So, let's talk about another approach. Giving up on this notion of consensus or agreement. There have still been people who said that deliberation is a good thing for democracy, even if it doesn't converge on agreement, because deliberation. Is a way to get at the truth of things. And after all, truth is important and the enlightenment is committed to the truth, right? Science. Get the right answer, not just any answer that people can happen to converge on. And so Fishkin's idea is the notion of a deliberative pull. And this is, this is the, the, the, the analogy, the closest analogy is to a jury in a jury trial. How do we pick juries? >> Randomly. >> Randomly, yeah. They go, you know, they go, they, whatever they use, they use drivers licenses, or voting registration. A random selection. And the, the idea of a random selection is that the, the selected group mirrors the population from which they're selected. So poll, polling uses random, right? And that's why when the pollster says. They go to the Democrats, they're going to win by X percent. It's because they, they're very confident that this sample reflects the population so, they've only polled, actually polled the sample but they belie, they, they have very good statistical tool, way of doing this now and they, they, they can know within. very small margin of error that they've got it right. Okay so Fishkin takes that logic and he says, one of the big problems of democracy. Everybody says voters don't know anything, you know, they can't name two republican policies and two democratic politics, policies about anything and this ignorance is terrible. So what we can do is. Have randomly selected groups, he calls them deliberative polls. And you get a group of people, and then you bring them somewhere, and you bring them say for three days. You pay them for their lost time, you know, they, they get paid. And they deliberate about some question in real depth. Whether, you know, whatever it should be. Whether there should be new kinds of environmental standards for cars. Or whether we should have affirmative action or not. The sorts of things that divide people in politics. And they should be well informed. They should, they should be given briefing books. We should bring experts arguing both sides of the question. And what Fishkin does is he, he surveys them before and after the, the deliberative. >> Mm-hm. >> Poll. And he see, so he, he can. Tell you how the, the deliberation has influenced their discussion. >> Mm-hm. >> And the presumption is that this kind of deliberation is going to make people converge on the right answer right? What do you think about that? >> I don't like it. Why don't you like it? >> Because it means giving up your control over decision making process and thinking on your own, it's so much open to manipulation. >> Okay, so, we'll, we'll get to the manipulation issue in a minute, but. These are not, these don't, these unlike juries which actually say guilty or not guilty, these deliberative polls don't actually make decisions for the society. You could say some people could, could say If Fishkin had the courage of his convictions. He should say they should make decisions. But you wouldn't want them to actually make decisions. >> But they influence to the level that's. >> Well you think they have influence? He, he wants them to have influence, he wants them, he wants what Fishkin wants is he wants politicians to watch them. That, to see the results and take them into account. >> It's kind of like, it reminds me of fleeting the witness, you know, when we have a trial I'm going to say, I object you're leading the witness, so this is kind of like the association I have. >> Okay. What do you think? You see any advantages? Do you like it or not? >> So we, we have a representative group being watched by a representative group. Would make decisions based on their. >> Yeah. >> No, I don't think that would ever work. The con, the politicians have their own constituencies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But on, on another note you need to think about who is administering these scripts and who is choosing these people. It's not necessarily going to be random. Someone's going to be choosing them. And even in a jury system. >> Well. >> The jurists, their jurists are, are voir dired. They're they're weeded out and they're selected and. >> Okay, but we don't allow weeding out and in Fishkin's case, they just, they used standard statistical techniques. It's not. You know, it's, its just this off-the-shelf soft way now for doing this kind of thing. So you can get, you, I think the interesting case is not to say, maybe they're not representative. Assume they are representative. >> Okay. >> What do you think? >> Assuming they-. >> You see any advantage to this? You know, it's, I mean, in a, in a way, it's, it's, it's a very clever mechanism for managing the scarcity of time and getting sophisticated attention to ques, questions. because you don't, you don't have the same deliberative poll ma, deciding lots of questions. You have many of them. He has, he has hundreds of them. >> Right. >> You know, so they're all doing different topics. And so the idea is they are sort of groups everywhere having, making informed decisions and the rest of us can have some confidence in what they decide. In just the same way as, when you see the results of a jury trial. It may strike you odd that they found this person not guilty, but what you end up saying to yourself is well, I, I you know, I just saw the news headlines. If I had been there in the room and heard everything, I'm assuming I would have come out the way that jury came out. >> Mm. Yeah. It's, it's. >> You, you look skeptical. >> No, no, no, no, I'm all right, but assuming it's representative, and assuming they're given enough time to deliberate. >> Yeah. >> And they've given some really you know,. Qualified experts to speak on all points of view possible. I, I think they'll, they'll for the most part, be rational. >> Okay, but then who is picking out the experts? How do we know that this is the expert group and they are just not like, planted there to influence the people that need to deliver it? Who is overseeing the whole process, how we know that the questions are posed in a right way, who is setting the agenda, all those kind of questions. >> Right. >> So yeah, there are those kinds of problems with it. For one you might say, you know who. Who decides, before you, before you do a random sample, you've gotta decide who to sample. That, that is not a statistical question, that is a, a choice. So, for instance some people