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.

I have been heavily involved in politics all my adult life and the current national situation, both in the government and opposition, is a low point, the lowest I can recall – even the dark days of 1955, 1966, 1975 and 1996. It seems to get worse every week.  The 2010 federal election was the worst in my memory because there was no debate about ideas, simply an exchange of slogans and mantras (”Stop the boats!”).  The word ”because”, leading to an attempt at reasoned explanation, seemed to have fallen out of the political lexicon. We observed an infantilisation of debate, for example on refugees and climate change.  There is good reason to expect that the 2013 election will be even more depressing. I have lost count of the number of exchanges I have had with voters in Melbourne streets where they express their dismay to me about the state of politics, on both sides. Some burst into tears.

This reiterates a point in an Age opinion piece back in July:

Tony Abbott’s approach to the carbon tax debate is illustrative of a general collapse in the quality of rational discourse. The proposed carbon tax, a very complex issue, is being attacked with ruthless simplicity, ”Stop a toxic tax, based on a lie.” Is there a second sentence in this argument? Has the word ”because” fallen out of the political vocabulary?

Then James Button, pointing towards an explanation:

Strangely, the information age seems to have made grasping the truth of things harder. The shrinking of the broad base of political parties, their failure to tell stories that inspire and ring true, the increasing lack of penetration of the serious media, the rarity of deep analysis told in a compelling way, the 60-second YouTube videos that portray Julia as robotic or Kevin as a knockabout bloke who swears a bit much, the distrust and distractedness of we the people – they all promote misunderstanding. They are death to an engaged politics.

Neither however has much to say about how to fix or ameloriate the problem.  They seem resigned to it, or perhaps hope that describing the problem will somehow help turn things around.  In this they are like Lindsay Tanner, whose Sideshow was an entertaining book-length treatment of this territory but was also short on solutions (see the tepid final chapter).

Button suggests that “the information age” is to blame, at least partly, for the degradation of politics.  Yet it is also the only place where countervailing forces are likely to arise.  And indeed we are seeing a sudden proliferation of new forms of democratic engagement (Duval, Next Generation Democracy; Shirky, Here Comes Everybody).

Our own fledgling effort in this area, YourView, is aimed at (among other things) helping interested citizens to “grasp the truth of things” by making the key arguments on major public issues easily accessible, allowing citizens to express their view, and identifying the “wisdom of the crowd.”

I’ve created a list of modifications needed to make Head First Rails work with Rails 3.x.  It started out as just my own notes but decided to make it public since nobody else seems to have done this (including, disappointingly, the publishers and authors).

The list is incomplete and may contain errors.  If you can help improve it please let me know.

BTW for any Rails beginners working through Head First Rails, I strongly recommend the Rails for Zombies online tutorials.  They work very well in parallel with HFR.

(If any regular reader of this blog is interested why I’m trying to learn Rails, I’m just trying to get my head around it to help me in driving our new project, YourView.  More on that soon.)

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If the transition to sustainability requires the public wisdom, and if we currently have no practical and effective mechanism for ascertaining that wisdom, then we need to develop something better.

What would such a mechanism look like?  Here’s a wish list:

• It would generate public wisdom in the fullest sense – i.e. the collective considered opinion based on large-scale deliberation.
• It would be generating that wisdom on all major issues, including new issues as soon as they arise.
• It would make that wisdom available to anyone at any time.
• It would by inclusive in the sense of providing a practical opportunity for any interested citizen to participate, and would in fact involve participation of numerous and diverse members of the public.
• It would be politically neutral and completely independent of control by government, corporates or any other powerful interest group.

A National Virtual Forum

Surveying the wish list, it is obvious that any mechanism capable of delivering the goods would have to be internet-based. It would have to be, in other words, a kind of national virtual forum (NVF).

No such forum exists today.  The good news however is that a NVF plausibly could exist.   As everyone knows, the internet hosts innumerable forums already; many are focused on serious social, economic and political issues, and support deliberation that is often of surprisingly high quality.  While it is de rigueur to sneer at the quality of online discussion, and indeed much of it is rubbish, we should at the same time acknowledge that every day literally thousands of Australians jump online and vigorously debate the major issues of the day.

Further, and more profoundly, there is the fact that internet-based environments or systems have been proven capable of synthesizing collective intelligence or wisdom of various kinds.  Wikipedia, prediction markets, Amazon.com, and Stack Overflow are all well known examples.  To be sure, none of these generate collective rational consensus of the kind expected from the NVF.  How exactly that form of collective intelligence will be assembled or extracted is a major design challenge.  But important precedents do exist, and they do more than just prove that collective intelligence can be generated: they provide a wealth of insights and hints for the development of a NVF.

