 Okay, so in many ways, I think non-financial use cases the first non-financial use case for Blockchains is actually public infrastructure So and it's it's important that we think about in this use case what neutrality means and what decentralization means So the the program has changed a little bit and we're going to talk about that Get started our clicker is not super working, but Okay, so as Pujo was saying we're here to talk about digital infrastructure and What does that mean? Not only in the blockchain space There are all kinds of digital infrastructure, but of course Ethereum is often envisioned as a potential Digital public infrastructure that can be used ubiquitously around the world. So The idea is to do some collective deliberation together on what does that mean and what are some of the requirements for? protocols and standards that are serving this function, so The agenda for today is we're going to kickstart this with two short talks first Pujo is going to talk about decentralization and then Glenn is going to talk about different approaches to neutrality and what are some of the conflicts between them and after that if The slides work we're going to use a tool called police to do a deliberation together and This tool I'll explain this to you in a moment, but it's a tool that uses advanced statistics and machine learning to gain some nuanced insights in a digital conversation and So we'll take these insights then we'll have an in-person discussion since that's the benefit of being here at DevCon and We'll come back to police. We'll do one more iteration reflecting some of the learnings and then we'll look at the results together, so in essence This is going to be an exercise in deliberation about digital infrastructure So hand it over to Pujo to get us started. Okay, great I like to walk around when I talk so as I said I want to talk about first decentralization and then okay, great and and Glenn will follow up with a prompt on neutrality So because not everybody has read the paper I want to kind of give first principles of how I think about decentralization And really the question is how do we build bottom-up decentralized networks? And there are all kinds of like networks, right? We have energy infrastructure. We have physical networks We have internet infrastructure internet network Starlink. We also have blockchains. We have social media. These are all networks and The question is oops How do we get bottom-up coordination of individuals who are part of communities to compose into larger pluralistic Networks of coordination that can solve problems at different social scales That is how I have conceptualized the question of decentralization Doing this in a decentralized way So what do we before I give like a kind of first articulation of the principle Let's just pump our intuitions and think about what do we not mean by decentralization? So you know an Autocrat controlling energy infrastructure not decentralization a benevolent entrepreneur controlling internet infrastructure not great either you know a group of sort of Mining pools that control a lot of mining power hash power or stake not great for decentralization and you know corporate monopolies not great for decentralization and Of course, there's political centralization as well and You know, there's tyranny of the majority which we're all familiar with in the civil rights movement There's tyranny of a political elite and technocratic elite And there's also tyranny of a cultural elite that can enforce their norms and language norms on people who don't necessarily You know agree But I think decentralization is a much more subtle question because we also have very very tacit and subtle what I call accidental over-coordination because of correlated interests and we see this in particular and very cute Lee and Glenn Was the first one who brought this to my attention in his book radical markets in traditional financial markets And so in traditional markets a lot of people, you know if you're a retail investor you give your money to an asset manager like black rock and fidelity and What that asset manager will do will buy stakes across rivals in a particular industry So say stakes across like every airline, right? But in doing that They have an incentive to vote as a shareholder to pressure CEOs to take anti-competitive practices lower prices Excuse me raise prices lower salaries not invest in R&D not invest in innovation And this is like not really great for markets And if you have a bunch of groups like fidelity black rock, you know state Street Vanguard all doing this It ends up being a kind of oops Uniform anti-competitive pressure on the entire market and on the entire industry And you what you get is the appearance of competition Across rivals and appearance of competition across asset managers, but really what you get is a behavior monopolist so Using this to pump our intuitions One of the principles we articulated in the desoc paper Was this principle of consensus across difference and the idea of consensus across difference Is that you rather get consensus between differently affiliated people or just very different people To surface consensus and that would be a better signal of a plural shared good Across broader groups than say consensus amongst a narrow group of individuals who might be sort of intentionally colluding or accidentally over coordinating in the way the the black rock and fidelity example illustrated Is there any questions about this principle Go ahead consensus between whom Yeah, you don't have to agree But if you get agreement across the idea is that agreement across very different people is more likely to signal something That's good for you know, broader groups than rather consensus amongst people who are very similar, right? Which might be more Sorry So, okay, I will I will move on we can we can leave it I actually think you're highlighting a good thing which is that the point of pluralism is Simultaneously identifying areas of cooperation across difference and identifying the areas of difference So like you can't have one without the other in in the dance of decentralization and pluralism And we're gonna talk about that like we're gonna highlight that in the exercise We're gonna do later. So I think both are like really important Yeah, I'll say this like a lot of a lot of discussion in a lot of memes in crypto are about coordination cooperation But they don't really address the question of conflict, right? And so consensus across difference is a principle that highlights and services like our differences, right? But finds those consensus amongst the most diversely affiliated So how did we as a first approximation express this principle in the paper Well, we first introduced this primitive called still bound tokens or non-transferable NFTs to represent memberships to social groups or represent affiliations and Then as a second step we propose this mechanism of using quadratic voting or funding How many people have heard of quadratic voting and funding just raise your hand. Okay, so you're familiar, right? And the nice thing about this mechanism is it? You know reflects a magnitude not just direction of individual preferences encounters some tyranny of the majority But as sort of the Black Rock example highlights, you know We're individuals were social beings were in groups were sometimes intentionally including sometimes were Accidentally over