Author Archives: Tom Atlee

Distinguishing Collective Wisdom from “the Wisdom of Crowds”

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This reflective piece comes from NCDD blogger Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Project. Tom’s original post can be found at www.tomatleeblog.com/?p=175327099.

The popular book “The Wisdom of Crowds” says a lot about the remarkable accuracy of thousands of people making guesses about something that has a real but unknown answer now or in the future. This phenomenon is fascinating but it doesn’t provide us with actual wisdom to guide our collective future. What would real collective wisdom look like, and how might we find or co-create it?

A friend just sent me this essay from the BBC: “‘Wisdom of the crowd’: The myths and realities” by Philip Ball.

I feel a need to respond to it – publicly and urgently.

I think it is unfortunate that James Surowiecki’s 2005 book “The Wisdom of Crowds” – which is a perfectly good book as far as it goes – has colonized the most popular term for collective wisdom so that it is hard to talk about the subject in any other terms than his, and be heard.

But think about it for a minute. “The Wisdom of Crowds” is about how accurate (or not) dozens or thousands of people are when they are guessing the number of beans in a bottle or predicting who is going to win the World Cup. The number of times their average collective guestimates are accurate is remarkable – which is the subject of Surowiecki’s book. But is that what wisdom is really about?

If some individual could predict the outcome of this year’s US elections, would we call them wise? Is that what we proclaim Christ or Buddha as wise for doing?

I would love it if we would reserve the terms “wisdom” and “wise” for guidance that makes life better – especially useful guidance that makes life better for most or all of us – including all the creatures of this living, fragile Earth – over the long term. That’s what we need wisdom for, now more than ever.

The traditions of the world’s great religions are one source of that wisdom, if we are mindful and heartful about which aspects of them we choose to follow, such as the near-universal Golden Rule of treating others the ways we would like to be treated. That’s wise. Various forms of systems thinking – from shamanism to ecology and complexity sciences – offer such wisdom because they deal with the wholeness and interconnectedness of the world. Nature’s ways of solving problems – as revealed by the sciences of biomimicry and evolution – also offers such guidance because nature’s solutions (and ways of generating solutions) have arisen and proven themselves through millions of years of testing.

And then there’s the processes through which we make our collective decisions. Here Surowiecki and his followers and critics have a lot to say. Surowieckians stress the need for the diversity and independence of the participants, noting that the more they talk with each other or are exposed to each other’s ideas, the less accurate their predictions and estimates become.

While this may be true enough for their “prediction markets”, it is tragic advice for those of us seeking to generate true collective wisdom to address our collective problems and crises. For this latter purpose it is essential that we talk together. But the quality of our talking can make or break our wisdom-generating capacity. Conversations that creatively use our different perspectives and ways of thinking will generate more wisdom than debates in which different “sides” try to win or where certain voices colonize the conversation while others remain silent and unheard. Furthermore, people who feel well heard tend to become more open to hearing others and more able to join in seeking deeper and higher forms of insight and co-creativity together – all sources of greater wisdom.

Once we have the capacity to convene and carry out such generative conversations, then the diversity of the participants becomes a very special treasure. We want diversity that covers as many relevant perspectives as possible – all the different types of stakeholders or a good random selection of our community or everyone involved in a conflict – and different personality types and different roles in how an issue will play out. Not all differences are the same – and some are much more important for group wisdom than others. But what we don’t want is all people of like mind reinforcing their pre-existing agreements or two polarized sides reinforcing their pre-existing disagreements.

We want people in such conversations to have available to them whatever information is relevant to their shared inquiry and challenge. Hopefully that pool of knowledge and perspectives will include some of the kinds of material noted in the “sources of wisdom” paragraph above. And it should be understandable, balanced, and readily engaged with.

Finally, we want people to be able to show up as whole human beings. Reason and passion are a dynamic duo that – although they each have their own center of gravity – are totally dependent on each other in practice. We cannot make a rational final choice without a desire for particular kind of outcome, a desire that arises from our emotion, our passion, our felt sense of need or aspiration. On the other hand, our collective desires and aspirations need facts and logic to tie them to the real world and understand the likely outcomes of this or that initiative we might take.

