Once upon a time, long ago (2004) and far away (Cambridge MA), a college sophomore created and released an online social network that became enormously successful and is the foundation for one of today’s most influential technology companies. It clearly tapped into a widely felt need. It grew exponentially, changing the world both for better and for worse.
Times have changed, and there are new needs to be met. The world feels dramatically polarized, with factions almost unable to communicate with each other, to the point of almost “living in different realities”. There are few trusted sources for information that people who disagree with each other can turn to, to settle their disputes.
Can a new kind of social network help? Can a college sophomore (or freshman or junior) create it today?
Let’s imagine that Alice and Bob take a break from their work in cybersecurity, and start discussing politics. Things go rapidly downhill, to the point where they almost stop talking with each other (which would be a big problem for their cybersecurity roles).
Both Alice and Bob have complex, diverse, and sophisticated systems of beliefs about many different topics. Both are widely read, and consider themselves to be serious thinkers, willing to think critically about their own beliefs as well as about the beliefs and claims of others.
While neither of them is a lock-step follower of any given leader, Alice’s beliefs are generally aligned with one side of the political spectrum (call it the “red” side), while Bob’s beliefs are generally aligned with the other side (call it the “blue” side). They tend to read news and opinions from sources generally aligned with their own side, but each sometimes reads articles and essays from the other side. Each is convinced that the other side’s news and opinions are full of misinformation, but each admits that their own side sometimes indulges in misinformation as well.
Alice and Bob have enjoyed their conversations with each other, especially when they stay away from political topics. But the urgent political questions of the day are very important to both of them, and it feels like a missed opportunity and a violation of personal integrity to avoid discussing them. Alice and Bob are both “techies”, and have had plenty of experience successfully hashing out scientific and technical disagreements. They have both seen that these discussions, however vigorous, often result in unexpected “win-win” conclusions.
How can they make this happen for political discussions?
Alice and Bob create a structured discussion for themselves. The starting point is to agree on a single question where they disagree on the answer, but agree that it must be limited enough to resolve with the resources they have available. Many of their previous failed discussions have jumped from one political topic to another, to the point where they give up in exhaustion. Their goal is to stick with one question until they can agree on the answer. Then, perhaps, they can take on another.
This discussion takes place within a Facebook-like interface, but with only two participants: Alice and Bob. They may provide links to other sources of information, but the discussion is private, between the two of them, at least in this part of the process.
Success is achieved when Alice and Bob agree on an answer to the question they have posed for themselves. (We’ll discuss later what happens next.) They fail when Alice and Bob agree that they don’t have an answer they can both agree on, and they are no longer making progress. Success and failure both require Alice and Bob to agree. Otherwise, the discussion remains private, even if it becomes inactive.
Success should be a win-win, agreeing on an answer they can both trust, to a question they both consider significant. This is not a zero-sum game, where one of them “wins” the argument and the other one “loses”. Indeed, their experience from scientific and technical discussions suggests that a final trusted answer is often different from both starting points, and both people benefit.
Another win-win benefit is that success means they have experienced a discussion method that was able to resolve an initial disagreement. That experience may well be valuable when discussing the next question in a continuing dialog.
No one can answer every question. No one has all the necessary information. We all build on information and conclusions developed previously, sometimes by ourselves, but often by others. Trusting those prior conclusions is essential.
In science and technology, we search for prior knowledge in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, and from other research groups we trust, but that is only the beginning. If my collaborators and I are going to invest months or years of our effort based on someone else’s paper, we don’t simply trust it on faith. We start by replicating their work, to make sure that it works in our environment and for our problems. (The trust and faith we start with justifies our investment in replicating the work.)
In the course of their discussion, Alice and Bob each present prior information gathered from the news or literature that they each trust, but the other may criticize as “mis-information”. Their discussion must drill down into the details, until they agree on a common trusted basis they can build on. There are many fact-checkers on the Internet, but those too must be evaluated for their trustworthiness.
Finding this common trusted foundation is hard. It can fail, ending the discussion. In science and technology, participants typically share a foundational belief that there is a common reality “out there”, and our discussions can build on that shared belief. Is this also true for political discussions? Maybe, but maybe not.
For this proposal, I choose to assume that it is possible to find some fundamental shared beliefs, so a successful discussion is possible even if it is hard.
Suppose Alice and Bob have put in the necessary hard work, and their discussion has resulted in a shared answer to the question they have chosen, trusted by both of them. This is a triumph! They can both be proud of their joint accomplishment.
Now what?
Their joint conclusion can now be released for public comment. Their entire discussion has been saved and stored, but they may want to clean it up a bit for public viewing. But not too much! The twists and turns of the dialog they went through, and the evidence they considered and evaluated, are also valuable to readers. A cleaned and polished presentation may well be less valuable than one that shows how the difficult challenges were made explicit and overcome.
Public comment is much like refereeing of papers in science and technology (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review). Also see Open Peer Commentary in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences). In the domain of politics, see the Federalist Papers (https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text). Federalist No. 1 sounds surprisingly contemporary (https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10#s-lg-box-wrapper-25493264).
At a certain point, Alice and Bob may add their own joint response to the public comments, and further comments are closed. Closing the comments is not to stifle further thought, but to encourage interested readers to consider creating their own new discussions.
At this point, the original discussion between Alice and Bob has been completed. Their discussion, the public comments, and their response to the comments is maintained by the social network as part of the public record.
Naturally, Alice and Bob may well have more to say to each other, and they and other people may create new discussions, with their own comments and responses.
The social network is a medium for discussion between two people who come to a significant question from different perspectives. The discussion is private until the discussants agree that it has succeeded. After a discussion has been open for public comment for long enough, the authors respond to the comments, and comments are closed.
Q: Should exactly two discussants be required? Or would a larger group of discussants be just as good? (I’m inclined toward just two, since it is easier for each person to respond to the point of view of an individual other person.)
Q: Is it essential that the discussants genuinely come with different perspectives? (I think so. Bridging that gap is the whole point. There are plenty of venues for distributing essays from a particular point of view.)
Q: Should failed discussions also be opened for public comment? (I think probably not. The point is to bridge the gap, not to highlight where it proved unbridgeable. But perhaps commenters have suggestions for how to succeed.)
The social network should maintain an index of existing discussions: ongoing in private, open for comment, and completed but available for reading. There could also be a set of proposed questions, inviting pairs of people with different perspectives to start a discussion
One goal of this effort is to bridge the polarization gap that our society is suffering from, by allowing two discussants from different sides to enter into good faith discussions, searching for a shared answer to a specific limited question.
Another goal of this effort is for discussants to identify information that they can both trust. A successful discussion identifies an answer to the specified question that both discussants agree they can trust.
A third goal is to create an index to a set of questions, discussions, and answers that successfully bridge the polarization divide.
Before releasing and publicizing this social network, we should have 3-5 completed discussions, plus 1-2 open for public comments, and 1-2 ongoing in private.