coordinating and you need to discount the influence of correlated social groups or in the kind of spirit of quadratic funding and voting take a square root over the social group and this gives us a kind of Degressive proportionality which we want because otherwise coordinated groups tend to drown out You know less coordinated groups in voice So to kind of summarize To get us our bottom-up coordination the mechanism we proposed is well first of all seeing individuals as necessary in the communities and communities being constitutive of their individuals and capturing the intensity of individual preferences with quadratic funding and voting but also discounting correlations and say over-coordination accident or intentional With social correlation discounts and with this mechanism what we're hoping to do and this is again Just a first approximation is to get this kind of nice intersecting partially nested structure of ever-growing network cooperation extending across you know digital and physical infrastructure and Importantly a Paradigm where parent power is not discreet. It's not binary. It's not rigid but rather continuous partial and recomposing and fluid So this is a broad and very broad strokes an explanation of you know The conception of decentralization that we've ushered for it I'm going to hand it over to Glenn now and he's going to talk about Reconciling this with neutrality and start pumping our intuitions there and asking us important questions yes, so Pooja did a beautiful job But then quite quickly over this notion of degressive proportionality and I want to sort of ease into it by just Like pressuring some things that sound natural, but are all contradictory with each other So they sort of create a paradox that forces us to think a step later Is there a slide for this put John the neutrality stuff or yeah? Yeah Okay, so What is neutrality so like here's a bunch of different notions of neutrality which like lots of people and maybe the same people in Many different contexts all go raw raw for but like actually can't be consistent with each other It's like one notion of neutrality is like every country should be treated the same But then you're like well, what about some countries are much bigger than others and maybe some countries are much richer than others and oh Well, I don't know okay, and then like resources should be treated the same like packets of information or units of compute or units of stake should all be treated symmetrically But wait like some people have a lot more of that than other people and is that fair and Like maybe it's concentrated in certain countries and maybe those countries are all really coordinated Maybe that's not good and then the US and China will just dominate everyone and hmm And then like another version is individual so like proof of personhood people are like really into like You know every person should have the same rights and you know It's really unfair the electoral college gives more like voice to certain people and whatever But then you're like oh, but like you know, what if that just leads like the majority of white people to totally screw over black people in the US or like you know Hindus and you know Muslims in India and and like well We also care about resources as well, and we care about what countries people so anyways The point is that there's a bunch of different notions of neutrality that we invoke in different contexts often very similar contexts And that are like pretty directly in conflict with each other and I think there's like a really profound idea That starts to point the way to like how we might try to reconcile these that comes from this statistician named Lionel Penrose So what what Lionel Penrose said is that if you have coordinated correlated things And then a bunch of uncoordinated things the Coordinated things get word much more than proportional to Like how loud they speak or how much votes they have or whatever And and that comes from a very basic statistical principle Which is if they you have uncorrelated things they tend to cancel each other out And so like their aggregate size only grows as the square root of the number of uncorrelated things Whereas a single correlated thing that scales up grows linearly in its strength and That might sound like a little bit abstract statistics, but like it's something that literally you can just recognize from dinner conversations So like if you go to a crowded restaurant There'll be all sorts of people talking right and like the total volume of all the people talking Will be like massively louder than the person you're trying to listen to next to you And yet somehow you can still hear that person because they're just slightly louder than any of the individual other voices and Your brain Like the whole mechanism of noise is to like take things that are uncoordinated and a little bit softer and Cancel them out and like have that one coordinated thing that's slightly louder stick out right and So Penrose originally applied this as a way to think about how votes should be given to countries or You know provinces within a federal union based on the population of the subunit So he said no it shouldn't be Neutral across people because those people are coordinated with each other by their joint membership of the country or the subunit And no it shouldn't be neutral across units because units have different numbers of people in them Instead the right principle is degressive proportionality, which is that The allocation should be based on the square root of the number of people within the country Yeah Kind of yeah, yeah, it's kind of like that. So so the point is that So he just and in fact this principle was adopted so the niece treaty the Polish delegation of the European Union Proposed that they should literally use the square root But people thought that was weird or whatever and so it turns out that they put in a system We're like if you look at the correlation between the square root and the number of like votes allocated It's like a 99% correlation to that rule But it doesn't literally use that rule because people thought that was too nerdy but anyway, basically that's the principle that's been used by the European Union and the thing is like Quadratic voting is just another application of that same principle It's an application of that principle Acknowledging that one site of correlation and coordination is individuals and an individual with a bunch of Steak or a bunch of voice credits or a bunch of whatever whatever it is that they use to express stronger intensity It's like a site of that sort of coordination and you want to down weight that in the square root way because coordination can occur within that individual But coordination can also occur within groups and and really what I want to suggest is that All the correlation discount stuff that Pooja is going at is just like a more general application of that principle It's like looking for all the different sites of social coordination whether they'd be within groups or individuals based on stake or people or whatever and trying to Downweight that coordination So that we ensure that voices are heard in a more fair way Anyway That's that's the basic frame that I want to give them There's a lot to talk about because we don't know how to do that yet That's these are all just illustrations of possible things in that direction and we're groping our way towards figuring it