S4 - Ep. 17 Plurality Book with Carl, Lillian, Shaurya

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season every couple months this season is lean mean Capital allocation machines Capital allocation is the process of deciding how to spend or invest Financial Resources with web 3 we can achieve not just Financial returns with those financial resources but achieve impact equals profit we can build more scale precise Democratic transparent Incorruptible and Global Capital allocation machines what are the coolest experiments who are the people who are doing it that is the theme of this season of green pill my guests today are

Sharia duie lilan Wang and Carl Kone they are some of the community members and co-authors that are supporting the launch of a new book entitled plurality the future of collaborative technology in democracy this book was written by Glenn W Audrey tang and the plurality Community Carl lilan charia are members of the plurality community and they are here today to talk about the book launch and to talk about some of the themes behind plurality so the book is available today on Amazon and plurality domnet so if you want to go ahead and open up a browser and open up plurality domnet that's where you can read the book online learn about the plurality

movement and um I think we're going to get into some of the high level Concepts on this episode so I think you're going to enjoy this episode what's up y'all great to have you on the show maybe we'll start off with a brief round of introductions starting with you Carl hey nice to see everyone here I guess I'm a frequent contributor to the the green pill podcast I'm one of the contributors to the plurality book I was very excited about it because I think that there's such a need to explore the whole design space around plurality and there was an opportunity to bring data into that conversation so I kind of reacted to one of Glenn's

tweets and said I'd love to help out any way that I can and next thing I know uh he kind of put me in charge of of helping with the the data and some of the styling around all the the exhibits and the visualizations for the exhibits that were in the book um so I think it's a really important topic I think that data is a very important component of of how we think about issues that affect Us and how we surface it and create narratives around that and it was just a really exciting way of of doing that out in the open with other contributors my day job I I do kind of data and data visualization for a project called open source Observer thanks Carl lilan you want to go next yes I'm a you are ux designer uh from Taiwan I'm based in New

Zealand currently and um I start to uh be involv in the plurality Community since end of last year so I met tofu which is another designer shout out to tofu he has been doing like a lot of like branding and like logo for uh basically logo you see everywhere it's from him and um so I'm collab with him and also Glen to work on the cover book cover and also several uh Graphics diagrams in the book so I just find this whole idea of like plurality is like very interested because um it's just a a totally different way of thinking and and feel like it's a it's a way of like collaboration that I have

never thought before and yeah so I really think that it's very important for like digital identity for like as a citizen of Taiwan like we always see like there's some threat out there and like we want to find our our way to survive and I think plurality might be an answer for it and also our digital Minister was who is also the part of the author Audrey and uh we all know like she's like very ad Advocate on the on all of the like democracy of like um collaboration things so I'm just really excited to be part of it and see how I can contribute to the community great last but not least I my name is Sharia

um I lead the publicity and marketing work for the plurality book um I learned about the book in back when I worked at Microsoft I actually found out about it through the platform that it's governed by called G forget um um G forget now called git rules I believe um is the governance platform for the book and so it's kind of being beta tested by developing the plurality book itself so it's the the plurality book is an application of what I would consider to be a plural technology in git rules and um similar to Carl I saw a tweet from Glen um thought the book was fantastic got in touch and um yeah I was put in charge of PR and marketing and uh since then we've put together a European which

is set to kick off in the next couple of days we're hitting about five cities I also LED some of the work surrounding endorsement sourcing and then also publication cordination um a little bit of the website um wording and generally serving as an ambassador for for the book so uh we can explain what these concepts are why they're relevant today and um trying to spread the word about taiwan's journey in nurturing his democracy and Audrey Tang's work being super successful in that end yeah one thing just to plug actually is that um Shia and lilan and I we've never actually met or spoken before this is our first time doing that and I think it's probably true for most people that work on this book is that they only collaborated either kind of directly in on git or in the Discord chat and so all

of this all this work was done basically with with very little synchronous communication yeah it's interesting to see all pushing the boundaries of I'm going to call it networked book writing or network movement stimulation here and maybe plural movement stimulation here since yall have kind of very different backgrounds I'd be curious to just tee us off with the with uh the question what is what is PL plurality and then that'll give us some more threads to pull from there so what is plurality and we'll go in reverse order of the introductions that we did so go ahead chario it's a great question one that comes up a lot the best way that I've settled on describing it is something is plural to the extent that it enables collaboration across social difference so something can be more plural

