bentrem

Ben Tremblay · @bentrem

20th Feb 2011 from Twitlonger

I finally used QuoraMy answer on "What startups focus on politics, elections, voting, etc?" > http://qr.ae/b40s < It's about governance, and caring!

Did you know that discussion / debate is not always an unalloyed good? (Hung juries are good example; talk sometimes just solidifies polarization.) If the point is to maximize ad revenue then that doesn't really matter. If the aim is to empower bottom-up / bazaar style exchange, then it's key.
The aspect that caught my attention: before the workshop on social justice and international trade folk had all sorts of wacky ideas. After, participants had far more confident opinions, and stated them far more clearly. But a) the views were more homogeneous, and worse b) very few folk could actually talk about the opinions they had. Something vital had gotten dumbed down.

So my approach *stealth mode* is to apply the most systematic propositional analysis to filter against sophistry/specious logic and fiction to do two things: first to show that agreement on facts is difficult but possible, and second (they key factor) to make space for individual's expression of just why data matters to them (subjective narrative). The core notion is that key points act as though "strange attractors in gnöosphere phase space" (see Hesse's glasperlenspiel) : there's no single point. Even when we do agree on a fact, most folk most times have their own view, and their own reason for caring about it. Hence "participatory deliberation". And yes, it can be treated with formal ontologies and XML and all the other semantic sweetness.

The first books didn't come c/w ToC, index, and footnotes. The first books didn't even have page numbers.

It's about praxis and techne. It's about more than optimizing for SEO. It depends on caring, as individual human beings.

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