Plurality in Japan (Cybozu Labs)

• Cybozu Labs Study Session 2024-08-02
• Participated in the session Designing for Plurality at Funding the Commons Tokyo 2024 with Audrey Tan and Glenn Weil (2024-07-25).
• Plurality in Japan” (7 minutes), which I prepared to speak there, was presented in Japanese in a separate session the day before for additional content and questions (Plurality in Japan(Japanese) , 40 minutes).
• I’ll talk about this one for 60 minutes.
  • I’m going to ask a lot of questions.

• Did the concept of broad listening come out of the Plurality community?
  • The concept of broad listening was named by a friend of Glenn’s named Andrew Trask (Naming Broad Listening).
    • Ultimately, Yasuno learned about the concept of broad listening by looking at machine translations of Plurality books that had been placed in the Plurality Japanese translation community.

• I’m curious how many Offensive ones there were: …
  • I don’t have the exact percentage, but I’m guessing there were quite a few, and the toxicity score comes out something like 0%~100% on some axis, so it cuts off at the threshold of 50% or so.

• Japan is not a top-down country!
  • Like the pattern of going back and forth for approval.
  • Ringi System” The Decision Making Process in Japanese Management Systems: An Overview].
  • Responsibility-averse?
  • I guess you could say the positive aspect is that it takes time to build consensus.
  • That is what “CONSENSUAL” means.
  • I do think that the strength of the hierarchy and the denial of higher and lower ranks are somehow contradictory.
  • Convincing is the best priority! I think it’s because there are a lot of people who are like that. Maybe there aren’t many people who don’t have a choice because they are told to.
  • The existence of the opposite style, “I can’t just accept what the higher-ups tell me,” is a characteristic of cultures that are not superordinate in the first place, and there are cultures that say, “The higher-ups told me, so of course I’ll obey, and of course they’ll take full responsibility for their decision-making.
    • 
  • Does that mean it’s acceptable if the higher ups take responsibility?
  • In Japan, the frontlines must also question the decisions of their superiors. That may be true.
• relevance
  • Personally, I think that “higher-ups” in Japan are not “individual bosses” but “air,” “company,” “world,” and “common sense,” the personification of a faceless group of individuals.
    • Therefore, the behavior of “individual bosses” to decide the “will of the group” (= the will of superiors) on their own is both repugnant and obedient to the decisions of the “superiors” (= the group).
      • Broad Listening is Important in Japan, Where Air Rules

• I have an image that the structure of decision making is not likely to change easily, but the structure of information transfer will change a lot.
  • If we can use Polis to remain anonymous and have confrontations without direct attacks psychological safety is going to be higher and better discussions.
• I wonder if Japan became this style because it was a polytheistic religion rather than a monotheistic one. In other words, there were many people higher than you, so you had to decide for yourself which one was right?
  • There are countries with polytheistic religions, not only Japan, so it would be strange to attribute it to them.

• Smooth, I don’t really get the image of smooth. …
  • You mean diverse perspectives? Or the opposite of an echo chamber?
  • I suggest you read the original, as it is a super-summary of “Smooth Society and Its Enemies” on one page.

I am sure that Nishio-san did not start out using the KJ method in the context of plurality, but I find it interesting that he has found a connection with it.

• Of course, when we started doing the KJ method, we didn’t yet have the word “plurality” in the current sense!

What is Plurality?

• 
• A concept proposed by Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl.
  • Plurality: Technology for Collaborative Diversity and Democracy
  • Techniques for Overcoming Differences and Collaboration
    • How difficult it is to “overcome differences.” …
  • A movement to update society for the better by using this technology.
  • 
  • The society that is being newly created is still taking shape and people have never seen it before.
  • So I can’t fully explain it in existing terms.
  • We must create new words and connect them to the context to create new meanings for the words themselves
  • Putting a new meaning on an existing word?
    • Yes, it’s in the dictionary, but I don’t know what it means when I try to interpret it in the dictionary sense. - Plurality is a new term
    • singular plural (singular plural)
    • There is a connection between “singularity ⇔ plurality”.
    • By the way, why do they call it “singular” when AI will evolve so much?
    • In the first place, “singularity” only means “singularity”, and $y=1/x$ is a singularity at $x=0$.
      • Singularity (mathematics) - Wikipedia

