Glen Weyl: The quadratic voting method is a fascinating experimental approach that alters traditional voting by allowing voters to rank candidates. With quadratic voting, voters can make a more comprehensive assessment of candidates rather than simply selecting one.
An important limitation of quadratic voting is its potential for instability and radical outcomes. In some cases, voters may be influenced by strategic voting, ranking candidates they believe have a better chance of winning rather than their true preferences. This can distort results and lead to unfairness.
Another issue is that quadratic voting requires voters to have a good understanding and ability to evaluate candidates. This may be challenging for some voters who lack sufficient information or time to assess all candidates thoroughly.
Despite these limitations, quadratic voting remains an intriguing experiment offering a different approach to elections that can promote broader participation and more extensive political discourse.
Glen: I believe platforms like Ethereum play a crucial role in realizing the potential of the metaverse. Blockchain technology offers a decentralized way to manage and record digital assets, forming a foundational basis for the metaverse.
Ethereum’s smart contract capabilities simplify interactions and collaborations within the metaverse, making them more reliable and straightforward. It enables diverse applications and organizations to establish and operate on the blockchain, providing greater flexibility and creativity for metaverse development.
Of course, blockchain technology faces challenges such as scalability and energy consumption. However, I’m confident that with ongoing technological advancements and improvements, these issues will be addressed.
Overall, Ethereum and other blockchain platforms provide robust foundations and tools for the realization of the metaverse. They will continue to play significant roles in driving metaverse development and innovation.
Following Plurality Activities:
At the conclusion of his speech, Glen also shared details about upcoming Plurality events. He mentioned the Plurality Summit 2024 and Plurality Salon as pivotal activities aimed at furthering the development and practice of the metaverse.
Plurality Summit 2024 will convene global experts and scholars to explore the future and developmental directions of the metaverse.
Plurality Salon, on the other hand, is a regular event intended to facilitate cross-disciplinary exchanges and collaborations, advancing the application of metaverse concepts and practices across various fields.
Through these initiatives, Glen aims to drive further development of the metaverse and expand its principles and practices into broader domains.
This encapsulates the essence of Glen Weyl’s presentation at the Metaverse Salon, which sparked extensive attention and discussion among attendees. He emphasized the relationship between democracy and information technology, as well as the importance of collaborative technologies for societal progress. He highlighted how communal rewards and collaborative technologies can unite diverse communities harmoniously rather than dividing them. The concept and practices of Plurality offer new approaches and methods for advancing the metaverse’s development. He introduced the essence and etymology of Plurality, the direction of democracy and information technology, and the action of Taiwan. He also explored methods to promote human social progress in the digital era, the potential of collaborative technology, and rewards from community life. Finally, he answered the questions of the participants and introduced the following activities of Plurality.
I believe that the experiences I have heard about quadratic voting are generally quite positive. However, there have been some important challenges that have emerged.
One of them is that if you allow people to coordinate extensively, groups that are able to coordinate extensively often end up dominating the quadratic voting process. This is true in other voting systems as well, as it is a well-known concept in democracy that coordinated interests dominate uncoordinated interests. However, I think that sometimes this can be even worse under quadratic voting, as trying to consider these social differences has become the sole reason for moving towards diversity, rather than simply a radical market concept.
We have started to recognize the importance of incorporating social organization into this concept. Another challenge in the state of Colorado is their decision to conduct secret voting, as they are concerned about issues of collusion. I think this is a big mistake, as it goes against the public records laws that require transparency in the behavior of lawmakers.
So, I think this is a case where trying to address collusion issues in a very simplistic way has led to many problems. This is another important lesson that I think we have learned.
Overall, these experiences have been great for most people, but I think these challenges have pushed us to innovate in the next generation of voting technology in an exciting way. These technologies will eventually take into account how social groups function within quadratic functions, and ultimately incorporate these considerations. Thank you.
Q: There is a follow-up question… You mentioned the aspect of secrecy, as I think in Ethereum, we want to avoid bribery attacks… We designed Macy to hide the type of vote. But do you think this secrecy is harmful or…?
Glen: I think the context of Ethereum is different from that of representative government, where representatives need to be able to communicate with their constituents. In theory, you can imagine a world, like Liquid Democracy on Ethereum, where your vote may be transparent to the people who voted for you but hidden from others, and that could be an ideal information structure.
It is not easy to achieve this in the real world, but it could be an interesting direction. I do think that many people in the crypto world have overly simplified this idea and tried to solve coercion issues by making your vote secret.
I think this, in practice, misses much of what actually happens in a standard voting process, as well as in the Ethereum world. Or, I know very little about how big of a problem it is or isn’t in countries that adopt it, to make strong statements.
But I think it is either naive to think that secret voting is a good thing or that it solves the strong problems that exist in modern advanced democratic countries, or it is naive to think that there are no bribery problems in countries that adopt it.
This is based on a very simple model. In Latin America, they have secret voting everywhere. There is still a lot of bribery happening. In fact, most of the time, bribery doesn’t need to see the voter’s ballot, and people often do mail-in voting. Although it can be effective to show this, there is no widespread voter bribery. So, I think these things work.