all out Yes, and as we continue groping our way forward We'll have a deliberation together here about About what he means and how should we be thinking about digital infrastructure, so We're going to do that using a tool called polis, which is a Plural social technology, so I'll just take a moment to explain what we mean by that So social technologies are voting public goods funding identity money These are all tools that we use to relate to each other and coordinate in society And what we're doing at radical exchange is we're trying to bring About a new paradigm for technology that has a philosophy underlying it and that philosophy is the philosophy of plurality So I won't Go too much into it, but when we're instantiating Pluralistic social philosophy in technology, there are two things that we want to be looking for One is we want technologies that help recognize and sort of provide better Resolution into the different social dimensions that exist within a community and then we want Technologies to also foster cooperation across social difference and sometimes that means Fostering or illuminating the the points of common ground and sometimes that means illuminating the points of divergence So that they can be worked out So Polis is a very simple tool, but before I give this explanation I know that our Wi-Fi is not so great So I'll skip ahead and ask you to point your phones to this QR code so that In a few minutes from now you will all have it on your phone and then I'll come back and explain it They say in Latin America Oh, hello Okay, so what is police now come back here We have a recommendation from Shrey if you sign into the workshop Wi-Fi with the password build it 2020 It's much faster than the conference 22 Okay Workshop Wi-Fi password DevCon workshop build it all lowercase 22 Thanks, Shrey Okay, so no need to go into it right now come back here now. I'll just tell you a little bit about this too and then we'll Start exploring it together. So the first thing is that it starts with an open question and then the participants can write statements in response to it and each statement will generate a card like this and The other participants are going to be able to agree disagree or pass Each of the comments and then what police does is that it takes all of the data and then it clusters all of the Participants into different opinion bubbles. So according to The opinion bubbles are defined according to how similarly these people Voted so you can see what are the different social dimensions and dimensions of opinions within a group and Then the last thing that it does is that it brings to the surface What are the points of common ground that these groups that have diverging views share? So one example of how this has been used in the past is in Taiwan This is used in Taiwan at the national level and they use it a few years ago to Try to understand how to regulate right-sharing companies. So in Brazil where I'm from this was a super polarized debate and I'm sharing many other places and There it was as well and there was a strong pro uber camp strong anti uber camp and then What police did there what its surface was just good common sense. So the things that came up were that Taxicab should no longer be orange. Everyone agreed to that before they had to be orange in Taiwan That this was an opportunity to review passenger safety Regulations and questions of liability insurance. So just good common sense that usually in the technologies that we use We don't have that we have the exact opposite We have that the polarizing statements are the ones that come to the surface and we we are Stuck in our ability to to come together and debate Productively as a society. So this this is an example of a plural social technology And we're going to experiment with it together right now And This is our question. How should we think about neutrality in digital infrastructure? So the first thing that we'll do is we'll take five minutes To evaluate some of the comments that are already there so you can go to the link and then I'll be back with you in a moment. All right So we'll now move to the next step which is For the next five minutes, we'll add new statements. So Here's what makes a good statement for this exercise The first thing is that it needs to be a standalone idea because if you have two ideas in one statement Then the other participants won't be able to evaluate Them they might agree with one and disagree with others. So it's complicated. So one idea per statement These need to be short statements up to a hundred and forty characters clear on size and hopefully raising new perspectives so Let's take another five to to add statements in response to to a question. Okay, so now Let's look at our report and then police generates a lot of data Wow, okay, so we had five groups and then he collapsed into two groups super interesting and so police generates a lot of data and We won't be able to have a super sort of in-depth analysis But we'll present the structure of the report and see what are some of the high-level insights that police provided to us so To the folks back there El support the technical Hola Puedan poner el link por favor Gracias puede hacer un refresh No, you're not controlling your you're just in Okay, so so let's first look at some some of the obvious things so we had First I think we should tell people what's in this report. Yeah Yeah, so that's let's first look into this structure and and then we'll get to to some of the insights later so the first thing that it does is Here's some data a hundred and eighteen people voted And out of that group a hundred and nine Were clustered into different opinion bubbles We had three thousand a hundred votes evaluations of statements 78 statements 38 votes per person. So you got to a little less than half of the statements But there's probably many redundant statements. So it shouldn't be so bad And then if you can put it on a poquito mas abajo por favor Aye pronto. So here Policies putting each state each state each of these dots corresponds to a statement and it's putting all of the Statements on a spectrum from consensus statements to divisive statements And as you can see we have a lot more Consensus than the then divisiveness. So it's just one thing that is interesting to notice is how social media Distorts that picture for us. It makes us believe that we have a lot more divisions But really we have a lot more consensus. So Puede poner el mouse in el Ponto mas extremo del lado derecho. Gracias Okay, let's see what's the most divisive statement a neutrality means treating every country the same even if one country is richer than the other In the other put a mas a esquerda por favor gracias Means treating every unique person the same Massa is good. Oh, please Neutrality means treating every broad blockchain protocol the same and enabling interoperability between them. So these are Getting to sort of similar things and as you can see what police is doing now We have three groups very dynamically changing So group a has 44 people group B has 26 people in group C has 39 people and on group a which has 44 65 percent of The members of group a Agreed with it. Why whereas everyone on group B disagreed with it and the majority the large majority of people in group C The disagrees with it. So here it's it's an example of like Surfacing what are the areas of divisiveness and the importance of sort of illuminating