Plurality Japanese edition is now available from Cybozu Shiki Books

• Japanese translation of PLURALITY by Audrey Tan and Glenn Weil | Cybozu Shiki Books
• Trilogy interview with Audrey+Glen+Halsk will also be published in a Cybozu-style web article
• Why is Cybozu cooperating with Plurality?
  • Because Cybozu’s mission is “[Creating a society full of teamwork
  • Technology to overcome “differences” and work together is Technology to create a society overflowing with teamwork.
  • The feeling of having found friends who share the same ideals (Sympathy for ideals)
• case
  • We have done “100 people, 100 different ways of working / 100 Personnel Systems for 100 People in 100 Different Ways” because each individual has a different situation.
    • Work-Life Balance Coordination Promotion and Evaluation Subcommittee (35th Meeting) Joint Meeting of the Coordination and Promotion Council of the Ministries and Agencies concerned with Work-Life Balance - “Work-Life Balance” Promotion Website - Gender Equality Bureau, Cabinet Office 100 people, 100 different ways of working - Cybozu’s work style transformation
  • Cybozu’s too free way of working was managed in this way! Cybozu’s too free way of working was managed in this way｜Cybozu Work Style Encyclopedia
    • June 27, 2018
    • A case study of how different needs (= diversity) are taken care of with the help of Digital Tools.
• Cybozu didn’t even have a broad listening tool, but they’ve been working hard.
  • In 1997, when the majority of communication within organizations was still oral conversations and whiteboards, “Cybozu Office” was released and communication became “something that never goes away”. As a result, roles such as information curator emerged.
    • A story about an employee who reads all the daily reports of about 500 people and is truly amazed at how well he keeps track of internal information | Cybozu Style
    • Like Cybozu Digest.
  • We have experienced things such as notification explosion by everyone sending out messages, etc., as our own personal experiences within our own company.
    • Things like political divisions on social networking sites didn’t happen because we are a corporate organization, but you are very concerned about the possibility of divisions in the form of siloing and dealing with it, both systemically and operationally.

Dig deeper in the remaining time

• The whole thing cannot be explained in 25 minutes.
• The overarching explanation is abstract.
  • 
  • I’m sure you can find that by searching, etc., so here are some interesting topics to connect to the context of Funding the Commons

Funding the Commons and Plurality

• Start with interchange format in Gyojin Karatani, which Audrey referred to, and run through digital democracy.
• 
  • If food was not storable, it was more reasonable for everyone to share more than they could eat alone than to let the uneaten amount rot. (Exchange Form A)
  • The ability to preserve food has eliminated the rationale for sharing.
  • The hungry want food, so they have to offer something in exchange.
  • At this time, all that “those who have no assets” could offer was their life time.
  • Thus occurred the “subordination to others” of selling off time. (Exchange Form B)
  • This evolved into an army not engaged in productive activities.
    • The occurrence of standing armies is quite old, already documented in Mesopotamia.
  • A “state” was created to protect the “people” within from external forces through military power.
  • By eliminating others through military force, “land” that belonged to no one became privately owned.
• The same long ago created “tokens that can be saved.”
  • Later it will be called money.
  • Shekel - Wikipedia
  • 
  • Replacement timing no longer needs to be synchronized, making replacement easier (Replacement Form C)
    • Efficiency through division of labor
      • Yes, there is that too. Adam Smith.
  • More compact and stable than “storable food,” easier to accumulate value
  • A synergistic effect occurred: the military strength of the value accumulation increased the reliability of this token, and vice versa, and this token increased the stability of the value accumulation
  • However, as the market for token exchange grows, geographically demarcated nations will become a hindrance.
    • The “state” as a mechanism to protect “friends” within by eliminating external enemies with military force seeks to strengthen borders, while trade seeks to weaken them.
    • The more connected the market, the more profitable it was.
  • Merchants interfere in the running of the state.
    • Venice in medieval Europe, etc.
  • The forces demanding open trade from the states became stronger and stronger, and eventually a global market was established.
    • Perry: “Please open the country!”
    • If you go to a convenience store there for a minute and look at the ingredients, they’re harvested all over the world.
• 
  • This was a rough explanation of exchange styles A, B, and C in Yukito Karatani’s theory of exchange styles.
  • By the way, if you look at world history on this scale, now is the period of “the first 100 years of the birth of the electronic calculator”.
  • A new kind of “thing (goods)” has been created: digital goods.
    • Can be replicated at negligible cost.
    • A fortune spent but not reduced.”
  • Just as in the days when sharing food increased the happiness of a society, copying digital goods increases the total amount of happiness in a society.
  • Digital goods, however, are inedible.
    • 
    • In the course of civilization’s progress to this point, most people have come to obtain their food in exchange for money.
    • If we made digital goods and gave them away for free, they would starve to death.
      • There was also an incident where an unrewarded OSS author became angry and engaged in vandalism (colors.js incident).
    • Society’s overall well-being is improved if the digital goods created are copied by as many people as possible for free.
    • Why don’t society fund the people who create digital goods to the extent that they don’t die, and make the digital goods created into commons that are shared by everyone?
      • (For those wondering about the difference between Common Goods and Public Goods: Funding the Commons says [“We build a bridge between builders and researchers focused on transforming the funding mechanisms for public goods.)
• So what does Plurality think about this area?
  • 
  • An important concept is the worldview of “neither the individual nor the whole, but a number of intersecting groups.
  • From this point of view, it seems like a false choice between “private ownership” and “worldwide sharing” in terms of digital goods.
  • Glen et al. said that there is a space between Public and Private (Beyond Public and Private).
    • 
  • Something similar is said in Japan by Kazuto Ataka ([web3, Environmental Impact and Thin Commons - Between Neuroscience and Marketing https://kaz-ataka.hatenablog. com/entry/2023/12/24/123010])(2023)
    • 
  • There is a growing sense that this problem is something that needs to be resolved in the future.
    • And the situation that web3 technology may be the solution to create new ownership and provision options for digital goods.
    • That’s why there’s a good amount of web3-related stuff in the other sessions.