relatively to something that is less plural and um what the book discusses is applications of pearl Technologies specifically so a popular one that comes up is quadratic voting that's something that's been integral to I think the git Point Community more broadly and whatnot but um generally it is something that uses a Network's diversity for growth rather than polarization or inequality which is what previously um diversity has been used for so that's probably the best way of it to make it short and sweet it is something that enables collaboration across social difference I guess it's my turn and I totally agree with what Shia just described and I think um for me that plurality is like

what I mentioned is the new way of like thinking and collaboration and probably is a third way that describing the book is like uh we're building this Corridor of a narrow I think it's called a narrow democracy of the corridor that is like a against the authoritarian and against with like probably just AI domination and it's a way that only can be done by having multiple people and like plurality like plurality also means like multiple people like in mandering so it's like only a group of only you have the willness from a group of people and like to hear from everyone that can make this thing happen yeah so like the technology

how to how to achieve that and what is uh what is the background behind it I think it's all like written in this plurality book yeah what I would add is that I it probably wasn't something that I thought about um very much until quite recently it was something that I was affected by but it didn't really give much mind space to the idea of of plurality itself and what I mean by that is that it's very easy to seek out Echo Chambers and to seek out you know confirmation bias and people that have have the same views as you and it really takes delate effort to look for diversity and viewpoints and actually to be able to build the muscle where you can hold different opposing or seemingly opposing viewpoints in your head at the

same time and actually try and reconcile some of the differences or you know perspectives so I think like at the at the individual level it's like the ability to have multiple perspectives and kind of put them on a even playing field in like a group or Society it's actually kind of seeking out that like intellectual diversity and different viewpoints and being again you know comfortable with that um and then like at the nation state level at the country level it's um you know recognizing that you need there to be opposing political views you want to prevent there from being too much polarization and that's kind of a necessary ingredient of having a a liberal democracy would love to talk about some tangible examples of

plurality out there I think it's one thing to talk about this in abstract but I I think that examples will help ground The Listener of plurality and practice and I I'm wondering for each of you what comes to mind when you think of a community that's doing this well obviously Taiwan is an example there's probably some examples in web 3 but uh what what are your favorite examples of plurality in in practice to ground The Listener in a practical example and uh whoever has an answer can go first on that one I can probably go first cuz yeah I I am like I start involved with the T Community uh like the Taiwan da Community like from last year and it's a

very interesting group of people so they start that group um called gol zero so it's a group of people that um like honestly anyone can join the group and it it's mostly for like any public goods related stuff so if you say that you feel like you want to make our politicians like the income more transparent to people you can say say yeah I want to create a project and can probably somehow use some technology and to make this happen like like we can I I I'm the person that host a group and I want I want to enjoy anyone that have the ability or have the same um also want to contribute to this idea to join

and then it's it's kind of like they are many many small groups like this that want to achieve on different kinds of issues like like want to take on different kinds of issues and want to or they feel like very passionate about of one uh topic then they can just like create it's basically on slack so you can just create a slack channel on this go zero slack uh workspace and then anyone interested can just join it and then you can like or organize like some online Meetup and things and then there are like many many groups of people have already achieved like uh building websites together or like just holding like online offline events and even just like a like a book club kind of things

and like trying to understand more about like web 3 or Dow and like just like different ways of collaboration and I think that's a very beautiful example of how plurality is anyone else have an example if not I can move on to NE the next question we don't have to have every guest answer every question but if you have one then please please speak up I would say um Pol is a great example of a plural technology for those who don't know what polus is it's an open- Source platform where communities can share their opinions on a certain topic and polus will aggregate these opinions and then cluster them uh into different groups that uh represent shared ideals between certain groups of