what are the points of conflict because this Gives a clear opportunity to have a more informed conversation about this specific topic Why is it that the folks on group a think that and why is it that the folks on group B and C disagree? so and puede poner And look los puntos mas de la derecha por favor, let's see what what what we agree about Neutrality is context dependent and these questions Lacking of context to be useful. Okay, thank you En la derecha Neutrality is different from fairness What else we're we're groping towards something be patient with us We're trying. Okay. So uno mas And mas para eyes eyes Kirta and Neutrality is not about removing biases is about embracing them all So we can see Yeah, people didn't answer but out of those who answered About 40% of people in just to be clear when you have a very large number of people You should expect that white section to take up almost all the space because the whole point is that you get a random selection of things and It tries to pick up the underlying statistical correlations rather than like literally having everyone go through every statement That's the whole point of the could everyone hear that Okay So now it put it by heart This was just to give a few like a taste of like what what are some what were some of the divisive and and and Consensual agreements, but We'll look into them and sort of analyze it more afterwards, but now let's look into what are some of the opinion bubbles What put it by heart mas un poco por favor? Mass mass Yes Which one on the top the one that was in the consensus So if it if it was everything in red it means that everyone in that opinion group disagreed with that statement So let's see how many clusters we have now Okay, so we have three clusters. Let's look at What the Now it's worked back to two Okay, where they are said on refresh for favor and you know, this is a demonstration of course And you know this tool has been used over days so you can sort of work through the data much better and usually very very clear patterns emerge but Let's you know where we'll do some we'll try to take some high-level insights Yeah, okay, so you want to Okay Puedes by heart para group one. So one really important thing to understand is I think Paul this is amazing It's super cool. It's a huge impact in the world. It's also like Absolute first like think of it as the like Bitcoin of like this kind of presents This is not at all optimized There's like anyone who's a smart technologist in the room is gonna think of like seven things that could be improved features Not all of which would work out, but like it's just it's a it's like the most basic proof of concept of this type of idea Yeah, okay, so In group A we have 59 participants Let's see What do they agree about so about half of them think that neutrality means try treating every unique person the same Whereas on group B. Oh, no, sorry. I read it wrong 85% of people on group A thinks that neutrality means treating every unique person the same whereas 76% of people on group B disagree with that. So that that already sort of characterizes These different groups, but maybe if we look into it more we can start to understand why let's see so Neutrality means treating all transactions the same sort of similar principles neutrality means treating every country the same Neutrality means that the rules are set to not privilege any specific participant There's more shared agreement on that but those three first statements already sort of indicate This division between groups A and B there It's very binary in the end. Yeah The When we go through it and I'll give an interpretation. So let's go down to group B now to look into that so group B has 50 participants and Group B seems Interesting so group B is largely Clustered around disagreements. So the the reds and it's the disagreements to the to the three statements or statements in similar spirits so neutrality means treating transactions the same as long as they can afford gas that was Not in the other one above and the majority of people in group B disagree with that And let's look at the first two Neutrality in certain cases can be evaluated at a group level and not at an individual level 94% of group B of people in group B agrees with that And they disagree that It means neutrality means treating every unique person the same so you can see a pattern there And then different forms of neutrality makes sense in different contacts. For example, some should distinguish humans and bots others Should not I guess was the last word that is missing 85% of people in group B agree with agrees with that. So now it can go up to majority majority, please So here actually majority is not a good word because what this is showing is the plural majority So what are the statements that groups a and b despite their divergences? Where is it that they can find common ground? so Neutrality means that Means the rules are set to not privilege any specific participant 81% overall agrees with that 93 on group a 69 on group B All human beings are rational Everyone agreed that this was a bit of a weird statements Personal liberty should be protected above corporate good Everyone agrees different forms of neutrality makes sense in different contacts For example, some should distinguish humans and bots some should others not should not Fascism is needed to achieve neutrality Yeah Lots of disagreements there and neutrality is different from fairness. That's an important point. So This is what's interesting about this is that Despite the divergences These are the areas of common ground out of which you can start a conversation. So I'll hand it over to Glenn to share a few thoughts on on the analysis She was thinking about it here. And then also if anyone has any any comments We'll hand it back to you Put it by her group. Oh, I group of a Para grupo a por favor puedes bajar para grupo a por favor senior Gracias, okay so This group has statements like neutrality and they agree with well Well, the other group disagrees with the statements like neutrality means treating every person the same Neutrality means treating every transaction the same neutrality means treating everyone in the same country the same Sorry treating every country the same etc. And so what I would describe as this group as it's sort of like the Maybe feel good group or something like that It's like there's many different forms of neutrality, which I was trying to argue were intention with each other And this group seems to be composed of people who kind of like all of them, you know, they're like Make I don't want them to be intentioned with each other or they all sound good to me or something like that like that that's sort of the The vibe I get from group a Group B on the other hand Put it behind a group of a Perfect. Um, this one really likes statements like Neutrality in certain cases can't be evaluated at group can be evaluated group and level and not individual level or Different forms of neutrality make sense in different context And doesn't like neutrality is, you know treating all the gas the same you know He's treating all the people the same so the way I would characterize this is group a is like I like it all and group B is like it's really complicated. You know what I mean? And so the the main divide tends to be like group a is kind of embracing the contradictions and group B is like Trying to say in the face of these