results, he concludes:

What comes out from this broad snapshot is that what Australians believe about the role of government in our society and economy isn’t necessarily what our institutions believe or practice, and probably hasn’t been for a while. Our beliefs as a country are certainly far removed from many participants in the national debate that pretend to speak on behalf of our population and on behalf of our interests.

Whatever the faults, foibles or otherwise of these national beliefs – and this isn’t an exercise in either support of, or opposition to them – our national debates on the role of government in our society and economy are becoming increasingly isolated from what the majority of the country actually believes.

Our public debates assume that the benefits of privatisation have reached a conclusion – the public believes that privatisation was and is a catastrophe and that government should own a larger sector of the economy because we trust government more than large private sector corporations.

Our public debates assume that smaller government and less regulation is universally beneficial – the public supports substantially higher levels of regulation on just about any topic you care to name and struggles to find something they’d like the government to become smaller in.

Our public debates assume that economic reform has been such an obviously beneficial thing to ordinary Australians that it no longer needs explaining – the public believes that corporations took all benefits of that reform, leaving them with little more than a casualised workforce and reduced job security.

In short, Steel seems to have revealed a quite dramatic mis-alignment between the actual views of Australians and the national public debates.   If true, this strikes at the heart of our democratic system.   Steel pessimistically concludes:

If we keep having our national debates like this – excluding larger and larger sections of our population and ignoring what they believe – they won’t be national debates, we’ll just be talking among ourselves generating ever increasing quantities of public opprobrium, contempt and general unhinging. If you haven’t noticed – this is where we are at right now.

Indeed.  Recent years have seen a chorus of complaints about the quality of public debate, and at the same time increasing disengagement by citizens from political parties and from politics more generally.

The mis-alignment between public debates and what Australians believe is not of course the same as mis-alignment in party support and in the polling booth.  But it surely strongly suggests significant such mis-alignment.  It would be strange if people ended up always supporting the parties which best represent their views, when those views tend to be sidelined in public debates which frequently reference party positions.

But this is just speculation.  What I’d like to see is real data.  Does anybody know of any?

Also posted on the YourView blog.

Here are the abstracts:

Deliberative Aggregators for Intelligence

It is widely appreciated that under appropriate circumstances “crowds” can be remarkably wise.  A practical challenge is always how to extract that wisdom.  One approach is to set up some kind of market.  Prediction markets are an increasingly familiar example.  Prediction markets can be effective but, at least in the classic form, have a number of drawbacks, such as (a) they only work for “verifiable” issues, where the truth of the matter comes to be objectively known at some point (e.g. an event occurs or it doesn’t by a certain date); (b) they encourage participants to conceal critical information from others; and (c) they create no “argument trail” justifying the collective view.

An alternative is a class of systems which can be called “deliberative aggregators.” These are virtual discussion forums, offering standard benefits such remote & asynchronous participation, and the ability to involve large numbers of participants.  Distinctively, however, they have some kind of mechanism for automatically aggregating discrete individual viewpoints into a collective view.

YourView (www.yourview.org.au) is one example of a deliberative aggregator.  On YourView, issues are raised; participants can vote on an issue, make comments and replies, and rate comments and replies.  Through this activity, participants earn credibility scores, measuring of the extent to which they exhibit epistemic virtues such as open-mindedness, cogency, etc.. YourView then uses credibility scores to determine the collective wisdom of the participants on the issue.

Although YourView is relatively new and has not yet been used in an intelligence context, I will discuss a number of issues pertaining to potential such usage, including: how YourView can support deliberation handling complex issue clusters (issues, sub-issues, etc;); and how it can handle open-ended questions, such as “Who is the likely successor to X as leader of country Y?”.

Hypothesis Mapping as an Alternative to Analysis of Competing Hypotheses

The Analysis of Competing Hypotheses is the leading structured analytic method for hypothesis testing and evaluation.  Although ACH has some obvious virtues, these are outweighed by a range theoretical and practical drawbacks, which may partly explain why it is taught far more often than it is actually used.  In the first part of this presentation I will briefly review the most important of these problems.

One reason for ACH’s “popularity” has been the lack of any serious alternative.  That situation is changing with the emergence of hypothesis mapping (HM).  HM is an extension of argument mapping to handle abductive reasoning, i.e. reasoning involving selection of the best explanatory hypothesis with regard to a range of available or potential evidence.  Hypothesis mapping is a software-supported method for laying out complex hypothesis sets and marshalling the evidence and arguments in relation to these hypotheses.

The second part of the presentation will provide a quick introduction to hypothesis mapping using an intelligence-type example, and review some of its relative strengths and weaknesses.

