@DanielMezick@martinfowler@agileschools I contribute to a neat platform called pol.is. It's used to shape law in #Taiwan. It's basically a technosocial exoskeleton that gives layppl the power to see the forest (10,000s of ppl) via dimensional reduction over a chaotic matrix of agree/disagree statemnts
@DanielMezick@martinfowler@agileschools It has some emergent properties that are a bit of a mindfuck. You can use it to help ppl see a more neutral landscape of complex opinion groups. And you can incentivize participants to do the hard work of finding consensus statements, by dropping statement "between groups"
@DanielMezick@martinfowler@agileschools So if you tell ppl you'll reward them for finding "consensus statements" that straddle groups (e.g. getting their item onto agenda of big meeting), then the most passionate participants (who might otherwise shake apart consensus) will scour the tool to build up a working model...
@DanielMezick@martinfowler@agileschools ...of other groups, so they can "trick" them into agreeing with the statements this passionate user submit. But surprise -- in selfishly trying to achieve that, they've now accidentally laid the foundations for empathy :) And they're a changed participant going forward
@DanielMezick@martinfowler@agileschools Further, the tools definitely opens up questions about how a system could elevate the voices of moderate particpnts (from the liminal spaces between groups) who might guide the discourse. What if we elevated these boundary folks, plucked from the math, to hold power? To decide?
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Hey @visiblynoisy, not sure if you remember our Dufferin Grove Park convo from ages ago, but when we were talking about @UsePolis, you expressed that you felt people of mixed [race] backgrounds seemed better able to sit in the uncomfortable space between groups...
Anyhow, I've come back to that conversation a whole lot in the past few years. So thanks. It gives me hope that many folks caught between tribes of all sorts are the heroes we need in this moment. Came across research today that validates what you sensed: citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo…
"Social Identity Complexity & Outgroup Tolerance" sounds boring, but the tl;dr is this: People with more complex social identities (membership in multiple distinct groups) are more tolerant of outgroups.