Of course, we also need creative imagination – co-creative imagination – to weave our possibilities and pieces of the puzzle into proposals we all want to put energy into. So the extent of our consensus – how well has our final proposal addressed the longings and concerns of all involved? – is another source of wisdom, indicating that we have taken into account that much of what’s really involved with the issue we were addressing. A high level of consensus also means that our proposal will tap into the implementing energy of many of the people involved, thereby minimizing how much top-down, outside-in effort, direction, and resources will be needed to achieve the results we seek – which is another piece of what makes some guidance or action wise.

Of course we actually don’t know what proposals will prove wise until long after the fact. How well is what we proposed actually working out in reality? Is it producing what we hoped for? Is it producing unexpected side effects that we don’t want? These questions don’t just address our success or failure. Most importantly, they point us back to our process. Have we set things up to review how well we’re doing, so we can catch problems early on or, if necessary, start over again? Is our process iterative or ongoing such that we exercise a ceaseless collective intelligence that feeds our collective learning and adaptation? A big part of wisdom is the humility to learn from experience and not just barge ahead regardless.

There is so much “we” know about how to do this well – and so much more that we need to learn to do it better, to upgrade what we know so that it is powerful enough to deal with climate change, peak oil, economic transformation, a growing and aging population, unexpected impacts from powerful new technologies, and so much more. This is what the wisdom of groups and communities and whole social systems – all the forms of collective wisdom – needs to be about.

Prediction markets are a part of that, but a truly tiny part. Most of the wisdom we need will come from our capacity to do the above conversation-based collective learning and co-creativity in the context of a rich, wisdom-serving informational environment that not only tolerates diversity but hungers for it and knows how to use it well.

All our futures depend on it.

Coheartedly,
Tom

Innovative Journalism Can Take Public Conversation to Scale

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We have barely begun to use major media and journalism – both old and new forms – to scale up the impact of powerful public conversations about public issues beyond the rooms and online forums where those conversations take place. Our societies urgently need innovations and development in the area of public conversation journalism in order to bring collective intelligence and community wisdom into our policy-making and into the everyday activities of ordinary citizens and organizations.

In this post I want to highlight the most remarkable public conversation journalism I’ve ever seen and explore some of the kinds of work public conversation journalists do and could do.

A few weeks ago 122 members of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation created, edited, and rated 95 ideas about what they’d like to see and do in their national conference in October 2014 (and you can see the results here). To my surprise and delight, an item I contributed ended up in third place:

Explore the best examples we can find where major media have partnered with dialogue and deliberation efforts to actually “scale up” public dialogue and deliberation to the regional, state, and national levels – or which contained lessons and best practices to help us do that in the future.

Thanks to these results I’ve decided it is finally time to share a major research project I’ve been working on over the last 15 years. I posted the last pieces of that work online last month. So now a major new resource is available – a thorough examination of what I believe is the most potent example of media-sponsored public conversation on public issues in North America and possibly the world. This initiative – all but unknown even to specialists in the field – was undertaken in 1991 by Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s leading newsweekly in collaboration with Canadian TV. The resources now available online include the entire 40 pages of Maclean’s coverage, the complete CTV documentary video, detailed interviews with four of the major players, and my own descriptions and analyses (see www.co-intelligence.org/Macleans1991Experiment.html).

What Maclean’s and Canadian TV did

These two major media innovators convened 12 Canadians whose extreme diversity reflected the diversity of their deeply divided country. They then charged these ordinary folks with articulating a shared vision for Canada. They were given two and a half days to do it. Maclean’s provided a team of leading-edge negotiators from the Harvard Negotiation Project – led by Roger Fisher, co-author of the classic negotiation handbook Getting to Yes – to help them.

The intense conversations that resulted were remarkable all by themselves. But the coverage provided by Maclean’s and Canadian TV was unprecedented and, I believe, has never been surpassed in the quarter of a century since. It generated widespread lively conversation around the country for months – and awards for Maclean’s.

Despite the fact that it happened more than two decades ago, I find this remarkable event teeming with potential lessons for all of us who want to “scale up” public dialogue and deliberation. We know that that can’t be achieved by centrally organizing millions of people into high quality conversations; there just aren’t the resources for doing that. We need some kind of catalyst that can trigger hundreds of self-organized, spontaneous conversations, including some with potential for real impact.

