I really appreciate this critique. And I'm grateful for your cynicism. So long as that cynicism isn't used as a reason not to take tenuous steps toward somethin

I really appreciate this critique. And I'm grateful for your cynicism. So long as that cynicism isn't used as a reason not to take tenuous steps toward something different from the status quo. With that said: > How much value does a consensus system like this truly have in finding the truth of a subject matter There's maybe some things to hash out here. If the value of consensus is seen as finding a "truth", then yes, I agree this tool is suspect for that. But if the value of consensus is simply finding enough agreement (on feelings/facts/whatever) to take a step forward together, then maybe it can survive truth shifting under our feet a bit. What matters is whether we maintain commitment to moving in some direction together. And my experience is that Polis creates the stability and trust required for this. Unlike the hyper-division fostered by social media platforms, Polis helps build stable common ground to stand on. It can be used to elevate and incentivize people who do the work of offering bridging (aka shared) sentiments. Other tools don't do this. My mental model is that the availability of these bridges in the opinion space, this stabilizes middle ground on which long-form deliberations can take place. [1] > might be used as a tool by people with bad intentions to gather data about what the population superficially thinks and then be able to shape your media campaign YES. This is a huge concern to not just Polis' creators, but many who work around big data. The capacity for abuse or manipulation is huge. My personal hope is that we can all build tooling like this together, to make us as a population legible to ourselves (symmetric, self-knowledge), rather than data simply making us legible to powerful actors via asymmetric knowledge (which is what's currently happening). This is why imho tools like Polis should be run openly by governments or other trusted partners (journalists). Cryptographic and data trusts should certainly play a role in future iterations. This whole effort needs people thinking about safeguards in the same way that those designing/maintaining a democracy think about safeguards. imho the process of running these processes must [eventually] be comparably sacred to those of running elections and parliaments. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrRRvqgYgT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrRRvqgYgT0