 OK, great. Thank you so much. So one of the things that I was hoping to learn from you and your experience with JOIN and with V-Taiwan, I'm really interested to learn how there may be limits to consensus-driven deliberation platforms and algorithms, and maybe correct my understanding, because that may not be the case. So I work on a digital democracy project in the United States. And our focus is to organize collective knowledge into collective deliberation. And so we've been operating from the premise that we could structure more knowledge in logically valid ways by instead of getting people to join a platform, gathering the collective knowledge across media types, deconstructing it into logical units, and then modeling that deliberation. The success of V-Taiwan setting an example for the world makes me pause and second guess if that's the best strategy. So I really wanted to learn more about how V-Taiwan operated. I saw some of the case studies of how it has been used. And I'm wondering if, based on your experience, you see any limits to that, because regulation about Uber, for example, or non-consensual sexual images seems to be maybe this isn't the case, but they seem to be smaller localized issues when larger policy deliberations about complex issues like climate change and some of the most polarizing issues in the United States, I think, would be so vast in terms of the relevant knowledge needed to be judged and organized. I'm not sure crowdsourcing would be possible. So yeah, thank you. That's a very good theoretical question. But I want to clarify two points just to check my understanding. OK. So first, of course, for example, the Uber case, it could be argued that it's vast because it talks about sharing versus geek versus platform economy, data governance, labor rights in the digital age, which is equally large as climate change. But or it could be rephrased as someone driving to work without a professional driver license, picking up strangers, they meet on the app, and they do that 10 times a day, which is a very, of course, localized concrete case. And we chose the later phrasing because, exactly as you pointed out, that that's the only way to make focused deliberation, focused conversation work. But when you say that you wish to tackle climate change, are you not planning to do something like this, like make it more specific and relevant? Or what's the structure of conversation? Great question. So the specific ontology of the knowledge that we're organizing is descriptive of the claims that we're seeing that occur in natural language, the English language, in the United States territory. There's some internationally relevant content. For example, the IPCC and things like that, the information that we'll have to include. But we also have to confine and limit it, absolutely. And also, when it comes to organizing, logical reasoning, I'm sure you're aware, there's an infinite context because debates can bleed into other debates and be relevant to other debates. And so what we found is a strategy for finding what we call the fundamental questions. So for the United States, there's about six fundamental questions that the American public is divided on when it comes to climate change. And what that helps us do is it helps us create that scope of relevance. So we don't end up with all this repetitive and recursive argumentation, but we can really argue from the general positions to conclusion. So you're absolutely right in which it has to be confined. It's just a different strategy for confinement. But we're hoping to be a little bit more exhaustive. And perhaps, I took a look at the V-Taiwan platform I'm familiar with, Polis. I was interested to learn if there was any deliberation mechanism on join or if that's just quadruple bobing, there is. We also use Polis on join when the situation calls for it. So again, just to show my understanding. So it's the list of fundamental questions on our website somewhere. And if it is, can you paste me the link or paste it just in the chat. I can tell you, we're still in stealth because we have all these standards for what can be published as a meaningful increment. Yeah, maybe just a couple of examples, we'll work. Yeah, so in the United States, the six fundamental questions of climate change that we found are what is climate change? Is it happening? What causes it? What's the impact of it? What could or should we do about it? And why has this debate lasted for so long? And I've given a talk about this and gave more detail in a hope 2020 talk. So I can send you that link, I guess. But it's not written, it's a talk that I gave. Okay, but the questions are, as you said, questions. They're not what we say in deliberation or in focus conversation. They're not part of the mess, right? It is the informed part that when people have a coherent answer to those questions can lead to action. But they're not in the shape of what action must be taken if I understand it correctly. Well, the question of what could or should we do about it calls for propositions of what should be the response. Should certain policy or regulations be instituted? Should people be taking personal action? What actions should those be? How do we know that those actions are going to have an impact? How do we measure impact? So it's almost like most of the questions are about articulating our understanding of the problem and showing how we have different interpretations of what we mean and how we back up that meaning. So for example, with climate change, the first question of the set is what is climate change? Which essentially means like, what do we mean when we use the term? Because even though there's like