Maclean’s and Canadian TV provide important clues. They designed their coverage in ways that closed the gap between the small facilitated conversation and its mass audience. They didn’t provide the usual coverage to be witnessed by passive observers keeping up with the latest news. Their coverage was actively, intensely engaging. Like reality TV today, the Maclean’s/Canadian TV coverage drew millions of readers and viewers into intimate and often dramatic interactions among twelve radically different Canadians who included a few people much like themselves as well as others that they strongly disagreed with. Because of the brilliant design of both the interactions and the coverage, these journalists showed us how to vicariously engage an entire country in a higher form of conversation and a renewed sense of political possibility.

As I noted in my book Empowering Public Wisdom, a major unlearned lesson in this effort was that Maclean’s and Canadian TV didn’t repeat this process every year after that. If such a journalistic engagement of the entire country in high quality conversation were to be done on a regular basis, any country doing it would find itself thinking more clearly and creatively about its affairs than it had ever done before and creating a political force field which would profoundly influence politicians, news media, educators, businesses, and government decision-makers, as well as ordinary citizens.

Once it became part of the political culture, such collective thoughtfulness and due attention to diverse views and information would make all the difference in the world. That was, after all, the dream of democracy in the first place: an informed, conversant citizenry engaged together in crafting their collective lives and future.

The fact that we have today new ways to do that – conversational technologies as well as digital and telecommunications technologies – makes it even more important to understand what pioneers in the field did that we can now build on to succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

Public conversation journalism

The field of journalism – its theory, practice, and business models – is in upheaval.

The primary source of this disruption – the Internet – is widely recognized: Journalists, who were once the gatekeepers of news and current information, have been bypassed by millions of bloggers, citizen journalists, and community and issue activists using the web and modern communications technology to share what’s going on and what they think about it. This explosion of participatory information-sharing has many blessings for democracy. But it also has limitations, as many valuable journalistic standards have been ignored on the way to greater freedom and participation. The field is now rife – or perhaps ripe – with angst and creative conversation and experimentation. Among the most creative efforts to engage with this issue is Journalism That Matters, catalyzed for over a decade by NCDDer Peggy Holman and a handful of colleagues.

To this rich transformational soup of modern journalism I want to add one more ingredient – an innovative manifestation of journalism’s time-honored contribution to informed citizen engagement in a vibrant democracy: I call it “public conversation journalism” – journalism that has a professional commitment to do things like these:

  • Report on public conversations on public issues – before, during, and after – as legitimate community news.
  • Sponsor major public conversations on public issues, like Maclean’s did.
  • Welcome op eds that promote or usefully comment on public conversations about public issues.
  • Profile public conversation participants from various angles including who they are (to entice audience identification with them and thus trigger a vicarious experience of their views, their passions, their transformations) as well as their personal human interest stories and their infectious enthusiasm.
  • Profile the issues being discussed (background and framing) to deepen and contextualize the public conversation.
  • Provide multi-media coverage (print, video, even journalistic drama like Multiple Viewpoint Drama and Playback Theater).
  • Feature conversations that include well chosen, inclusive diversity such as we find in the Maclean’s initiative, Citizens Juries, WIsdom Councils, and Deliberative Polling (which convene cross-sections or random selected members of a population) and/or in “whole system” stakeholder conversations such as Consensus Councils and Future Search Conferences.
  • Provide truly transpartisan coverage – that is, coverage that includes a broad range of perspectives that move the viewer or reader beyond the reductionist, obsolete, and deeply adversarial standard of “both sides”.
  • Cover the very real drama of citizens problem-solving together, that may include but goes way beyond “the debate”.
  • Help the public understand the character and dynamics of different kinds of conversation – productive and unproductive, creative and uncreative, informed and uninformed, vibrant and restrained, diverse citizens and “the usual suspects”, colaborative and adversarial, etc.
  • Cover – and even provide forums and structure for – the social media generated around quality dialogue and deliberation.
  • Cover the actual results of public conversations on public issues – the immediate and longer term impacts on participants, communities, decision-makers, etc. – and publicize when good public conversational work gets taken seriously or ignored.
  • Cover efforts to institutionalize public deliberations, to build a “culture of dialogue”, to promote citizen engagement, etc.