Challenges

A NVF would clearly face numerous major obstacles.  In my view, these are best regarded as challenges to be overcome rather than fatal objections to the whole exercise.   Here are four, with brief hints as to how they might be tackled.

1. Critical Mass.  The NVF will have to attract many and diverse participants.  To do this, first and foremost the NVF must be easily accessible – simple to use and available via any major channel (website, mobile apps, etc.).  It must be thoroughly and effectively integrated with social media (Twitter, etc.).   “Gamification” techniques will help deepen participants’ engagement.  Finally, a major media alliance will situate the NVF in the public’s attention (similar to, say, the Oursay cooperation with The Age).
2. Representativeness.  For its outputs to count as the wisdom of the public as a whole, the participants would need to be sufficiently similar to the public – i.e., to statistically represent the public.  On the face of it, this will be a problem if the NVF has an open-door approach, allowing its participants to self-select.  Despite this various strategies can be used to approximate and enhance representativeness, approaching full representativeness as a kind of limit case.  For example, assuming there are demographics on participants of a known degree of reliability, and a sufficiently large and diverse set of participants, it would be possible to select suitable subsets of participants to form the pool for the purposes of computing group wisdom.
3. Gaming.  If it builds any kind of momentum, the NVF will become a target for “gaming” (e.g. astroturfing) as groups attempt to manipulate the outputs to suit their own interests.  This problem can never by fully solved, but could be handled adequately.  The problem of distinguishing genuine from bogus participation is similar to the problem of distinguishing genuine email from spam, and Google has shown that this can be done remarkably well.
4. Credibility/Influence.  The main point of setting up the NVF is to help governments make the best decisions.  For this to work, governments would have to take the NVF outputs seriously.  I’m optimistic that this problem would start to solve itself just insofar as the NVF achieves critical mass and delivers its intended output – not because governments will be virtuous and do the right thing but rather because they will inevitably start to respond out of pure pragmatic political self-interest.  If the genuine considered opinion of the public on a major issue is available, and if it diverges significantly from the public attitude as expressed in the polls, then it will constitute another kind of political cudgel which can be used by either the government or the opposition.

Conclusion – Now is the time to start

Clearly, establishing a NVF of the kind described would be no mean feat.  Yet as I’ve argued, we need such a thing if we’re to make a smooth, timely transition to sustainability.

It is high time we had practical and effective mechanisms for knowing what the public really thinks on the major issues affecting it.   The ubiquity and sophistication of the internet and the systems built upon it provide us the opportunity to realise this democratic ideal.

The NVF proper will not be built in a day or even a year.  Rather, it will evolve in a serious of stages, incrementally approaching the full vision.

Eight years (from here to 2020) is probably a reasonable time-frame within which something worthwhile could be achieved.  Remember that Twitter is less than eight years old, and has already played a key role in democratic movements worldwide (e.g. North Africa).

This post is the third part of a draft chapter What Do We Think? Identifying the Public Wisdom to Guide Sustainability Decisions, in preparation for the volume 20/20 Vision for a Sustainable Society, being put together by the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute.

Previous:

• What do we think? 1: Public Attitude versus Public Wisdom
• What do we think? 2: Why we should know but don’t

Why?

First, because it will help governments to make the decisions we need them to make. The public wisdom can give the government the kind of “mandate” or authority it needs to tackle divisive issues and make tough decisions, even when doing so may be going against the tide of public opinion as measured by the polls.

Knowing the public wisdom on the matter may also help swing public opinion.

This potential benefit was behind Julia Gillard’s recommendation, in the 2010 election campaign, that a 150-person Citizen’s Assembly be convened to develop some rational consensus around climate change policy.  She apparently believed that identifying the considered opinon of the public on the issue would help break the political impasse.  The proposal had some intrinsic merit but was, as Lyn Carson has described, ridiculed from many directions, with such rejection driven by many different agendas and misunderstandings.   One lesson of this episode is that we need institutions and mechanisms capable of articulating the collective wisdom without requiring any support or approval from the powers that be (see below).

Second, because on many issues, the public wisdom would be best guide to the truth of the matter.  If we’re serious about making the right decision, then we must find out what the public really thinks.

Consider an issue like whether we should have more large dams to better manage scarce water resources.   This simple-sounding question sits on top of a complex web of issues, involving not just factual and technical matters but diverse competing interests and conflicting values.  Certainly many individual experts and interest groups are highly knowledgeable about particular aspects, and their input should be given due consideration.  However such folks always have a particular perspective; they see only their part of the larger elephant.  The wider the involvement – the more diverse and comprehensive the selection of participants – the more chance that all the relevant information can be brought to the decision, and the relevant interests and values recognised and accommodated.