Prediction markets of course only work for predictions – or more generally for what I call “verifiable” questions.   A verifiable question is one for which it is possible, at some point, to determine the answer definitively.  For example, predicting the winner of the Oscar for best picture.   This is what allows the prediction market to determine how much each player wins or loses.

The problem is that many issues we want addressed are not verifiable in this sense.

For example, decisions.  Would it be better to continue to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear ambitions, or should a military strike be launched?   We can speculate and debate about this, but we’ll never know the answer for sure, because one path will be taken, and the other never taken, and so we’ll never know what would have happened had we taken the other path.

Wouldn’t it be good if we had something like a prediction market, but which works for non-verifiable issues?

Amazon.com book ratings are an interesting case.   Whether a book is or is not a good one is certainly a non-verifiable issue.   Yet Amazon has created a mechanism for combining the views of many people into a single collective verdict, e.g. 4.5 stars.   At one level the system is just counting votes; Amazon users vote by choosing a numerical star level, and Amazon averages these.   But note that Amazon’s product pages also allow users to make comments, and reply to comments; and these comment streams can involve quite a lot of debate.   It is plausible that, at least sometimes, a user’s vote is influenced by these comments.   So the overall rating is at least somewhat influenced by collective deliberation over the merits of the book.

Amazon’s mechanism is an instance of a more general class, for which I’ve coined the term “deliberative aggregator“.   A deliberative aggregator has three key features:

1. It is some kind of virtual forum, thereby allowing large-scale, remote and asynchronous participation.
2. It supports deliberation, and its outputs in some way depend on or at least are influenced by that deliberation.  (That’s what makes it “deliberative.”)
3. It aggregates data of some kind (e.g. ratings) to produce a collective viewpoint or judgement.

YourView is another example of a deliberative aggregator.   Yourview’s aggregation mechanism (currently) is to compute the “weighted vote,” i.e. the votes of users weighted by their credibility, where a user’s credibility is a score, built up over time, indicating the extent to which, in their participation on YourView, they have exhibited “epistemic virtues,” i.e. the general traits of good thinkers.

Many other kinds of deliberative aggregators would be possible.   An interesting theoretical question is: what is the best design for a deliberative aggregator?  And more generally: what is the best way to discern collective wisdom for non-verifiable questions?

The main thing is they [Republicans] are in absolute, abject and catastrophic denial about a straightforward set of facts that is probably the most important set of facts we face as a nation, and as human beings on planet earth. They have turned their faces away from climate change in a way that is simply and utterly unforgivable. They now apparently DO feel entitled to their own facts, and they live, campaign and purportedly do their jobs in a zone of outright lies. Lies they have every reason to understand are lies, and lies that will almost certainly result in massive destruction and death. Exactly how would you be “fair” to these people?

In Australia unfortunately we have our share of Republicans.   And we’re much too fair to them.

But this example illustrates an important general point.

One of the most basic, widespread and damaging thinking errors is: failure to make a relevant comparison.*

Consider this comment by someone I’ll call “Peggy Balfour,” since that’s what she calls herself.

“Strategy ideation, formulation, and execution is essential for executives looking to drive business in today’s economy. At Columbia Business School Executive Education, we understand this need. To this end, we offer programs that equip executives with a range of tools and frameworks to define and implement their organization’s immediate and long-term strategies.”

Over half of Australians are dismissive about global warming.  That’s the apparent message from a survey on the ABC website, part of its “I can change your mind about climate” programming airing this evening (Thurs 26th April).

With over 20,000 responses, the survey appears to be unusually large and therefore to provide an excellent view into the Australian mindset.

Some might see these results as confirming that Australians are coming to their senses in rejecting the excesses of the “warmist” school.

Others might see the results as revealing the effects of a sustained campaign of disinformation and manipulation by powerful vested interests and their supporters.

They might also suspect that the poll has simply been gamed by the “denialist” crowd, jumping on and pushing their views in great disproportion to their real numbers.

Gaming the survey would actually have been quite easy.  There seemed to be nothing to stop one person responding numerous times.

But more generally, online polls and surveys are of dubious merit, since their participants are generally self-selected and therefore unrepresentative of the population at large.

That’s why, when The Age runs an online poll, it says “Disclaimer: These polls are not scientific and reflect the opinion only of visitors who have chosen to participate.”

Translation: Results are basically worthless.  For entertainment value only.

The ABC’s survey, for this reason, is seriously deficient as a perspective on what Australians really think about climate change.  Indeed it is disturbing that the ABC doesn’t openly admit these shortcomings on the survey site.

