Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] [MG] Pirate Party Germany - "Opinion Forming Tool" (Working Group) - Next Meeting

[Pietro Speroni di Fenizio <metagovernment AT pietrosperoni.it>]

Hi Marc,
thanks for the question. And correctly posed. In fact I … disagree
with the schema. :-)

Let me clarify my position.

It seem to me that for your schema to work you would have to accept a
series of data and information and a description of the world which is
independent of the observer. This is fine in the scientific domain
(yes also in quantum computing!). Where it really is not ok is when we
are speaking about society. The way in which you describe events,
social events for example is intrinsically tied to your point of view.

I know this sounds philosophical but I will enter into examples very soon.

People who think there is a well external description of the world
will generally look for an external ontology. But ontologies are top
down creatures, because making people with different ontologies speak
is such a complicated issue. Possible but unreasonably complicated.
Plus you hav n people, you have n(n-1)/2 ontological translations to
make. So to avoid all this ontologies are generally set up from above.

The opposite are folksonomies of tags, where people tag objects, and
for each object tagged you have a position in an n dimensional simplex
( http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2005/05/25/tag-clouds-metric/ ). And in
between you have situations like stakoverflow where people are only
allowed to use few tags, and people with higher experience/karma can
define new keywords. I find everything except the pure folksonomy
ethically undefendable.

But the problem does not lie only in how you classify information, but
also in how you contextualise it. Contextualising situations,
informations, questions, and answers have an enormous influence in the
way in which they are being received, and acted upon. This is why so
much work is being done on this level bu everybody. Politicians use it
all the time, and so do lawyers. "Was Iraq attacked or liberated?".
"Yesterday a kid in Italy what taken by the police because the mother
would not permit him to go with the father. "
No, "Yesterday a kid was liberated" (words of the father, a lawyer, at
the television). "The kid was abducted by the italian gestapo" (a
tweet I found yesterday).

Things are being used all the time in the dynamic between the sex: "do
you fuck someone or fuck with someone or have sex with someone or make
love with someone?"

Some biases are obvious and easy to spot. Others are harder, and
others are really unavoidable and depend on a different understanding
of what reality is. If you believe that life begins at the moment of
conception then abortion IS an assassination. If you think life does
not start until the fetus has a certain complexity, then it IS NOT and
it depends on when you are doing it, if you believe the fetus inside
the body of the mother is really part of the mother, then it makes no
sense to have anyone but the mother decide. And so on.

Look at the abortion discussion, pro-life versus pro-choice. No one is
against anything.

The idea that there is a neutral point of view is unfortunately a myth
for several topics. Which is why WIkipedia is such a cool tool when
you speak about science, but starts to break down (forcing editors to
lock pages) when you move to politics or fringe believe systems (where
pages are simply speed-deleted).

How you pose the information has an enormous impact on how questions
are then posed, and how decisions are made.

So, no I do not agree that there is an information level that can be
separated from the discussion and decision level.

What can be done is a system where users ask factual questions from
time to time about data. The data are fed into it. But then how those
are interpreted contaminates the data into becoming part of one point
of view or the other.

And to answer your next question, although there are people who might
be uninterested in a topic enough to have a more objective point of
view, I don't think this is always possible. ANd sometimes people who
seem to be so are really not. And can give a spin to the story which
is just easier to spot.

Cheers,
Pietro


On 12 October 2012 07:12, marc <marc AT merkstduwas.de> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> With regards to your little 'misinterpretation' where to locate Vilfredo in
> the process, I would like to invite you to think about a 'classification'
> schema for our projects/tools/concepts.
>
> IMHO we are all pointing into the same direction, but on different tracks.
> That's a good thing, as long as all tracks are connected to eachother in
> some way ;o) To make this connectivity easier and more intuitive, it may be
> helpfull to have a kind of classification to put the projects/tools/concepts
> on.
>
> My very rough understanding of our domain is the one below. Please feel free
> to correct and enhance my very first draft:
> http://meinungsfindungstool.piratenpad.de/Decision-Making-Standard
>
>
> Decision-Making (Willensbildung) as the overall social and political process
> could be devided into to following areas:
>
>
> 1) Information Gathering
>
> 2) Opinion-Forming
> 2.1) brainstorming
> 2.2) discussion
>
> 3) Decision Forming
> 3.1) voting
>
>
> Once we agreed on such schema, it may be easier to identify the differences
> and the similarities of the projects/tools/concepts. And yes of course, it
> is a many-to-many relation between projects/tools/concepts and schema
> category.
>
> What do you think?
>
>
> Cheers
> marc
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Michael Allan
> Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2012 9:36 PM
> To: Metagovernment Project ; Piraten AGMeinungsfindungstool
> Subject: [MG] Pirate Party Germany - "Opinion Forming Tool" (Working Group)
> - Next Meeting
>
>
> Sorry Pietro, You're right, Vilfredo's not for brainstorming.
> It's for opinion formation and decision more than ideation.
>
> Pietro Speroni di Fenizio said:
>>
>> As the creator of Vilfredo I just would like to say that I disagree
>> with it being viewed as a brainstorming medium. If I wanted to make a
>> brainstorming system I would do a completely different system. No need
>> to use Pareto Front, go through iterations, find a consensus...
>>
>> It is a decision making system that works for specific type of
>> questions for groups with 4-15 people.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Pietro
>
>
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