contradictions We've got to do a lot of really complicated thinking and I probably can't in a tweet length thing even express What I think the next steps of that. So that's my interpretive in that spirit Um Does anyone here feels like they identify with group a and want to wants to share Elaborate a bit on their views and share with the rest of the group or group B Any volunteers? Okay. So are you on group a or group B? I'm in a group B and I like I saw it like from a perspective from like a tolerance and I think like no group a like the neutrality as was like close Our embraced as a as a tolerance by the group a that's that's how I feel it like we tolerate everything and Try to neutralize Yeah, I dare I'm alone. I think I would have been in group a I guess and I think I would say that the The complexity of neutrality kind of comes out if you look at it as a very specific thing that applies to those that are Maintaining the function of a system and not necessarily Looking at the decisions of a system And I think that kind of For me makes makes it a lot simpler Hi guys, my name is Faroocho. I think I associate myself with group B more because in a complex system It's really difficult to evaluate neutrality when When some agents on people provide more value than others Hey, I'm Phil. So I agree with Glenn's notion about the many different Conflicting neutralities and I think that makes any decision taken on the basis of neutrality kind of reductionist So I kind of vibe with the like it's complicated You know description. I think that's kind of accurate Hey, this is her son One thing that I'm interested to understand is like how would we solve that like when like each all countries would be treated the same Aren't we better off splitting? United-State to 50 country and and so on, you know, like it's how would we Solve such kind of attack which is like your you will coordinate again in a different way so you will take advantage With be yeah, obviously Okay One more Hi, I'm Saffron. I I probably was in group B definitely and I think maybe this means that we can't say that a System a system as a whole is or isn't neutral, but that we can evaluate some degree of neutrality along a particular axis And kind of look at it in a very multidimensional way Okay, two more I was in group A and the way what I thought about the groupings was Kind of in a line with a Vitalik's paper about Vita vetoocracy and bulldozer political axis and I feel like group A is like the veto veto Ocracy and group B's may be more the bulldozer political axis For those who haven't read. Can you just elaborate a little bit on that? I From what I remember it was the veto Ocracy was more like if there's a lot of people Who are equally weighted they'll be able to keep back kind of a tyranny of Bulldozers, but bulldozers are needed in order to get a lot of stuff done So you kind of need both both groups to balance the system That's what I remember. All right one more. Does anyone feel like they have something? Victor Lee I'm in group B two thoughts is that One is probably some other people or they mentioned that It that's a social difference. There's many that met dimension You cannot achieve neutrality on all dimension at the same time. So it's a constraint neutrality maybe in one or two Access or dimension that's achievable and also that to achieve the neutrality Require a vital judgment, right? In what what make it neutral is just treat them all the same or Sometimes maybe require treating differently in order to be neutral and that require a vital judgment that also very difficult That's why I'm in the group B Okay question Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. I wonder maybe if someone from group A Would like to elaborate a little bit more on their views and share with the rest of the group Well, okay You Yeah, for me I was in group A and I just found myself Maybe a little bit naively having a bias towards just wanting to agree with all the statements I mean, I kind of saw some of the tension between the statements, but I also Just like there's a lot of different interpretations of what neutrality is and kind of just found myself agreeing with all of them I'm trying to wrap my hair around the terms equity and Equality and I'm would like to know from your perspective if those If any of those is actually a neutral one in any of these senses One thing to say about equity and equality. I'm not sure But I think that people are referring to a particular meme that defines those in a particular way Not necessarily to like some abstract diversion of it Do you know the meme that I'm talking about? Yeah, probably that There's like a fence and then you have like people with different heights and is that the meme that you're talking about Can you elaborate on that one? So like for example, let's say Let's go to the statement that says how many people have seen that meme raise your hand Okay, most people have seen that meme so I won't like explain what it what it shows But when we say neutrality means treating every unique person the same Are we taking into consideration that or not on what and what are the things that we should be taking into consideration when we say treating this same Let's continue Developing this conversation the idea for now the next step. Oh, sorry you asked one final statement I have a little bit of a difficulty wrapping my head around the term neutrality because like You mentioned neutrality only exists in different contexts And when we're trying to build systems that are supposed to be neutral Then that means that there is a certain bias To gain positive impact to get negative impact Or whatever and when we're not building these systems by ourselves We're building them together and how can we make sure that we have as less bias as we can or we don't corrupt that bias when we're Building the system It's a great question folks The idea for now I want to stick to our agenda so that we can make the best use of our time together the idea for now this was a prompt and Hopefully an exercise that shows some of the different views and I have to say I'm a bit impressed because usually It felt very binary, you know the results here What it's not three groups. It's not three groups. Okay. We want to refresh it. So we take a look at what what group C is about quickly No, it's poede a serum Recargar la página So a is the same as before basically, but I'm trying to understand what group B or no Okay We'll come back with a few more comments But the idea for now is just for you at your tables first to take 10 minutes to discuss this and then as you you can share your visions and Some of some of the questions that this this conversation on police brought up to mind to you And then what we'll do is we'll take we'll do another iteration on polis It becomes a lot more interesting when we iterate on it because we can see both sides. We can think about it in a more informed way and then the idea is to try to Understand where the bridges what are the areas of common ground? What are some of some of the statements new statements that can be added that can help reach these groups? So let's just take 10 minutes to discuss at our tables What is it how is it that we should be thinking about neutrality and your impressions about the exercise so far Okay, so folks Come back here with me who's hearing me clap one time Who's with me clap twice? Okay, sorry one second So what I'd like