people so where before the conversation was many individual notes speaking to each other and Technology didn't point out explicitly where people would agree now with polus you can take those same text inputs and um highlight the agreement amongst what would be otherwise really diverse individuals so it kind of brings us closer together shows us where we agree and also ultimately where we differ and um it highlights where we agree more so it's a a more pro-social form of discourse that um I think is really true to this to the nature of plural Technologies more generally Carl anything come to mind if not I can move on to the next question yeah let's move on I think those are

great examples great why do you all think that this book is important right now what is the moment that we're trying to meet by putting the plurality book out there yeah I'm happy to take that one I think that there's a couple things here that really resonate about the mission of the book so number one I think we feel that we're at an age where polarization on various axes is like really really high which is kind of surprising given that we have so much more information at our disposal and we've somehow found a way to suppress the the desire to kind of you know make sense and hold that information on different levels and are actually using that to seek out information which confirms our biases or allows us to reinforce views or find other people that think the same thing as us so we

definitely have to rebuild the muscle of being able to appreciate diversity of viewpoints and kind of challenge some of our you know animal instincts and desire to hold on to beliefs that that feel good but we you know are losing out on that richness and diversity of thought so I think like the the time is very important the part that I was particularly interested in was just how data plays a role in you know making sense of the world around us and you know bolstering or challenging different narratives so we're at a time right now where you you can take issues like climate change you can take covid you can take health care costs you can take education you can take different policies and there's enough data out there where anybody could basically find some statistics to reinforce certain

views and they can be very um clever about how you show the data or put a caption on top of it and so we're at a point right now where we've kind of gone from viewing data as like the truth to actually being much more skeptical of where the data is coming from and the you know motives behind sharing that particular source of data so what I thought was important about the book is actually any data that we use any exhibits that we include the the audience or the the the reader of that should be able to understand where this is coming from and even have the ability of of transforming the data um to test different ideas or to visualize it in different ways or to give it their own caption so there there are a number of examples where we tried to take some

exhibit that some other author had created and replicate it and then ensure that anybody else who wanted to take their own spin had the source code and the ability to do that I'd like to think that more projects can do that type of thing where they kind of put the data out there they encourage people to to kick the tires on it and give it multiple interpretations and so for this particular case study uh I feel that like you know in addition to having a plurality of ways of translating or interpreting or applying the book the data that was backing up some of the assertions should have that same that same feature thanks anyone else have something to add yeah I think that the plurality book is important today because there's this increasing sense that most folks have regardless of tech

literacy or academic background but there's an understanding that technology is impactful and if nobody's driving it it will inevitably harm some portion of our culture and Society in ways that we cannot control and can eventually reel in and so you can see that in the ongoing discourse with things like AI regulation or what are we going to do about Tik Tok in the United States how are we going to regulate crypto moving forward and um election Integrity conversation so these it people understand that technology is consequential the the problem is that while we can agree that something needs to be done we don't typically Center the

conversation around the right things and mainly what what I refer to is outdated governance models models that don't work in the favor of the people that end up interacting with and are ultimately most affected by these Technologies so what the book has done is it gives a fresh perspective and I think really intentional discourse about what are the changes that we need to make and then how can we make them and while it's not saying this is the only way to do it it does do a great job of showing how Taiwan has accomplished this and how Audy Tong has been a Pioneer in this space and um it discusses those learnings and I think is a great starting point to have productive discourse about what do we do about

these Technologies yeah I think it's a that's a really like profound point that you made there because if you look at how most people approach these things they will maybe have the same root cause and they might have the same end goal in mind like obviously nobody wants you know AI to exterminate the human population like that that's an outcome everybody can agree is is bad and obviously you know we we now have the ability to you know maybe it's a decade maybe it's less than that maybe it's longer but to to create AGI um so we can kind of agree on both of those things as being you know the beginning and the end but what we do in the middle is like the important part to decide on and so even just you know creating a solution space where people are able to surface

different plausible implementation approaches and ideas and you can actually you know use something like polus or other tools to make sense of that and identify common ground that is very different than just kind of you know buckling down and viewing these people as a set that you have no common ground with regardless of how you see the issue I'm curious what Drew each of you to the book we all have scarcity of our time and many things that that we can we can work on uh what Drew you to the book and and why was was it important to you to to contribute to this book what drew me to the book in the in the very beginning was this this notion that this is a living breathing document that is open source and I can

