- I wrote this article to solve the problem of not having enough information on Cybozu Labs website and not knowing what they are doing. memo It would be good to write about broad listening and the improvements made possible by Polis and LLM (Talk to the City is a specific example of this). I guess I should write about the security camp and U22 ProCon as well as the unexplored juniors.
What is Plurality? Plurality is a concept proposed by Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl and their colleagues, and here is a conversation we had when they visited Cybozu’s office on 2024-07-26.
Audrey : We coined the term “Plurality”. Instead of calling it “inclusive diversity” or “digital democracy”. We have already given these terms a specific field color, because they already have a specific field color. For example, if you say “digital democracy” for Plurality, people think of electronic voting machines, even though Plurality can be applied in the workplace. When you say “inclusive diversity,” people immediately think of things like gender and race. That, of course, is also an important part of difference, but it is not the primary focus of this highly coordinated technology.
That is why, like any other language, we need lots of adjectives to describe what we want to describe. But if we have too many adjectives, the words become too long and no one will listen. There is also “polycentric collectivism,” as Glenn attempted, which has too many syllables and makes communication even more difficult.
Glen: This overlapping mixture is better than the word “Plurality”.
Plurality
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This conversation became an article: Feeding off conflicting opinions, we will use digital technology to rejoin the world’s divisions. Unraveling the New Concept of Plurality──Audrey Tan x Glenn Weil x Haruyuki Seki, Code for Japan | Cybozu Style Japanese book project is underway: PLURALITY by Audrey Tan and Glenn Weil, translated into Japanese by Cybozu Shiki Books
What is Broad Listening? Broadlistening is a concept proposed by Andrew Trask and made famous by Audrey et al. in the context of Plurality. It aims to realize better multi-person communication by technologically supporting “listening to many voices”, which is the opposite of “reaching many voices”.
Broadlistening
In Japan, Takahiro Yasuno ran for Governor of Tokyo in July 2024 with broad listening in his manifesto, based on the book Plurality, and then in the House of Representatives election in November 2024, he collaborated with Nippon Television Network Corporation to report on broad listening. Broad Listening” has gained recognition.
Broad Listening itself is not a technique limited to public policy, but rather a method of promoting mutual understanding in groups of multiple people through large-scale language modeling. We believe that broad listening is useful in creating a “society full of teamwork,” which is Cybozu’s goal, and we are conducting research on both theoretical and applied aspects of broad listening.
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Contribution to the Journal of Information Processing Society of Japan: Yasukazu Nishio, “From One Subjectivity to Many, Not Subjective or Objective,” Information Processing Vol. 64 (2023) No. 9, “A Tool for the New Age, ChatGPT: Exploring Its Potential from 14 Perspectives.” Technology for Democracy] I’ll talk about Broad Listening and Talk to the City - YouTube Takahiro Yasuno & Yasukazu Nishio The world’s first terrestrial broadcasting] Analyzing the Lower House election using the broad listening technology used in the Tokyo gubernatorial election｜#Takahiro Yasuno, Office (official)
Analysis of opinion vectors by voting In 2014, the Taiwanese digital democracy project “vTaiwan” was founded, led by Audrey Tang and others; since 2015, “Polis” has been adopted and gained international attention as a successful example of online deliberation.
Polis” is a system that visualizes the distribution of people’s opinions within an opinion space, and encourages each participant in a discussion to better understand the opinions of others, leading to better discussions.
In Japan, it was widely provided under the name “Public Opinion Map” on JAPAN CHOICE, an election information website run by the NPO Mielka, for the 2024 House of Representatives election.
This Polis-like approach is a technique that can be applied to a wide variety of situations, such as disagreements within an organization or understanding the results of customer surveys.
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Polis: Scaling Deliberation by Mapping High Dimensional Opinion Spaces TODO: Write a Note on the results of the poll map and link to it here
Analysis of Opinion Vectors by LLM Since 2023, advances in Large Language Model (LLM) technology have made it easier to convert opinions described in natural language into high-dimensional vectors. In addition, it is now possible for LLMs to explain “how opinions are organized” in natural language based on the results of clustering, rather than merely visualizing them.
This technology for promoting understanding of the distribution of opinions in high-dimensional space is also useful for creating “a society overflowing with teamwork,” which is Cybozu’s goal. Cybozu is conducting research on both theoretical and applied aspects, such as the aforementioned “Talk to the City” application by Yasuno’s team and the “AI-based cluster commentary” technology for public opinion maps.
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Talk to the City
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