to do right now is to have some of you so we ask you to share What was your reason for being in group a or group B? But is there anyone here who has very strong views on what neutrality is and wants to convey that? to the rest of the group hi guys, so our talk was primarily focused on Debating neutrality within democracy He's from Colombia. I'm from Mexico. He's from the US Canada and where we all talked about was that it's really complicated to have to wait each vote the same when Some of that democracy is corrupted from the from the campaign From the campaign start for example in Mexico right now. We have I'm low as a president and he's building a lot of infrastructure projects that don't make sense and See more than 60% of the population agree with him But it's really difficult for people who well, it's different. It's really difficult for the right incentives To guide the correct policies because when somebody can quickly say, okay, I'm gonna give you This short-term reward for your vote. Well, that's difficult. So what we were basically talking about was Neutrality in different concepts Basically makes it Yeah, it's it's very difficult to have a neutrality when the people acting on it have different incentives. Yeah So I'm from Colombia and here in Colombia a big social problematic is buying votes so people although we debated about How it ended up affecting the policies and the actual morality of it at the end of the day It's not the right incentive. It's an incentive external to the To the one that should be which is the actual policies and beliefs of the governor so Weighing those people who are kind of neutral and don't know who to vote for or don't are not really interesting Voting for and you offer them an incentive Economic incentive Then it becomes like their vote is not for the people it's for them and their vote is not Actually for what you're voting for which is the governor but for the Whatever money they gave you so should that vote be taken into account because according to a neutral perspective it should but I At least doubt it should Thanks So I think at our table. We all agreed that it's not an easy Thing to define especially coming from like foreign languages We had like an English as a second language was like we had a hard time even like reading those statements and Comprehending them and processing But one thing that we all agreed that naturality is pretty much a status of here and now Even with like what you just said about political vote like here and now you're natural But maybe within like a few weeks you will have an opinion and you will be agreeing or disagreeing. So it's almost like a You cannot keep the state forever. It's just a here and now how you feel and it's yes, exactly We kind of had the same feelings about like this exercise and like how we think about it and it changes for sure. It's not Something we can have forever This is super interesting sort of speaking to the needs for sort of continuous adaptation adaptability Okay, so now I'm curious if was was there any of you who were either on group a or group B and After this conversation sort of gained a new understanding of the other groups perspective that you didn't have before And Maybe change your mind a little bit or just had a bit more nuance in your views and would like to share that with the rest of the group Yeah, I that really stood out to me. I'm Alex by the way that As I was sort of watching these questions and how people were describing neutrality and siding with it I feel like neutrality for one took a lens where Neutrality was very close to goodness like as if some people were already feeling like neutrality was good And that's how they were voting and another perspective which started clearly like forming for me as we were doing this was that some people at least to how I see it now seem to take neutrality as a Rule we apply regardless of context, which if you're gonna strictly logically define things like I think that makes a lot of sense But yeah, not everybody's gonna view it that way And then if you get into complexity and know it's context-dependent then you get a very clear Split so it's really interesting to see multiple shifts in what I understood to be neutrality Happen as we were going through how other people's observed it Yeah, so kind of referring to what I was saying before I mean like one observation like hearing here and like here discussion at the table was that Yeah, very often like we want to tolerate someone else opinion. We want to be like good in a society, but Me being part of the group B Yes, kind of like you know opposing to say that okay, and we can neutralize things we can't tolerate everything. Yes, like But things should be called out, right like neutralizing the value meaning like no Getting rid of our civilization kind of the thing, right? So yes, it's complex but you know the the problem is that like at some Extremes like a neutral thing can be in my opinion bullshit Right if we like really know like take the value out of it, right? Yeah, but I think like that's the problem anyone else has some bridging Reflections, okay Thanks I'm Leonardo and I was thinking about because we are all talking about neutrality like just neutrality But at the question it says about digital neutrality, right? So I was thinking about if it is Like maybe a difference or something very specific to digital because thinking about digital and so that digital it may be refers in general to binary data info right and it is be like that mainly for Communicating so maybe if we talk about digital neutrality we are talking about communication across networks So from that point I see that maybe it's not like that complex the term of neutrality Because if you talk about communicating over networks, it could be like any peer has the same chance to communicate with other peer, right? so at that point I think that I was in the group a because I didn't see like a Bigger complex problem, but something in a specific context then if we talk about Neutrality as general half everything neutrality I think that we get to that point where it can be many different things and have many different ways to express neutrality, right? Yeah, and to emphasize that our question is directed towards digital neutrality. So that's digital public infrastructure neutrality in digital infrastructure Does anyone has any other sort of insights or bridging comments that they want to share? Okay, I thought that was a very insightful exercise and I think I was more associating myself with the group A At the start and then they were discussing and I was hearing other people giving feedback And I think I mean as just a human being It's very hard to make binary choices like just 100% yes or 100% no and For me it was like I would agree with the like most of the maybe Questions that the group A was agreeing but unless there's some exceptional circumstances kind of the situation so for me it was I was more You know, it was closer to me to vote on a group because like maybe 80% I would agree that as a basic rule and basic understanding of neutrality But then also leaving a room for you know, I know exception in special cases rather than just saying completely no and disagreeing So this is actually a wonderful point because we'll we'll iterate on the platform one more one more time after all of these discussions And in this iteration This is the opportunity for you to add that extra