What is Plurality?

2024-04-19

What is Plurality? --- /halsk/what-is-plurality?

• Plurality” is a new technological paradigm and movement proposed by Audrey Tan, Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs, and Glenn Weil, a researcher and economist at Microsoft.

• The word Plurality, in its most basic sense, refers to “multitude” or “diversity.” It is a word that describes a state in which a multitude of elements, ideas, and perspectives are present, emphasizing the recognition of diverse perspectives and ideas, not just one perspective or idea.

• Based on the meaning of the word, Plurality, as advocated by Tan and Weil, is oriented toward collaboration across social and cultural diversity. It is the pursuit of technology that recognizes, respects, and empowers social and cultural differences.

• The proper use of technology is also advocated as a means to help democratic societies thrive and overcome social divisions.

• For more information, see https://plurality.net.

• A book on this idea, “Plurality” will be published on May 20.
• There is also a Japanese forum on this book: /plurality-japanese.

The following is a summary of nishio’s participation in Plurality Tokyo on 2023-04-12

What is Plurality?

• Taiwan: “several positions” is original. Taiwan: “pluralistic” and “pluralism” are also used. ref. multiverse division.
• Japan: No definite translation yet.

Concept proposed by Audrey Tang and E. Glen Weyl in September 2022.

• Original source: Plurality:. Technology for Collaborative Diversity and Democracy - RadicalxChange
  • It’s hard to put it in Japanese, but I guess it could be called “plurality: coactive technology for diversity and democracy.
  • The document is a proposal for a new concept of “Plurality”, so I did not apply a translation.
  • The corresponding concept Singularity is translated as “Singularity”, so it was aligned with it and katakana was used.
• About Audrey Tang
  • Feng Tang, Audrey Tan
  • Programmer and politician, Republic of China
  • 2005, Version 6 of the programming language Perl implemented in Haskell
  • Joined the Cabinet in Taiwan in October 2016 and served as Political Affairs Commissioner for Digital
  • First Director of the newly established Department of Mathematical Development on August 27, 2022.
    • The Ministry of Mathematical Development is, in Japanese, the “Digital Development Agency.
  • When Uber landed in Taiwan, thousands of citizens debated on a discussion platform called vTaiwan, and opinions emerged that overcame the initial conflict and were supported by both sides, which were then implemented by the Taiwanese government.
• About E. Glen Weyl
  • Eric Glen Weyl
  • Research Fellow at Microsoft Research and an economist.
  • 2018 Co-authored paper, “Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy.”
  • 2018 Co-author, “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.”
  • Quadratic voting] and quadratic funding advocated by them are seen as promising methods for better social decision-making and distribution of funds.
  • Gitcoin has actually used Quadratic funding to distribute funds for public good projects such as open source, with $50+million(over$6.7 billion) as of 2023.

FAQ

• Q: What exactly do you mean?
  • There is an official Japanese translation of the original document, about 6 pages long, so read that first.
  • https://www.plurality.net/v/jpn/
• Q: What does that mean in a nutshell?
  • If a concept can be succinctly explained in existing language, it is not a new concept
• Q: Roughly what do you mean?
  • According to Nishio’s interpretation.
    • Rapid development of AI is causing “not good things” to happen.
    • There are “good” techniques, tools and methodologies to counter this.
    • But these vague “not good” and “good” are difficult to discuss, so we need to name them.
    • Plurality” refers to the “direction of change” and the “ideal beyond change” in which various specific technologies bring about changes in society in a “good” direction.
    • Specific examples of what is “good” about vTaiwan and [Quadratic Funding
    • Specific examples not mentioned above: it is “bad” that advances in AI image recognition technology allow the government to know “who is where” via surveillance cameras; it is “good” that distributed ID technology, which is not under government control, allows individuals to have personal identities online without physical physical danger It is “good” to be able to have a personal identity online without physical bodily danger

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This page is auto-translated from /nishio/Pluralityとは using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.