standard scientific technical ways of describing changes to the climate system, in the public there's argumentation of it being like capital C climate change. It's going to be catastrophic and it's going to be imminent and immediate and that's deliberated on how quickly are we going to feel how severe effects, where in the world, in the United States people debate about that. So it's important when we're talking about subsequent policy suggestions or changes in behavior and regulation that we're operating on the same definition of climate change. Because there may be a reason why some people are proposing stronger policy measures than others is because their definition is more catastrophic than another citizen's definition of climate change. Or maybe because they live in catastrophic areas. Exactly, yes. Right, so to reiterate what I heard, so what should we do part of the question once we get a coherent answer is meant to motivate the individuals participating in the conversation to commit to implement such solutions as individuals or as groups or as governments. It's not, based on what I hear, meant to kind of force a decision unilaterally saying that we have the legitimacy. One of the solution is to implement the carbon tax or cabin trade system and then use citing this just like a politician will cite a referendum result, a sortation or a survey or citizens is simply citing this saying that, okay now we have the mandate to do some radical drastic change. So it's more voluntary, more grassroots instead of a more top-down result when we call the kind of bindingness of the process, is that correct? Yes, it's definitely more of a grassroots. It's not meant to be binding or forceful at all. It's just meant to be a tool that states we've processed this content, we've crunched these YouTube videos through which you've expressed yourself. We've looked at scholarly articles and books and podcasts and taken in the media that the public is generating and doing some work to bridge the digital divide. So have focus groups and hear people's feedback. There's a request for comment feature on the front end. And it's like by incorporating your content and organizing it so every single point of view is steel manned, you can see what is suggested to be the most steel manned, evidence driven, strongest argument policy. It doesn't have any like, I believe you once used the phrase a tiger with no teeth and I feel like that's the same too. It's just an offering of saying through this methodology and mechanism, this could be policy that's supported and it would have to have the support of people in order for it to. But in the V-Taiwan as well as the joint process, the teeth is the legislators and the ministers. So if they pre-commit to accept whatever result that's produced in a fair way, then basically that becomes the teeth. So Uber of course negotiates in good faith. But the reason why Uber is now a Taiwan taxi company is because if they don't do so, it is the astronomical I think highest in Asia, fine backed by a law that institutes the V-Taiwan resolutions. So that's the teeth and that takes of course, at our current representative system, the legislators to pre-commit to implement the teeth part of the tiger. But on the other hand, it's of tremendous benefit to the legislator because they don't want to be all teeth in a tiger, that's a skeleton or something, fossa, because then they would not be rapid and agile enough to meet the ever-changing emerging demands of the new technologies on social norms. And with V-Taiwan and joint, they can say here is a co-evolving social norm and we all already agree on including Uber drivers. So here's this astronomical fine. So that's the teeth. So what I was trying to say is that maybe it's not a methodological or epistemological difference of our method. Ultimately, it's because the teeth after the V-Taiwan or joint process was already there. There's a sense of pre-commitment and that creates the incentive for people to join, by intended, to join platform because that's the only place they can get guaranteed ministerial level response. And they can, of course, cite all the social media, YouTube videos and things like that. At the end of the day though, it has to be the process that's pre-committed by the ministers and mayors. Right. We've had some success working at the local level in creating logical decision-making models by doing a process of organizing content and putting it into more logical proofs. And then the only hope that we had in the United States is potentially offering the information through the Congressional Revenue Service, which is how politicians in the United States get their information. But I've had concerns that the success of Taiwan can't assume the same premises for the United States in terms of it being in Taiwan a young democracy. It seems to be a very tech-savvy culture, responsive government. And I'm not so sure we can assume the same in the United States. So last time I checked, I think this was some years ago, V-Taiwan had about hundreds of thousands of users. Has it increased since then? I think I heard you say that join had about half the population, which is like- No, it's, the join is now over 30 million visits. So more than population. But of course, people may, you know, raise too many petitions and there's of course people outside of Taiwan that joins the join platform. So join has doubled in traffic in the past couple years. And- Translation. Yeah, sure. Thank you. But what I was trying to say is that we say that we're V-Taiwan inspired processes because fundamentally V-Taiwan is about research. It's about exploring the configurations. But the main distinguishing