be one of many people that contributes to it in some manner so I came looking to get my hands dirty with open source and Once I arrived I found much much more meaning in in the work that was being done I think that the conversations that were being had are are so important for today and ultimately um as I got deeper into it seeing more and more people join the Discord and raise their hands to volunteer and offer perspectives and engaging meaningfully with the project is I think ultimately really inspiring and so that's what drew me to the project and and what kept me around for me it's also like I'm just very intrigued by the idea of the Open Source book and also like it feels very

rewarding when I receive those re like the points um even though I didn't know that what I can really do with those points at that moment but then later I think now uh like recently we start to see like oh I can actually like vote on the future of the books next priorities or and I think it's it's kind of let me can imagine if this can work for a book how possibly can work for like other stuff or like even a network State uh kind of concept so yeah it just I'm I'm just like I want to experiment this like really new thing that is happening yeah yeah I think I felt similarly so you know both Glenn

and and Audrey were were big heroes of mine I've I've heard them speak before I've been very inspired by many of their ideas I I also think like specifically in the case of of like governance the idea that right now like in the US I'm guessing there aren't any serving politicians that have ever committed to a GitHub repit before that like that section of the population is so underrepresented despite the fact that technology has such an important impact on our lives and even more so going forward so even taking something which is less technical like like writing a book and you know doing copy editing but being able to see the history of an idea the history of a paragraph how those evolved how that's been translated by different people I think that's such an important way of thinking about law and

you know the the codes that we use to to govern societies you know since learning more about it I would actually kind of see what Audrey was doing on GitHub and what types of commits they were making and a lot of it is like the type of stuff that I imagine civil servants and politicians are doing around the world where they are kind of reviewing laws they are translating things they are clarifying things and doing that work out in the open where like the entire Society can see it and comment on it and engage just seems like a Natural Evolution for where democracy should should go uh so anyway it seemed like a pretty irresistible Call to Adventure a call to Adventure I I love that this season of green pill podcast is all about Capital allocation basically the

the thought is we can now do Capital allocation on chain it's programmable it's scalable are we going to build more precise scalable more democratic Capital allocation mechanisms and they'll also have all the benefits that blockchains have transparency immutability globalness programmability and and so I guess uh the question that's on the tip of my tongue is what are what will plural Capital allocation look like it's one thing to build plural cultures and plural uh education but how could we build more of a plurality of capital allocation and Carl since I think you're the one who's down the web three Rabbit Hole the furthest I'll I'll I'll toss that over to you I mean I think what's what's very

interesting I wish more people who are outside the space understood is that on the one hand what what's happening in in the crypto space is that you have you know Financial experiments you have economic experiments that are happening but then you also have a lot of governance experiments that are happening so new ideas new ways at arriving at consensus new ways of kind of determining the boundaries of a community and who has a say over decisions that affect that community so all these experiments are happening they're happening at like a really really fast scale because traditionally making money or getting a large group to vote on something was really just the type of thing that a nation state could do um unless you're playing you know big massive multiplayer online games you didn't really have that kind of

capability to do kind of you know Real World building and experimentation in that way so the fact that this is happening and the fact that you can basically say all right like here's a governance decision and we're are going to put a bit of money behind this we're going to give this this group of people Capital that they can allocate they can basically place bets on different types of outcomes or different solutions to the same problem you now have the ability to kind of look back and see okay like did that work did we produce a better outcome so the combination of having like you know the capability of of having a financial layer and then this governance layer and then there being a lot of experimentation that is happening just feels extremely unique so what I'd like to see is nation states you know

maybe it begins with Taiwan maybe others you know uh take a page from their book and do this where they say okay we are going to take some aspect of our budget we're going to give the community some tools for deciding what they care about and what types of things they want to see and then they can actually allocate some of this funding and we can be adults and come back six months later a year later whatever the period is and determine have discussion about what worked and what didn't and hopefully move some of the things that worked forward so that kind of you know Hands-On governance with the real money behind it seems like something that we should be trying more of and so I'm I'm glad that Taiwan is doing that I'd like there to be more experiments I think there's a lot of inspiration that people