I hope journalists and professionals in the fields of citizen dialogue and deliberation and public engagement engage in thinking together about how to bring about this powerful new kind of collaboration among themselves and their colleagues. I hope to hear from you about earlier and current experiments in such collaboration, including any details we can all learn from and questions and challenges you now face. I have heard of some work in Australia along these lines, and a number of people have noted that South Africa’s Mt. Fleur scenario initiative – which, intriguingly, happened one year after the Maclean’s initiative – included remarkable publicity by major news media.

There is SO much to learn and try out here…

Review of Rosa Zubizarreta’s New Book, “From Conflict to Creative Collaboration”

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We are happy to share the post below from NCDD organizational member Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute, which came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

I just finished reading NCDD member Rosa Zubizarreta’s new book From Conflict to Creative Collaboration: A User’s Guide to Dynamic Facilitation. I’m quite excited. I’ve known about “DF” for fifteen years, and I’ve never seen it described as clearly and compellingly as in this book.

It’s an oddity: DF generates a remarkably effective creative group conversation whose nonlinearity makes it seem very peculiar indeed. Many NCDD practitioners have found it hard to grasp or turn away from those who unduly evangelize it. But I want to say that it is definitely worth checking out – and that finally we have a book that makes real sense of it without overselling it and with good attention to contextualizing it within the larger field of group process.

Furthermore, like many other excellent books focused on one process – notably Juanita Brown et al’s The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures through Conversations that Matter – Rosa’s book provides deep insights into group and facilitation dynamics that we would all be wise to attend to, regardless of which methods we love and use.

This particular unusual facilitation approach is built around a few deceptively simple practices like fully hearing each person, reframing conflicts as concerns, being truly open to every perspective and to the range of human emotions, and always inviting the best solutions from each and every person. I say “deceptively simple” because – like the deceptive simplicity of “following your breath” while meditating – the power of these practices comes from their persistent and courageous application. So, as with so many processes, it’s good to have access to a facilitator skilled in the practice.

Because when these practices are applied persistently and courageously – and with empathy and faith – I have seen them produce the seeming miracles for which I think Dynamic Facilitation is becoming increasingly appreciated. These practices have a pretty good record of transforming difficult and conflicted people into creative collaborators, and thorny resistant problems and disputes into breakthrough insights and effective new directions.

This alleged “magic” of Dynamic Facilitation is, like all magic, impressive because it does things we don’t believe are possible with actions that could not possibly produce those results. The nonlinear power of DF seems to defy logical understanding – a puzzle that, thankfully, begins to dissolve as we read Rosa’s book.

She makes it clear what’s going on and why, and how to perform these miracles ourselves. She also makes it clear that, while all the magician’s secrets are here and some people – the “naturals”, we might say – can perform them right out of the book, for most of us it takes practice. Practice… and authentic respect for people – genuine curiosity about what people think and feel and a faith in their ability to find their way together in groups when they’re given the right support. These are the qualities of the master Dynamic Facilitator – of whom Rosa, I quite seriously suggest, is one of the best. She’s also a dynamite observer, theoretician, and writer.

DF is filled with nuances and extraordinary phenomena and assumptions, all of which become vividly obvious to us in the gentle flow of Rosa’s prose. The subject unfolds in foreshadowed layers: She gives us a good glimpse of a vista and then takes us down for a more detailed examination of the landscape which, in turn, has its own smaller vistas and finer-grained details. Layer upon layer she guides and invites us. At each step of the way, she grounds us both in the simple overriding mechanics of the process and the underlying spirit of the whole thing. We learn about chart pads for people’s Problem Statements, Solutions, Concerns, and Data; reflecting back to each person their meaning and caring; asking for solutions and concerns; and many other techniques. We also learn that what we’re doing at every stage is making a space safe enough for the perspectives and problem-solving impulses of diverse individuals to evolve quite naturally into collective big picture insights, innovations and transcendence.

Rosa wrote this book especially for existing and prospective facilitators and for people seeking help with group work. And so, for us NCDDers, she offers a section clarifying the important differences between DF and practices like Open Space Technology, Focusing, and brainstorming. But aside from that one specialized section – which can be readily skipped by a lay reader (or they can look up these practices online), the rest of the book is nearly jargon-free. From my view straddling many methods and lay perspectives, Rosa says it like it is in ways that will allow most readers to gain a wholesome, satisfying understanding of this remarkable topic regardless of their facilitation experience.

