Tau/Agoras: Encouraging responsible participation with consequence and opinion mapping

Decision support may help people track costs and benefits of each decision

We have a potential problem which will emerge that when you have great power you also have great responsibility. Tau if it achieves the goals ahead of itself will be a network which empowers participants. This leads to a dilemma of how do you have both participant empowerment and also encourage responsible participation? If participant empowerment takes place but responsible participation does not then the negative outcomes which many fear could become more likely.

Tau/Agoras is a neutral technology. It has no current definition because it is to be collaboratively and community defined. In this post I offer two ideas which can help encourage (to those willing) responsible participation and co-creation.

Opinion mapping

Ohad brought up the idea of opinion maps in one of his QAs and I agree with the idea that we need a way to track opinions. Consensus detection gives us this capability and scaling discussion is a key and necessary feature for Tau to even have the hope of being used in a responsible manner. Consensus detection at the minimum allows for detecting agreement between dozens, hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of participants. This has been tested so far using the TML Bot and we have seen in the tests that the intersect function of the TML Bot does work to merge agreement. Many problems still remain at this phase though because expressing opinions in a way where the TML Bot can record it is not yet simple.

Some ways of expression could include asynchronous communication. One benefit of having a TML Bot is that this would allow anyone to communicate their opinions to their instance of TML in a potentially private manner on their own PCs and then over time intersect or merge by broadcasting in some manner their opinions to the cloud or P2P network. There could also be even better ways if natural language processing can reach the state where the classifier can track sentiment because this sentiment analysis feature can help people to arrive at more educated opinions. Of course there are still issues such as the fact that how would the network determine true information from false information, or deal with fake facts, but these are a matter of building filters or offering filtering services.

Consequence mapping

To map the potential consequences from any decision from a decision tree can really help a person to arrive at a high quality decision from the knowledge they have. If we factor in sentiment, add debiasing, enable contradiction detection, fact checking or information filtering services, then we can see that the consequence map can for example include lots of different prices or rewards and costs for different decisions. For example negative sentiment could be a potential cost while positive sentiment could be a potential reward, while you also can have economic costs such as monetary, moral costs if the participant for example is vegan for instance and does not want to support animal suffering.

Decision support as a service?

Services can be offered over Agoras. Experts in different fields including in fields of decision support, can offer services. As mentioned one problem is determining what is true and what isn't true. There are experts in this world who can offer services which can help to fact check different areas. In my opinion fact checking may never be completely automated but it is possible for humans to verify certain information as true using their own expertise.

So part of decision support likely will include answering the question of is this information true or false? What is the probability that this information is true or false? Which experts believe this information is true or false? These quantification or truth and falsehood are probabilistic fuzzy logic. If someone is an expert you may want to have the ability to follow their truth. So just like stigmergy, to follow the opinions of the experts in the field could be incredibly valuable for Tau if there are experts in the field who can be trusted.

Consequence maps? If an expert predicts a certain consequence is likely to happen and it does happen then you may want to begin following their consequence map because perhaps their view of the situation is better.