have criticized Fishkin has done some of these deliberative polls on things like minimum wage and employment. Policies and immigration and some people have said, well if you're dealing with immigration policy, in this, in the US, maybe there should be Mexicans involved in the deliberative process. After all it affects them. So the, they, those kind, you know, and that's not a statistical question that's a normative question about who should come. Should we just have citizens? But you know, citizenship is what Rawls would say is morally arbitrary. So and people across the border are affected. So, you'd have to think about that. That's a moral choice. It's not a statistical choice. As I think you indicated. Agenda control is a big issue. Who decides what issues are going to be talked about and in what order? That sort of thing. I, there's a famous, political economist by the name of Gerald Kramer who extended Arrow's theorem and showed that if you let me control the agenda. I can produce any outcome I want. And that's as true of deliberate process as, as it is of voting processes. Framing effects. I think you mentioned framing effects. We talked about Kahneman and all that. Earlier in the course. Who frames the question, is going to have a big effect on how it's thought about. And so that those issues as well. But then finally, and I think this is another reason to be very skeptical of deliberative mechanisms, is that they sometimes don't converge on the truth. Kahneman and Sunstein have done a lot of experiments where they've shown that actually. Particularly if people in deliberative settings are like-minded, they tend to become more extreme. And so [NOISE] in, in a very diverse population it might not matter, assuming that deliberative poll was representative. But in a relatively homogenous population, the deliberators would become more extreme. So, deliberation in a, in an obvious case, say deliberation among members of the tea party, will make them move to more extreme positions. So deliberations among members of, you know, Occupy Wall Street, will make them become more extreme. So you've gotta have very large scope for. Selecting your population before you're going to get the advantages of, of diversity to, to forestall that. So that's a big problem with these deliberative mechanisms in practice. But there's a deeper philosophical problem. That is sometimes called the, the wisdom of crowds so imagine a cow is in a field, okay? Looks like a happy cow. >> [LAUGH]. >> And it doesn't know what might be happening to it soon, but. Suppose there's 20 people surrounding the cow. And the question is what does the cow weigh, all right? There are two mechanisms. One mechanism is people can deliberate about it. So you might say. Ho, how ma, ho, what do you think that cow weighs? How many pounds? >> Cow weighs 1600 pounds. >> Okay. What, what do you think that cow weigh? >> [LAUGH] I don't know. >> You don't know. >> I don't know. . >> Okay. I think it weighs 2000 pounds. >> Okay. >> We could go and we could, and you can, might say, well why do you think that? And we would have a discussion, okay. And eventually, we would reach some, in a deliberate pro, you know, we would, we would come to our considered judgment as a group as to what that cow weigh. >> [LAUGH] >> Okay? The, the other mechanism is, we wouldn't speak at all. We would each write down on a piece of paper what we think the cow weighs. Say there was 20 of us. We would each write it down, no, no communication. We would add, ad them all up and divide it by 20 and get a number. >> Average it. Which process do you think is more likely to get it right? >> The second one. >> Why? >> Because no one is influencing. The other, so it's not this pressure of the group to adopt the opinion. >> What do you think? >> Right, okay, the second one maybe, because there's no, you know, somebody skilled at arguing isn't going to hijack the conversation and influence everyone. But they're both ridiculous. You should just weigh the cow. No assuming assuming you can't weight-. >> You can't weight the cow? >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> [LAUGH]. >> The second method is, is, is better because it's [CROSSTALK]. >> Both right all. All the studies show that the second method, if you have, especially if you have a fairly large number of people, gets it right. It gets it very, very close to the actually the right answer. And the reason is what you were both alluding to. Is that if, if you have a group, what happens is. One person says, well, I grew up on a farm. I know all about cows. >> Right. >> And then, say, somebody like you who didn't say, well, I don't know, I better listen, he grew up, he says he knows about cows. What do I know? And so strong personalities tend to influence the outcomes. Males tend to dominate over females because males are more self-assured and so you get all these biases. That come out of the deliberative process and in fact, this is why the, the, the famous book that I'm talking about is called the Wisdom of Crowds. Because the idea of crowds is that they don't deliberate. And the, the analogy here is to markets. People say one of the reasons markets are so efficient in the economy. Is that it's millions of independent decisions people are making. Millions of private choices rather than trying to structure some process. So, all of which goes to undermine the idea that deliberation is any better at converging on the truth. Then it is at converging on consensus. They're conditions under which a will and it won't converge on consensus and they're conditions under which it might converge on the truth but we don't have any particular reason to know that it will and so when you look at Fishkin's deliberative polls. And he can show you that people's views changed as a result of the deliberation. You, we don't have any reason to know they changed in the direction of getting closer to the truth. Right, so the take away point here is that the problem of the general will hasn't been solved. The problem of the General Will is real. I think political economists from Condor say to Arrow and Cramer established that. The technical fixers, I'm you have can take a trust from me, are all problematic, they haven't been final solutions of the problem as a technical matter. And the, the notion that deliberation can somehow make this problem go away is not sustainable, because the attempts to get consensus are problematic, and the, the attempts to get to the truth are problematic. But that's not all there is to be said about majority rule, and we will return to the subject next time.