From the history of Dynamic Facilitation to its technical details, from its unfolding stages to its proper application, this book covers the ground and covers it well. It ranks among the best books I’ve seen on group process and human – in this case collective – potential. I like to think that that its widespread use could make a big difference in the nonlinear and often troubling trajectory of our civilization. In the simplest terms, the innovative tool it describes could help us co-create our future with much more wisdom and effectiveness.

I am so excited that the curious magic of DF is now out of the closet and at everyone’s fingertips.

Journalism to enhance citizen-based deliberative democracy

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TomAtlee-borderPractitioners and advocates involved with group process, dialogue and deliberation, public engagement, and deliberative democracy are aware that ordinary people, under the right conditions, are capable of generating public policy guidance that is at least as wise—and often far wiser—than what we typically see produced by government bodies. Such forums facilitate productive reflection and interaction among diverse citizens—often informed by fair briefings and diverse experts—to come up with creative responses to major public issues that make sense to a very wide spectrum of their fellow voters.

By promoting such wisdom-generating public conversations, journalists could enable communities to step beyond unproductive special interests and polarized debates to co-create their own shared stories of what is happening to them now and how they will shape their future.

The journalists’ role would be vital at every stage. They would make everyone in a community aware of public wisdom–generating conversations before, during, and after they happened. Citizens would know why such a conversation was happening and what it was about. They would know who was participating—perhaps they would even attend an event at which future participants were selected with some fanfare. They may have been invited to prior and follow-up public conversations in person and online. They would know what the experience was like for participants because those participants would be interviewed by news media. They would have opportunities to say what they thought about it all. Thanks to news media, they would know if and how the recommendations were followed, who was involved, and what the successes and failures were.

This is an expanded vision of journalism, but solidly within its tradition of empowering democracy. Public wisdom–generating processes are extremely empowering to citizens and whole communities. The stories of participants make great human-interest features. The engagements themselves are dramatic, because heat is generated when we have diverse ordinary people coming together to discuss hot issues. News outlets love conflict. But deliberative conflict is different from the usual conflicts that preoccupy the mainstream news media. Hot conflicts that evolve into creative solutions are very different from hot conflicts that are chronic, suppressed, or violent. Journalists can show citizens what a profound difference working together can make in our politics. Not because they are biased, but simply because they objectively report instances where people actually work well together on important national and community issues.

An exemplar of this type of reporting is the 1991 “People’s Verdict” experiment done by Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s leading glossy newsweekly. Maclean’s devoted forty pages to describing their remarkable initiative—PDFs of which are available online at co-intelligence.org/S-Canadaadvrsariesdream.html. Perhaps most significantly, Maclean’s devoted half a page to each of the dozen citizen panelists scientifically chose to collectively represent the diversity of Canada—including a picture, so that readers could pick who they identified with and who they thought was an “enemy.” They then provided twelve pages covering the actual conversation—a day-by-day, hour-by-hour, blow-by-blow account of the conflicts and the ultimate healing and collaboration—including photos of every stage, from arms folded in opposition to former antagonists hugging. Other articles in the issue described the process of participant selection, the facilitation method used, and background about the issues that were discussed. The group’s final agreement was printed on pages colored like old parchment, with the signatures of all the deliberators at the bottom of the last page, like those of John Hancock and other Founding Fathers at the bottom of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Robert Marshall, Maclean’s assistant managing editor, noted that past efforts—a parliamentary committee, a governmental consultative initiative, and a $27 million Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future—had all failed to create real dialogue among citizens about constructive solutions—even though those efforts involved four hundred thousand Canadians in focus groups, phone calls, and mail-in reporting. “The experience of the Maclean’s forum indicates that if a national dialogue ever does take place, it would be an extremely productive process.”

Well, that dialogue did take place. Following Maclean’s July 1, 1991 issue and the related hour-long Canadian TV documentary, spontaneous national dialogue and forums cropped up across Canada organized by schools, churches, and many other groups. Citizens had energy to actually heal the country and confront the country’s issues together. But then the prime minister was ‘hammered’ in a few of the forums and accused the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of fixing questions to make him look bad. He became a critic of the process, suspecting impure political motives by the process’s advocates. In the end, political agendas and personalities held sway, maintained their business as usual patterns, and the country as a whole returned to politics as usual.