The ABC survey does have one merit: it enables participants find out what category they belong to (Dismissive, Alarmist, etc.).  Much like those “What kind of lover are you?” questionnaires found in popular magazines.

The deeper problem here is that uncovering what Australians genuinely think on matters of public moment is actually quite difficult.  Considered as a large group, “the people” doesn’t have vocal chords and can’t speak its thoughts.

Consequently, specially designed processes are needed to elicit this thinking.

Opinion polls, of course, are one common approach.  When properly conducted, they improve on mere online polls in that they at least canvass opinions from fairly representative samples.

But standard opinion polls have their own drawbacks.  The randomly selected participants are typically relatively ill-informed about the issue and aren’t able, in the polling situation, to give the questions any serious thought. Further, the attitudes of the ill-informed are often easily manipulated by the rhetoric doing the rounds at the time of the poll.

At best, these polls provide a statistical snapshot of “off the top of the head” responses.  They don’t ascertain the considered views individuals would have if they were better informed and able to reflect properly.

Much better are the kind of careful surveys conducted by psychologists, such as the 2010 Griffith Climate Survey by Joseph Reser and colleagues.   These by design elicit more thoughtful responses and provide more nuanced insight into people’s perceptions.

That survey found that “less than six per cent of people surveyed were sceptical about climate change”. The stark difference between this finding and that of the ABC poll should give us pause.

However even the Griffith-type surveys are only aggregating what individuals come up with in the 30-60 minutes they spend answering the questions. They don’t provide the collective view, i.e. the view that we would develop as a group if we had the chance to think together about the issue, pooling our perspectives and debating them thoroughly.

The deliberative democracy movement, led in Australia by pioneers such as Lyn Carson and John Dryzek, has long been urging that in a genuine democracy, governments should be guided and constrained by this kind of considered collective view; and that it is best ascertained through a well-designed process in which representative groups of ordinary citizens – “mini-publics” – convene and engage in extended deliberation.

In recent decades, around the world, many such exercises have been conducted.  They reliably show that the considered collective view differs from the results of ordinary opinion polls. They show that under the right circumstances, many people change their minds in informed ways.

Australian democracy would be much healthier if such exercises happened far more frequently and played a much more central role in serious political life.

However there is a prohibitive practical problem with the standard deliberative democracy approach: its exercises are costly and cumbersome, and so happen too infrequently.

One challenge for twenty-first century democratic politics is to design and implement better processes for identifying what we think, not about personalities or political intrigues but about major public issues.

Like the ABC survey, such processes will need to be easily and inexpensively implemented, which means they must be conducted online.

However, like deliberative democracy, they must also able to provide genuine insight into what Australians really think, i.e. the considered collective view.

Reconciling these two demands is far from easy, but the new era of social media is rapidly throwing open new opportunities.

Taking the broadest historical view, the new communication platforms may enable democracy to return, in some key respects, to its Athenian roots – and, indeed, improve on the Athenian model: something that modern representative democracy has always sought to do, but has managed only very imperfectly.

YourView, of course, is our foray into this space.

Both the lead article and the interview transcript give good overviews of the project.  I particularly recommend the interview because, being longer, it gives a more comprehensive perspective, though in a conversational tone.

In its first half, “Cultivating Deliberation for Democracy” discusses the failure of “deliberation technologies” to substantially improve public deliberation in either quantity or quality.   To be sure, new technologies have made possible massive quantities of deliberation of a very public kind (e.g. in public forums such as comments in the New York Times).  However those technologies are not specifically deliberation technologies.  Nothing about them is specifically tailored to support deliberation as opposed to other forms of public conversation.  Meanwhile, deliberation technologies properly so-called – including my own previous efforts – have notably failed to be adopted by the public at large.  I explain this by pointing out the obvious: people don’t like to be “boxed in” by the kinds of constraints typically provided in deliberation technologies.

The second half gives an overview of the YourView project.  YourView is a deliberation technology, but tries to take a rather different approach, aiming to cultivate rather than construct quality public deliberation. YourView provides a forum in which participants can vote and comment on major public issues.  What makes YourView distinctive is that it attempts to determine the “collective wisdom” of the participants.  It does this by calculating, for each participant, a “credibility” score, using data generated through their participant and others’ responses.   In more philosophical terms, YourView attempts to determine the extent to which a participant is exhibiting various “epistemic virtues” such as open-mindedness.  Credibility scores are useful in two ways.  First, they enable YourView to calculate the collective wisdom by weighting contributions by credibility.   Second, they drive more, and more thoughtful, engagement on the site, because high credibility translates to status and (in some ways) power in the YourView forum.