I think many cryptographers like to use these relatively simple models because they are clear and easy to understand, but they don’t actually capture the essence of the problem. I would encourage us to use these theories but not get too caught up in them or think that they are the ultimate solution.
Question from Tim Colton (Bloomberg Opinion columnist):
Q: I think a lot of the ideas in Plurality make sense, but they are too esoteric for the general public, similar to many of the issues surrounding the crypto space. It goes beyond just the currency aspect of crypto, where there are a lot of good ideas and good technologies. But the general public simply cannot understand, so they ignore it and focus on all the failures that happen. Of course, SBF is the most famous.
So my question is, what kind of conversation can you ask everyone in this salon to have at the dinner table or over coffee with an ordinary person, like their Aunt Mary? What kind of conversation can they have to help them understand, for example, the key concepts of Plurality so that they can internalize and understand how it relates to them? Because if these ideas want attention, we have to bring them into a broader society. It can’t just be us weirdos in this room.
So how can people sit down and have a very simple conversation with someone slightly above average intelligence so that they can internalize it and start spreading the gospel?
Glen: That’s a great question, and we’ve thought a lot about that and have many different approaches. I will only give a few because of the limited time, but we talk more about this in the book. For every activity, you need to increase the number of people engaging in a lower-intensity version of that activity to support the participants of those activities.
My vision is that by 2030, one billion people… people outside of the Chinese-speaking world, will recognize Audrey or Plurality, and one hundred million people will have seen a movie about Plurality or even Audrey’s life, not just abstract ideas.
The way Plurality emerges is like the Force in Star Wars. Nobody knows what the Force really is, but you know it’s something floating around, and that’s cool.
Then, ten million people spend an hour or more reading media content about these ideas; one million people read the book or become part of the broader Plurality community in some way; one hundred thousand people truly digest the content of the book; ten thousand people join Discord and actively contribute; one thousand people feel confident enough to be the messengers who go out and speak about these ideas, not just at the dinner table but more widely.
We need participation at many different levels, not just from those who fully understand it. We need many reinforcing structures that understand it at different levels of resolution, and each level and its subparts require different signals to understand. Stories about Taiwan, Audrey’s life story, my frustration with AI, my frustration with all these crypto scams, I want different things. It’s a story that can cross political divides in the United States and easily convey to people.
Certainly, it has to be some kind of attractive technological issue, but you know, AI and crypto are like that too. We’re used to having these mysterious technological things floating around. But as long as you have connections to people who know a little more, who are connected to people who know a little more, you create the kind of structure that political movements rely on.
And then we also need to pay very close attention to those people who are capable of creating different political divides and rich structures. Therefore, in our thinking about communication, what we do is for each audience we have, we analyze what is the watershed in the network, what are the boundaries where credibility and social capital in one domain cannot diffuse to another domain.
At a high level, we study culture, politics, and business, because these are very different domains. But within each of these domains, we think about what their internal divisions are.
You know, in the political domain, it would be like the West versus other countries, and then you have left-wing, right-wing, and centrist, and all these types of factions, right? So in each domain, we pay attention to the existing divisions and use the language relevant to that community for dissemination. That’s why we believe in translation, not just translation across languages, but translation across cultural contexts. We believe that we will be able to create a book with different entry points, where some people might be interested in concrete applications, and some might be interested in philosophy, and so on.
So, to address the challenges you mentioned, we need to reflect the Plurality that exists in our descriptions of the world when we communicate these ideas.
(Speech ends)
Plurality Follow-up Activities Information:
The Plurality Salon event on January 19th has successfully concluded. In order to allow more people to participate in discussions on the topic of the multiverse and to learn about how to become contributors to the Plurality Book, TempoX will continue to hold follow-up Plurality Salon events, such as “Building Islands,” after the Lunar New Year. These events will continue the discussion on the multiverse until the “Plurality Summit 2024” in August. From August 6th to 8th, the summit will invite global Plurality contributors and heavyweight guests to participate in cross-border panel discussions at the Nangang Exhibition Center, discussing the future of the multiverse. Your contributions and participation are essential in making Taiwan visible to the world on the path to success.
Plurality Summit 2024
| Date: August 6th to 8th
| Keynote Speakers:
Vitalik Buterin
| Co-founder of Ethereum
Glen Weyl
| Research Director of Microsoft’s Pluralistic Collaboration Center, author of “Radical Markets,” co-author of “Plurality”
Audrey Tang
| Co-author of “Plurality”
(More speakers to be announced)
| Location: Nangang Exhibition Center
| Official Website: https://plurality.abs.io/
Plurality Salon
| Event Name: “Building Islands”
| Event Format: Lectures, book clubs, collaborative workshops, exchange tea parties (to be determined, announced according to each event)
| Date: After the Lunar New Year in February, one event per month is expected
| Physical Lecture Venue: TempoX (22F, No. 15-1, Section 1, Hangzhou South Road, Zhongzheng District, Taipei City)
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