nuance that you felt was missing in the former statement So neutrality is tata tata tata unless so you can you can add that nuance and that complexity in this in the second iteration This is a little bit of a troll point, but it did change my views So someone said the word neutralize earlier and I made the connection between neutrality and neutralization Like wouldn't the most neutral thing in the world just be if none of us really existed that would be super fair It'd be super conforming with all of group A's statements vacuously satisfy any definition of neutrality So just putting that out there as an idea Okay So what he said I just thought of something like when we talk about digital neutrality, right? It obviously becomes a lot easier to enforce because you could like create things a protocol levels Which humans cannot change obviously that is not we don't exist But we lock out a lot of choices that you could otherwise have in that and then in a sense You are like a lot of like freedom of choice is gone and thereby it's a lot more neutral It's not like very far from what he said I was a little bit dismissive of group A and identified with group B but just to like I thought that your comment was very insightful, which is I Think that many of people in group A seem to have thought of each statement is having much more implied context then Like I was thinking like they were they might have been stated in a universal way But a lot of people thought well, of course They must be talking about context X or context Y And so I'm in agreement with a statement because I see that implied context But if we draw that out Maybe there wouldn't be as much disagreement between the two groups because group B was really Thinking of them as very broad statements in group A was thinking of them as Specific to the context where that principle is appropriate So now in the spirit of adaptability I want us to I am sorry I can't take more inputs because I want us to take the time to do one more round Let's let's see how this how these notions Evolve by going back to the platform and adding bridging statements statements that have richer contacts and that add the exceptions to the rule and that you feel can sort of Reflect anything that you might have learned about Someone else's point of view today or anything else that you might that you might want to add, you know It's not a tyranny, but I Think one of the particularly interesting things is to try to add that additional context and once and And try to bridge what are some of those different views now that you've been more exposed to them So let's take five minutes for that Okay Let's come back to to the report and see how things have evolved so You know, this is interesting I've done this Workshop I've used this tool a number of times and I have to say that this was definitely the most binary conversation in the most binary group that I've ever Worked with and have sort of seen represented in in this tool which to me what that says is that this ecosystem needs a lot more of these kinds of tools and sort of conversations because it feels like Yeah, it's just very binary, but we've evolved. We have a solid third group right now so I think group a Remains with similar views group B sort of Sceptical and saying it's complex. It's complicated, but not really articulating what What that complex vision is and then Kudos to group C who is starting starting to Create some of these articulations. So let's look into Group C together. This was really interesting. So group C Is saying Neutrality must be put in a context Otherwise, it doesn't make sense Neutrality is not an optimal solution for the evolution of the human race incentives are inherently non-neutral and they super disagree with Treating every country the same every every unique person the same. So they're saying, you know, you need contacts you need to take into account different incentives and You need new I think that what's I won't put my interpretation of the Comment about ending the human race is that sort of affirming that that you want plurality, right? You want to have diversity you don't want to Collapse so is there any conception of neutrality that can also make room for pluralism Remains to be seen but I think that this statement is expressed that this is a desirable thing So Yeah, this let me do one more refresh here To see if anything different came on group B The guy that said we must all perish to achieve neutrality made a good point And let's look at the spectrum here. So a lot more concentration here on consensus Um Neutrality while important is not the only goal Neutrality is layered some layers of the system should should strive to be neutral And some layers can be biased. We should continue to accept should continue this exercise on a bar with drinks Okay, so let's go. Let's see What is it that all three groups can agree? Neutrality means the rules are set to not privilege any specific participants neutrality is different from fairness Individuals should have autonomy over what products and services they use a Neutrality while important is not the only goal of a society and needs to be balanced with other priorities And then what are some of the things that it's interesting because there's almost usually in the Plural majority section. There's more agreements than disagreements. This is pretty half and half There's a lot of areas of common ground of disagreements Neutrality specialist Neutrality means in difference not caring a lot of people in disagree with that super interesting. The group is never right against the individual So As I mentioned, you know, this this is super rich and they're you know It merits doing a proper analysis that we can't do right here But hopefully this was an interesting exercise. Neutrality is a huge value in this ecosystem and It's one that has very very serious and important implications. So I'm Curious to hear any thoughts reflections comments on this exercise or anything that you might have learned and And we'll be posting More sort of thoughtful report of how this went Online so you can look for it on the radical exchange Twitter or you can come up to the table and Just send me just give me your email and Yeah, hopefully this was this was a good exercise. I'll take a few comments and then we'll wrap up I wanted to know if In the second round, did we vote again on the same statements or the votes we already had? Issued of the statements on the first round state the same because like from a deliberative Democratic perspective it would be interesting to vote again on those issues like after debating All this is open source software, so it needs a lot it needs a lot of work But no the votes remain the same the votes remain the same So I thought that was an interesting experiment. I guess one question is I think this group is like all coming here with good faith And good intentions and one thing I noticed is like as people answered questions Even if I wasn't answering a question the groups could like pretty quickly kind of shift and also my position in the groups kind of Could quickly shift so are you thinking about this in the context of like people who might want to like? Intentionally create those shifts or like kind of a more adversarial mindset and how would you mitigate that I guess? No yesterday. We were giving this workshop to a group of organizations that are working on Citizen participation in the