Notice the several varieties of public participation we see here. We see the wisdom-generating archetypal participation of diverse voices in the mini-public convened through wise selection of typical participants. We see an often transformational vicarious participation of the broad public witnessing the deliberations among people they identify with and people they see as opponents unfolding in both print and broadcast media. And we see the direct mass participation in spontaneous and organized dialogues around the country. Another form of participation not present in the Maclean’s case, but present in other initiatives, might be called crowdsourced participation, in which hundreds or thousands of individuals offer their input, usually online.

In the midst of this appreciation, I want to focus for a moment on the biggest thing that was missing from the Maclean’s initiative: iteration. Imagine what would have happened in Canada if Maclean’s had done this same exercise again the following year. And the next year. And the next. Imagine that it had also reported on all the subsequent conversations, conflicts, citizen engagements, and activism that came out of those exercises. Talk about a catalyst! Nothing in such a repetitive exercise would violate objectivity or principled news reporting. But it would be a profound expansion of journalism’s primary function of promoting an informed citizenry and responsible, answerable leadership in an engaged democracy.

Versions of this could be done in any community, as well as at state and national levels. All it would take is journalists stepping into this new story of a more potent role for democratic journalism.

Citizen deliberations can produce excellent results—real public wisdom. But most of the public, if they have not been through those deliberations, can remain oblivious to that wisdom, or even can be swayed by well-financed public relations attacks into opposing it. Here again, the role of journalists is essential. They can help the public understand what went into the formation of that wisdom (as was done by Maclean’s) and can help increase general public respect for, and attention to, and demand for well-designed and realized citizen deliberations.

This should be seen as a major element in the emerging new ecology of journalism that will bring new life both to the profession and to democracy itself.

(Edited from Chapter 8 of EMPOWERING PUBLIC WISDOM by Tom Atlee)

Bias warps reason. Does deliberation ameliorate that?

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Summary: Research shows that individuals bend facts and math to align with their existing views. But does this happen when they’re in high quality interactive deliberative forums?

A recent Salon article “Study Proves That Politics and Math Are Incompatible“ reports that research led by Yale law professor Dan Kahan demonstrates that “it’s easier than we think for reasonable people to trick themselves into reaching unreasonable conclusions. Kahan and his team found that, when it comes to controversial issues, people’s ability to do math is impacted by their political beliefs.”

Researchers reported that BOTH conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats got poor grades on mathematically interpreting data about “the effectiveness of concealed carry laws… [W]hether or not people got the question right depended on their political beliefs – and whether or not the correct answer supported their preconceived notions of gun control.” Interestingly, “The people who were normally best at mathematical reasoning… were the most susceptible to getting the politically charged question wrong.”

“For study author Kahan, these results are a fairly strong refutation of what is called the ‘deficit model’ in the field of science and technology studies–the idea that if people just had more knowledge, or more reasoning ability, then they would be better able to come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data (for instance, whether concealed weapons bans work). Kahan’s data suggest the opposite–that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy.”

As fascinating and significant as this study is for democratic theory and practice, it misses a factor that might well modify its conclusions in important ways–the role of well designed, well facilitated, well informed deliberative forums involving diverse citizens who have a mandate to work together to come up with findings that are useful for their community or country.

So much of both political activism and deliberative democracy efforts focus on informing the opinions of individual voters rather than on the capacity of high-quality deliberative activity to generate higher forms of collective political wisdom that take into account and transcend the separate opinions of the participants.

I would like to see research that explores that collective deliberative potential. And I would offer this as the experimental hypothesis:

In the context of well designed group deliberations to produce collective public policy recommendations, diverse citizens’ mathematical, scientific, and rational capacities prove much more sound than when those same citizens reflect on an issue by themselves or with like-minded fellows.

I believe that the fairly balanced briefings, quality conversations, and shared mandate involved in such forums significantly reduce the tendency for “reasonable people to trick themselves into reaching unreasonable conclusions.” I believe that the research I recommend above would show that such forums measurably reduce the tendency for “political biases [to] skew our reasoning abilities” and that they can and do help citizens “come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data.”

Until such research is done, I urge us to notice the extent to which the hypotheses above manifests in the citizen engagements with which we are involved and to promote exercising and empowering our collective political wisdom-generating capacity beyond its mere impact on individual participants and observers.

Coheartedly,
Tom