can draw from from the crypto space and for for young people this is like exactly the type of kind of Hands-On governance that I think we should we should entrust them to participate in I don't know if anyone else wants to take a swing at this I I feel like we're the web three nerds on the call uh so if not it's fine I I'd Echo what what said for the most part but um when when you talk about you know new or novel Capital allocation there's there's a host of things that that need to be done to make that operate at at scale right so we need like Carl said an identity system a governance system we need public knowledge and understanding and appre apprting what the capital allocation mechanism is so um I think the plurality book is a great place to to get started

with that stuff it'll give you good context it'll give you pros and cons of different approaches used in the past it'll teach you about taiwan's journey in this and um ultimately it'll inform the public about the notion that there are other options and that your voice can be integrated into decisions that are consequential for you and your future Generations yeah my addition to to sort of this to step out of the host seat and and answer my own question for a sec is that I'm excited about the plurality of capital allocation mechanisms that could proliferate on chain and and I think that like that plurality is is a feature because it creates anti-fragility as opposed to having like one Grant giving mechanism or having some bureaucratic process

where only the lobbyists or the elites can actually uh get money what if we could build more onchain mechanisms to distribute money for public goods into the common to the plurality of people out there using a plurality of capital allocation mechanisms and I think we're already starting to see this in ethereum with all these grants programs run by all these different projects and then you have quadratic funding and retroactive public goods funding and conviction voting and dedicated domain allocation so it's an Ecology of of capital allocation I think is very plural at its at its base so Carl I don't know if you have any reaction to that if not we can move on no I mean I plus one everything you said uh connecting it to something that Lilian said earlier so one of the things that the book did to coordinate contributions

was it it used get rules which has this kind of built-in it's like a point system basically where you can look at a contribution and you can award points to uh the contributor who made that based on the value the uniqueness whatever metric you care about and so I think that like especially for something which was Global and there wasn't much FaceTime between the contributors it introduced a like a pretty interesting Dynamic I don't think any of us were motivated because we wanted to get these like get rules point points um that had nothing to do with it it kind of tapped into our intrinsic motivation but on the other hand there is the idea that you need to decide which contributions are going to be accepted you need to build reputation over time and so this is a really interesting way of of layering

that in in a way where it wasn't about that but that was like a nice feature and allowed you kind of at the end of the book to look back and say wow like here's all the people that contributed here's different things that they did here's how active they were and now here's this way of kind of looking at at a high level how we might try to um you know parse and value those different contributions I know you kind of brought that up is there anything else you'd like to add but based on your experience with with G roles yeah I actually haven't participated in the in the voting but I already like look through like some like projects that um are like proposals and like it can be just as simple as like oh should we have a illust uh have a DI diagram for a

certain paragraph and that kind of thing and even that is can be determined by people and I think that's really cool it rules is awesome I I think it's it's it's a great way to prioritize issues and then reward folks for for taking care of them and ultimately then deciding on what gets plugged into the book and you can apply that issue prioritization and po request approval model to a lot of Open Source projects and you know git rules has some ways to go but um the way I see this working out in the longer run is as more people engage with the platform they gain credibility and they um further the

books alignment to the communities that it's intended to serve so it's this self-reinforcing engine where you can join you can contribute you can be credited and you can in the process make the book more aligned to yourself and the incentives are such that you will be credited more if your contributions align more with Community or in other words facilitating collaboration across social difference um so it's it's a metaphor for itself and I think it it really works out in um the community's favor I'm also quite Keen to see like how because currently it's just a gland that is assigned the point and I'm just quite K to see like how it will evolve

in the future if there will be more people that can also do that yeah like my own experience would be that there are very few issues where I had a strong opinion on I was quite happy to you know view Glenn and Audrey's benevolent dictators that had a vision for this and I was very happy to to contribute but there are a few things that I care a lot about actually so when it came to just like the data and the figures I felt that it was really important that any data that was there you could trace the original Source like where did this data come from is it a public Source or is it something where anybody else could go in and like kick the tires and say actually you missed something here or there's an update and now you need to to capture this so that

was an area where I felt quite strongly you know just the idea of having the these votes or these um voting rights doesn't mean that you're going to exercise it on every issue there can be many issues where you're just quite happy to delegate to others who are more knowledgeable in it but the fact that you have this and you're able to use that as you see fit allows you to engage where you need to but at the same time feel that you're kind of confident that the the group is making the good choice because you can see what they're doing and you don't need you know you don't feel the need to to exercise your your voice in every vote last question question before we wrap if the plurality book is massively successful if the plurality movement is maximally successful how does the world change in