southern southern hemisphere and they were like my god This is like such a good tool for political manipulation. You can use it for good or bad. I mean it can go in any direction, but Part of the thinking behind Trying to advance a paradigm with more pluralistic social technology is that if we if we can Provide more resolution into the different social dimensions that exists within a community Then that's that's the only thing that will unlock good governance and our ability to find to cooperate across diversity, so You know it comes it's a double-edged Sword, I'm not sure if that answered one of the thing I say Phil is that we just have like no I don't even know I have no idea like it's really interesting questions. So This is my perspective on the highlighted statement. I thought this the other priorities are more like today versus the future Like if you ask me should the world today be neutral? Yes, of course There should be fairness had the world be neutral from day one of existence would be reached here I don't know so I mean I don't have an answer obviously But like I thought that's what like that statement is all about like today's neutrality versus neutrality as A tool to forward the human race Some comments on on the exercise itself I think that the exercise heavily depends on the quality of the questions and probably we need to have some Approach to exclude some some of these questions When we see some white areas there and probably those those questions were not very you know So people didn't want to answer this question probably we should exclude them or probably we should have another Options on the on the pole so where people voting so they can Kind of exclude or report against this question Thanks, we Radical exchange we do develop a few technologies, but this is not developed by us is by the amazing folks at the Computational democracy project And it's an open-source software You can make a full request or give them some support and share your feedback But yeah, as Glenn was saying this is a very very primitive tool, but it is better than most of the things that we're using in trying to you know identify social groups and and Illuminate areas of common ground and disagreement And it's it's something to it's remarkable how how primitive it is and and the fact that it's still One of the best tools that we have so we need to Continue developing this Yeah, so going back to the earlier part of the I find it interesting because I tried to prime the discussion with like a conception of decentralization and So we could actually use some of those if somebody want if you know If anyone here is a hacktivist and wants to improve polls We could actually import some of those concepts there like for example Having non-transferable NFTs to represent your groups and allowing contract voting and then we could have a much richer perspective of clustering there But the second observation I wanted to make like Glenn you gave your perspective on the clustering But I actually I think the difference between group A and group B was like a was sort of more biased towards thinking about neutrality in the in the sort of voice camp of voice versus exit and thinking about equality and notions of fairness and being like yeah, yeah, of course like individuals nation-states, right? And then I think group B was maybe more focused on like neutrality as an exit I should be able to be able to send my information packet wherever I want to or like, you know transactions Independent of gas or with the exception of gas. Sorry with gas is the only limitation So I thought that was that's kind of I think there's some broad strokes that can be made there on like voice versus exit and how that how Where where you kind of are on that might inform your view of neutrality Yeah, I just wanted to talk about like, you know Using some learnings from I mean this workshop into the DAO Like now tooling specifically, right? So like very often in DAO that know The questions we ask in the DAO. Maybe not the right. It's not made not very often the right one like for example yesterday, we had a workshop with With maker on like how to optimize their governance process and like, you know, there was some drama related to Yeah, basically some voting currently in cosmos we have like this huge proposal for atom 2.0 and Yes, like very often we cannot like know get an agreement because The scope of of a decision is huge Right, so like applying this tools for the hours to make more. I mean to break them down and more make more Specific Decisions, yes, I guess that would really help in Contribute to polis and I know that there was one Integration with web 3 wallets That was made last year But we ended up not using it, but I'm happy to connect you With the folks who worked on it and as Glenn was saying I mean if this was if you could quadratically vote on the statements This would be incredible if you could also connect it with SPT's that are being used today for example for At the govern platform that creates SPT's for Dow contributions and then you have internal clusters you have external clusters, you know, there's There are many ways in which this can develop. I'll go to some of the other folks Okay What do you mean of quadratic voting for like yes, no question? I mean, it's I mean Be able to express the intensity of how how much you agree or disagree But it can have a quadratic system with it. You can have like credit credits that They can spend if you have a set budget to spend on you have to see everything at the same time to figure out how to allocate your budget We we have a software for quadratic voting that we developed at radical exchange in the way that this happens is that You usually go through it through the different proposals a couple times And you sort of distribute it once and then you sort of continue readjusting it a few times Which means that you probably need some way of curating a smaller number of statements Our sort of way to hack around this is that in many workshops that we do a radical change We first do a police conversation Then we do we curate a ballot and then we put it in the quadratic voting platform and then we do a vote So we do this deliberation and there's also a delegation step So you have some credits, then you delegate them around then you then we do a police Deliberation and then a quadratic vote in the end and it works pretty well like in groups that are actually like trying to Work around a solution We've seen groups that have sort of been Having a very hard time in advancing on a particular issue for months And then they did a workshop in one and a half hours using these three tools and they sort of unlocked a few things So it's a pretty good idea, but it would be better to have them more integrated Did you guys also think there were some like broad-stokes differences in one group thinking about the idea of neutrality versus one group thinking How would neutrality be applied in the real or the digital world? Thinking about Might be folks we have five more seconds in this workshop, so I just want to thank everyone And I also want to say we have Amazing infinite diversity in infinite combination stickers here, so you can come grab them and And if you'd like to to get the report of this exercise, we'll post it on the radical exchange Twitter but I Can send it to your email as well just come over and send me and give me your email address And thank you so much