After attending the Westminster Skeptics ‘Geek Manifesto‘ event the other night, I’m now leafing through my shiny signed copy of Mark Henderson’s new book. This isn’t a review (I’ve not finished reading it yet!) but the book carries a powerful case for rationalism in politics. The author tends towards a sort of post politics-ism that [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Debategraph’
Poblish: when crowdsourcing new policies, don’t waste existing content
This is the first in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’ that Paul introduced yesterday. With all the talk about brand new crowdsourcing platforms, and letting the population ‘speak their minds‘, it’s easy to forget the mass of already-expressed opinion that exists [...]
Going to extremes. ‘Whataboutery’: polarisation v ‘the hive mind’
I’ve been reading Cass Sunstein’s ‘Going to Extremes‘ lately – it’s worth a look. Sunstein’s conclusion – that when we are filtered into like-minded groups that we reinforce each other’s prejudices and tend to reach more extreme conclusions than we would if we were on our own – is not a particularly startling one in [...]
Debategraph on the G20
David of Debategraph has dissected the G20 communique, using his Debategraph application. Quite a brilliant idea, Debategraph. It does everything that a pro-democracy technology should do – it enables a wide range of people to rationalise a problem. Once that’s done, elected politicians can make and explain their decisions – not in terms of interests [...]