characteristics of V-Taiwan was that it's not run by the civil service. It's not staffed by the public civil servants. So basically it belongs to whomever who want to try new things. So the V-Taiwan folks, for example, worked I think this year with the legislators and their staff, chiefs of staffs on open parliament plan. That is to say to change the way the legislature itself interacts with people and things like that. But then it become meta, right? It's not about specific measures anymore. It's about how to transform the way that the legislature itself works. And so I don't think we then at that time, at that point can count the number of proposals or number of engaged citizens and so on because it's a different game altogether. But what V-Taiwan circa 2015 is doing is now the joint platforms purview. Got it. So do you think that the technology that was built off of Polis has any limitations when it comes to public deliberation on issues? Well, Polis is just a, well, as it just, but it's a lot, but fundamental is just a weekly survey, right? So it's not unlike any survey. But the only thing is that people are incentivized. There's a high basic reproduction of ideas that are created by people as part of the surveys issues instead of relying on a few elites to predetermine what's being surveyed. That's its main insight. So within that, its limitations is exactly the same as survey technology because, broadly speaking, it's still part of the survey technology, sweet, right? Got it. So it's a much better survey, much more funnier survey, survey that people would organically share and a survey that people would say, oh, I'll recommend this survey to a friend, which is great. But it suffers from exactly the same limitation as any other survey methodology suffer in the broad scheme of things. Okay, got it. So I tried to get Google to translate the join platform so I could look to see if there was a deliberation element and how it was being applied. Because I was really curious about how sophisticated the commenting could possibly be if there was an inability to create threads, which I think was an anti-trolling mechanism. It's just like people are submitting comments and then it's graphed out and people are voting. And so what we find in our work is that oftentimes public rhetoric is very ambiguous in its language. So like, for example, if people are arguing about nuclear reactor safety in the United States, nuclear reactor could mean 53 different specs. And if we're talking about safety, it's like, okay, which part of it are you talking about? The spent fuel cells, the reactor itself, like the waste storage, the waste transportation mechanism. And then what do you mean by safety? Is it that like an aircraft carrier can't cause a meltdown by like blowing into it or like one way meltdown from like water not being pumped out? To actually argue in depth about the, or even understand something in depth, it requires like unpacking how vague our language tends to be, especially in political rhetoric. And so I was really curious if Taiwan found a solution to that. To that level of deliberation. Yeah, we just had a referendum about our fourth nuclear plant. So I'm very much aware of the dynamic you're saying. I used to sidestep the controversy, simply saying, hey, when I say nuclear reactor, I mean the sun, right? Sun. Right, which is a fusion reactor. Exactly, yeah, exactly. Right, so yeah, so of course, at least nowhere as we all know. So yeah, the way we fix this is quite simple. It's the very simple nature of crowdsourcing. The successful crowdsourcing, as well as crowdfunding topics, tend to have what I call the fast fear and fun, right? These are the three pillars. So it's fast. So it means that it responds in an H-R-Y to the emergent issue, not A, like four decade, five decade old structural issue. It's fair because people who participate believe they can get something out of it. And there's a strong incentive to basically pre-commit equal amount of attention, vis-a-vis the attention of people who participate. And it's fun, meaning that the topic itself, as chosen by the initiator themselves, has a high basic reproduction number. But we don't need to mandate how exactly to get the fun part through, because it's by selection bias, right? Citizens' initiative that doesn't have a higher than one basic reproduction number are like unsuccessful virus mutations. They don't go anywhere. And the things that go viral, well, that's because they're viral, right? So by the time that they gather 5,000 signatures or the participatory budgeting, raise a sufficient profile to warrant a vote, or so on and so forth. By definition, they already found something that resonates with people in a specific way. So it's solved not by brilliant, intelligent design of any kind, but rather by grassroots collective intelligence. Got it. I mean, do you imagine that there's any type of limitation on that? Because something that I'm always interested in is in the United States, we've got a very, it seems, or it is argued that we have a very polarized information ecology and that there are interests in propagandizing the public through media and public marketing campaigns and things like that. So even if there is consensus and energy towards a specific end, like for example, like the anti-nuclear sentiment in the United States has been strong for a long time. It seems to be like tapering off a little bit, but it begs the question, like, is that really informed by something that's evidence-based or is it informed by effective marketing campaigns and rhetoric that's readily given to individuals? And even evidence studies, these sorts of things, but taken