Note that I’m not claiming that the public’s considered opinion is the best guide on any complex matter.  Many issues clearly are matters of specialist expertise, and the general public is in no position assess the merits of different theories.  An obvious example is the science of climate change.  Only the body of climate scientists has the knowledge and competence to settle the scientific issues.  Neither laypeople individually nor the public as a whole have any business trying to make up their own minds on this topic.

However on major sustainability issues there are no individuals or special groups in a uniquely privileged position to discern the truth.  These decisions are matters of interests and values as much as they are matters of knowledge or expertise, and the Australian people are the relevant authorities on what their interests and values are.

But we don’t know what the public wisdom is

The problem with the public wisdom is that we almost never know what it is.  That is, on any given major issue, we don’t know what the collective considered opinion is.  Indeed, that wisdom usually doesn’t even exist, in the sense that nothing has been done to put it together.

We do have many windows onto public opinion, but they’re all either ineffective (don’t deliver public wisdom) or impractical (too cumbersome and expensive).

For example standard opinion polls, for reasons described above, don’t tell us what the public wisdom is.

Well-designed surveys are a step up from standard opinion polls (Reser).  However, these surveys provide little opportunity for the respondents to engage in any sustained reflection, individually or collectively.   They are just more sensitive ways of identifying the attitudes people happen to have.  Ideally, such surveys would play a much larger role than they currently do in the gauging of public opinion.   However they can’t identify the public wisdom, in the sense described above.

Deliberative polling, and why it is not enough

By far the best mechanism we currently have for ascertaining the public wisdom is deliberative polling.  It is summarised on the Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy website as follows:

A random, representative sample is first polled on the targeted issues. After this baseline poll, members of the sample are invited to gather at a single place for a weekend in order to discuss the issues. Carefully balanced briefing materials are sent to the participants and are also made publicly available. The participants engage in dialogue with competing experts and political leaders based on questions they develop in small group discussions with trained moderators. Parts of the weekend events are broadcast on television, either live or in taped and edited form. After the deliberations, the sample is again asked the original questions. The resulting changes in opinion represent the conclusions the public would reach, if people had opportunity to become more informed and more engaged by the issues.

Over the past few decades, dozens of deliberative polls have been conducted around the world.  In Australia has had a handful, on topics such as republicanism and reconciliation.

Australia would benefit greatly if deliberative polls were held much more often, and if their results were more influential in major decisions.

However, deliberative polling, in its standard form at least, can’t meet the need to deliver the collective wisdom for the purpose of guiding timely decision making on major sustainability issues.

The critical problem is that deliberative poll is a cumbersome exercise and is costly to stage.  This has a number of consequences:

• There aren’t enough of them.  The large cost is one major reason there have been so few deliberative polls since the idea was first propounded over two decades ago.  It may be that the frequency of deliberative polls is increasing, which is a surely a good thing, but deliberative polling currently and for the foreseeable future can address only a fraction of the issues which properly ought to be guided by public wisdom.
• They take a long time to set up.  It can take six months or more to set up and run a deliberative poll.  The time from conception – the moment when it is recognised that having a DP on a certain topic would desirable – is far longer.  And of course most deliberative polls that have been conceived simply haven’t been run (yet).
• Once run, they’re finished.  The public wisdom identified in the deliberative poll is frozen in time.   It becomes outdated and irrelevant as circumstances and information change.

The latter two points may not be such a problem for relatively timeless issues such as whether Australia should become a republic, but they constitute a severe drawback when decisions need to be made quickly on issues which are heavily shaped by circumstances arising at a particular moment in history.

For example, should Australia adopt the Gillard governments carbon pricing scheme?  This is not the general issue of e.g. whether Australia should take action on climate change, and whether it should institute an emissions trading scheme.  Rather it is whether a particular plan should be adopted at a particular historical juncture.  The debate is raging as this is being written, and ideally we would be able to divine the collective wisdom right now.   A deliberative poll on the topic would be great, but it isn’t happening, and practically speaking couldn’t happen for many months.  By the time a deliberative poll was staged, it may well be too late.

A more philosophical quibble with deliberative polling is that, as standardly conducted, it doesn’t deliver public wisdom in the fullest sense.   The primary output of the deliberative poll is the poll results – i.e. a tabulation of individual opinions.  Granted, these individual opinions have become more considered through quality deliberation, and are thus worthy of more respect than the attitudes tapped by standard opinion polls.  However there has been no deeper aggregation of individual judgement into a coherent collective viewpoint.   It is as if the IPCC reports were to consist of an exit poll of climate scientists’ beliefs, rather than a carefully drafted and agreed statement.

This post is the second part of a draft chapter What Do We Think? Identifying the Public Wisdom to Guide Sustainability Decisions, in preparation for the volume 20/20 Vision for a Sustainable Society, being put together by the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute.

Previous:

• What do we think? 1: Public Attitude versus Public Wisdom

Coming up:

• What do we think? 3: A virtual forum, and why it might work