Because if you individually survey people, they tend to be extreme. They’re like “YIMBY! Yes, in my backyard!“ “NIMBY! Never in my backyard!“ But if you say to a group of ten: Only the idea that resonate in the room has a chance to pass out of the room, to go out cross-pollinate other rooms, everybody become MIMBY—“Maybe In My Backyard”—if you do this, if you do that. Right? So again there’s a function of the space, not the function of the people. But if you publish the result of such a deliberative poll, it looks exactly like a regular poll. And so all the existing ways you integrate polls into your democracy still functions. So the point here is not to reinvent some wild new form of digital democracy. It is to ensure that we can come to see each other on overlap, not on outrage, using pro-social design.

Keyboard shortcuts

j previous speech k next speech