out of the full context of the conversation as a whole, it may sound like it's evidence-driven, but it may just be cherry-picked content combined with rhetoric and motivated by fear that's driven by money in politics, essentially. And so is it just that maybe Taiwan has a different culture than the United States, or do you see a platform that's, or organizing ideas around consensus could be applied even in a deeply polarized information environment that's polluted with lots of money? So the forced nuclear plant, I think the Contra has four million votes and the pro is, I think, 200K less, but still it's a very tight race. And I mean, like the Swiss referendums, right? People accept the legitimacy of the result, of course, but because our results are binding for only two years, so whomever loses doesn't really lose. They have two years to gather more evidence to convince the other side. So I think that the point here is about iteration cycle. If you allow for a short enough, like less than four years, two years, or in terms of regulations on joint platforms, 60 days, and so on, so it's like a heartbeat. People who felt that the marketing rhetorics, whatever, won the day, they don't have to be pessimistic because they then can say, okay, let's try it out for two years and see where it leads us. And then if they're actually right and the people who won actually were wrong, then within two years we'll get more evidence in the side of the people who initially lost the referendum or whatever, other process. But on the other hand, if it's irrevocable, of course, then people are motivated to go all in when it comes to propaganda, disinformation, and things like that. But when tapered off on like two year, two year, two year, or one year, one year iterations like perpetually budgeting tend to be, then there really is no incentive to go all in on disinformation on any particular one because, well, you can just lose it all the next year. Got it. I could see that working for a lot of issues and there seems to be some things that require really long time scales. So I don't know, I would love, if it's possible, to see the deliberation among the Taiwanese people about the nuclear reactor in that case. Here is the deliberation and it's on Polish actually, it's run by a media and of course it's a Mandarin but it's in plain text. So I believe your machine learning algorithms will work. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to hear that. So perfect, thank you. So what I was saying is it seems as though with many, many issues, that does seem to have the right incentive structure to either have people go all in or not when it comes to like propagandizing the public with certain things that like, for example, investing in the building of a nuclear reactor or a nuclear power plant, some of those build cycles can be anywhere from like five to unfortunately we've seen up to 15 years. So it seemed as though for some things being able to quickly flip flop the decision-making, I mean, maybe that even tapers off. Like society itself has become aware of the issue enough and eventually more decided that after going back and forth and like issuing funding, taking off funding, eventually they settle on something. Interesting. Yeah, and I think the initiator of the pro-nuclear force plant initiator after losing the referendum by a small margin, he said, well, it's a sign that we need to look into small reactors. That can actually, as you said, shorten the build time because I think one of the dividing points of the force plant, a specific plant, not the nuclear strategy in general, was that a potential fault line was discovered after it's being constructed and which creates tremendous pressure because there's no way to move things. But with smaller reactors, it's conceivable you can put it on a ship or something. And which doesn't suffer from the same fault line structure. As you said, I think this zig-zagging at the end of the day converges towards something that's sensible for both sides that both sides can live with. Fantastic. Okay, and this is all in the V-Taiwan version of Polis. No, this is just in the, this is just Polis. So what I pasted to you, the second link, is found right there. And it's a civic tech enabled media, a new media as we call it here. And the new media is run independently. It's not sponsored by the state or anything, but it played the role that V-Taiwan plays. It's V-Taiwan-inspired. I mean, the people doing this were all part of the initial V-Taiwan conversation. So it's not branded V-Taiwan, but basically it's taking the referendum conversations, the public forums and debates, and then setting up a parallel hackMD reader-based Polis structure that finds the common points between the people who feel very differently when they hear the debates. Got it, amazing. And then, I'm sorry if you already told me this, but how did you get so much, I think it was 30 million monthly active users on join. How did that happen? That's a really good question. The 30 million was visits, by the way. So we don't know, but okay. So I think two things. First, as I said, the petitions that captures people's imagination and resonates across the country. For example, I'll use a couple examples. There was a petition a couple of years ago where more than 8,000 people signed to change the time zone of Taiwan to that of plus nine where currently at plus eight, the same as Japan. And equally, there's also a petition more than 8,000 people strong saying we should remain in plus eight and not change our times of two plus nine. And so the collaboration meeting, we invited the petitioner from both sides on a face-to-face dialogue and both of them