intersecting group and Ideology in the 21st Century.

• Talk a little more about this diagram
• 
• In this connection, Ideology in the 21st Century organizes and strongly promotes one of the three ideologies, “digital democracy,” in the Plurality book
  • 
    • from Glen’s slide : [/plurality-japanese/Glen in Japan Keynote Japanese subtitle65aaa7faff09e0000559732](https://scrapbox.io/plurality-japanese/Glen in Japan Keynote Japanese subtitle65aaa7faff09e0000559732)
    • Integrated Technocracy (synthetic technocracy) is the idea that AI advances will create a being that surpasses humans, so why don’t we all just leave it to it?
    • It is this ideology that is implied by the word Singularity when it is explained that “Plurality is a synonym for Singularity.
    • This corresponds to the WHOLE in the indivisual / intersecting group / whole diagram
      • 
    • I don’t understand it well when I think of Plurality as a synonym for this and think of it as aiming at INDIVIDUALITY.
    • Especially web3 people would mistake it for an oppositional composition of centralized and decentralized power.
    • corporate libertarianism (corporate libertarianism) is the antipode in the conflict.
    • Using cryptography and other technologies to strengthen individual freedoms and undermine the power of government to restrict them.
    • The idea is to let the market mechanism take care of itself, so to speak.
    • This corresponds to the indivisual in the indivisual / intersecting group / whole diagram
    • A vision of avoiding and deconstructing social organization through technology and replacing trust with algorithms” by Glen
    • digital democracy also opposes [corporate libertarianism
    • For example, at yesterday’s Meetup, the question was “Do you think we can have a trustless government in the future?” Audrey answered [“I don’t like the word trustless. I like the word trust building.
    • They seem to think that the direction of pursuing trastress is to disassemble and destroy the existing social structure built by trust, which is undesirable.
  • You can look at these three ideologies and try to figure out which element is stronger in you.
    • Plural Viewpoints, a service that allows questions to be posed to three different ideologies
      • Often divided, and even when not divided, there are differences in specific policies.
      • For example, “The declining birthrate and aging population are making it difficult to maintain the welfare of the elderly, what should be done?”
      • ST: Implement nursing care robots and AI to compensate for labor shortages and improve the quality of care.
      • CL: Reduce regulations and increase competition among businesses so that innovative services and products for the elderly can emerge.
      • DD: Strengthen community networks and create systems to support seniors through volunteerism and community activities.
      • Each has a point.
    • Nishio personally believes that “in the long run, it is an integrated technocracy, but before that, we need digital democracy first.
      • When AI becomes smarter than humans, AI governance will be better than human governance.
      • However, when we speak of “governing people to happiness,” it is not good if some people define “happiness” in a way that imposes a form of happiness on other people, so we need a way to collect the various forms of happiness of everyone.
      • Since that is digital democracy, we can conclude that “digital democracy is necessary before integrated technocracy.
      • Regardless of whether we accept a dictatorship by a smart AI later, it is better to push for digital democracy at this point.
      • You can also decide in a digital democracy whether to accept it or not.

Diagram to be used for questions

• 
  • [/plurality-japanese/ spectrum of collaboration across diversity](https://scrapbox.io/plurality-japanese/ spectrum of collaboration across diversity).
• 
  • [/plurality-japanese/3-0-⿻ What is it?660a2224aff09e0000857770](https://scrapbox.io/plurality-japanese/3-0-⿻ What is it?660a2224aff09e0000857770)
  • 
  • /plurality-japanese/Trinity

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