10 years so take us forward to 2035 and tell us uh about the plurality movement and how it's changed the world yeah so a couple things are running through my head right now I think number one I would like to see like very tactically a lot of translations so there's a a large translator team not represented here but I'd love to see there be 50 versions in different languages that are that are circulating number two I'd actually like to see more departments Ministries within governments actually experiment with this type of thing you know literally what that means is there are people on their teams that are spinning up a repo and committing code into that repo and it can be anything from like a draft

regulation anything else that they they might want to put there uh the third thing I like to see is actually that some of these tools start being used to alloc at meaningful amounts of money so like the example that we gave you could actually have quadratic funding or you could have some funding mechanism where the community is is giving input into the types of things that they want built or solutions to problems and they also have like a say they have votes and how that funding is get gonna get allocated those types of you know experiments on liid liquid democracy those are all three things I'd like to see I'd actually like to see them in five years not 15 years uh I think you know big Vision 15 years from now is that we kind of you know maxed out this phase of of

civilization where we are very very polarized we're not able to hold multiple ideas in our head at one time and we actually go in the other direction towards more plurality I would say that in the future if plurality is maximally successful we would have interoperable decentralized identity systems we would have a public that appreciates the value of their data and is able to custody it without the threat of having it compromised we would have Bottoms Up governance models and similar to what Carl said meaningful amounts of capital that are allocated through these funding mechanisms there's

an audience of governments that are looking to update and digitize their infrastructures and so there's a lot of theories about you know how Network States might develop and and the role of democracies in the future I feel that if it's done in a way that's beneficial for everybody it would likely mirror what what plurality promises so it would something like India stack which is a very ambitious project that leverages the AAR technology to to unify India it would probably align itself with a more plural um implementation of its own TCH so that would be maybe a very tactical way to look at the future and what plurality can offer for it I would think

that um like maybe just starting from a workplace uh will be different like uh instead of like uh just someone making like maybe the CEO is making like some single decision they will be possibly that everyone can also be involved somehow with the decision making process and even probably even the salary how to distribute your salary can be different even like for a policy that is um like everyone can just open their app and like participating in voting for a decision for the country or for the organization that they belong to and then make impact all right I lied that

wasn't the last question last question is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say Carl we'll go to your first again I think we covered everything this a lot of fun if you're interested in the plurality book it is open source you can Fork its contents you can use it in any way you'd like you are absolutely welcome to join the Discord um earn credits and uh participate in the development of the project so please come by and we definitely need more designers because uh from what I see from the pipeline there already like a lot of things that will probably happening so yeah join us on this score yeah I lied too I think if if you like the book the best compliment you can do is to Fork it there you go I love that all right well uh the call to action for

The Listener I think is to go to plurality Donnet and to check out the book which launches this week and thanks y all for coming on the green pillow podcast enjoyed the conversation and excited for the future of plurality thank you see you guys thanks Kevin all right we just heard from Shia Lillian and Carl of the plurality Community about I'm excited about them because I think that this community and Audrey and Glenn are doing really good work to push democracy into the 21st century and I think that the concept of plurality is really very beautiful aesthetic but also in terms of the ideas and I think it's one of the powerful movements and ideas for the 21st century and I can't wait to see what plural Capital allocation looks like thanks for listening to the green

pill. network podcast this podcast features the people who are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum systems to the world like Carl like lilan like Sharia like the plurality Community if you value our work you can go to pods. media and find all episodes and start collecting thank you to yes crypto MMA on chain. eth and zeron knowledge. eth for being recent collectors of green pill podcast episodes while you're here you may also want to make an offering to our algorithmic overlords Please Subscribe rate and review tell your friends about green pill really helps us build the regenerative crypto economics movement I will see you next time peace and love [Music]