want to see Taiwan as more unique in the world. And then using evidence-based logic, we calculated to the dollar how much exactly it would cost if we change our time zone and how much recurring cost it would incur on our systems and all for what, all for forcing people from other jurisdictions to change their watch once they land to Taiwan and getting maybe 15 minutes of international fame. But of course it's not worth it and the watch out of it just nowadays anyway. So it's not worth it. But it's worth to invest that amount of money to making Taiwan seen as more unique in the world. That both sides agree. So they then brainstormed about how to market our LGBTIQ friendly, marriage equality, human right of government, and so on and so forth. And it went very friendly. And so it's one of those very rare things that both sides eventually are in vehement agreement. But it's not possible unless we have this very strong science-based, logic-based, dollar amount-based calculation of a cost and benefit analysis. So it is sort of a model case. But on that case alone, right, we've got tens and thousands of literally petitioners and their friends and families paying attention to the resolution of this issue. So that's one example. Another example was that there was a young student in high school, but we didn't know because we allow pseudonyms. They're authenticated only through SMS. So this, I love Elephant and Elephant love me person, said we should bomb plastic straws on the takeouts of our national drink, the bubble tea, among others. And which capture people's attention because at that time there was a viral picture of a sea turtle being choked by a straw or something like that. And then it gathered in no time a very high amount of signatures. But when I met the petitioner, I was delighted to find that she's, I think just turned 17 and asked her, why do you raise such a popular petition topic that gets everybody talking about it? And she said, well, it's our civics class assignment. So it turns out that the high school teachers, civics teachers, bus it in the pod of their civics assignment to find something that's viral and join. So for a while, more than one quarter of petitions on the join platform were somehow related to the people under 18s rise, right? So like they want to go to school later in the day. They want to sleep more. And we got the sleep experts to share the latest research that basically says if you don't have sufficient sleep, you can't really learn anyway, things like that. And that's why the parents and teachers opinion to exactly as you said that as more evidence gets disclosed, it's harder to have polarized arguments in a sense once it's absorbed by both sides and so forth. So that get all the high school students talking about, right? So when I, a couple of weeks ago, went to a senior high to give a interactive lecture, one of the top voted slido question, which is like join but for face to face conversations, right? So the top vote is anonymous slido question. Is that why is the school preparing for Minister Tong? A, it's not a very large straw, but it's a plastic straw, it's plastic. So why are we signing off a petition and then acting opposite toward it? Is that what we want from our civics education? And then I immediately just ripped the plastic cover off and start drinking directly from it. So anecdotes like that, of course go viral on social media. And each one brings more visits to a joint platform. Got it. Okay, and then just to check my understanding, the collection of the evidence based and logic based argumentation and the bringing in of sleep experts, that's something that's facilitated by the people running this platform. That's right. And we have a regulation. We have a regulation on exactly how to do that. And interestingly, it's in English. So feel free to explore the participation officer mechanism, the directions, all more than 100 collaborative meetings that follow the process, including the guidelines principles and so on. Thank you so much. I am so excited to read this. Very fascinating. Great. Okay, well, I know we're over time. You mentioned that you may have additional time, but I don't want to take up too much of it. I think I've had all of my questions answered and I really want to dig into the platforms. So thank you very, very much. And then please, if there's anything that comes up to you about the limitations of logic based deliberation, I mean, I think I've really taken away a lot to think of. I hope you won't hesitate to just correct my thinking on these things. Well, I think the only point I want to make is that the anecdotes that people bring back to their communities after a successful dialogue, that is really key. Logic by itself is not viral. So what we need really is to learn from the conspiracy theories, take their kind of mRNA strand out and then repackage it. So I've just read on XKCD, the webcomic that we should manufacture a COVID plus 19, not minus 19, so that it's even more viral and cures everyone in the facts. Viral vaccine, so to speak. Well, that's what's cute. Oh, so I will say that right now we do have full funding to map the nuclear energy debate in the United States. When it's a completed project in our existing methodology, I would love to share it with you and get your feedback about how to maybe create reactions that could be anecdotes that are brought to the community and even sincerely get feedback about the utility of organizing knowledge in that way, potentially even incorporating it into PULUS as well. But I'd love to follow up with you if you've got time later. Yeah, certainly. So yeah, live long and prosper. Thank you, you too. Take care.