In this conversation with Leon Gettler I talk about the ways we could select people on merit in a bottom-up way which dispensed with the invidiousness of competition. This kind of thing was actually prominent in the minds of the American founding fathers way back when. We should return to their concern with some of the downsides of too much competition in choosing out leaders. 

You know how those on the left are pilloried for not standing up during Stalin's show trials in the 1930. When the tanks rolled into Prague in 1958 or to Hungary a decade later? Well they should be piloried for it. And now the toxicity of the right has spun out of control, still most people on the right aren't too fussed. The toxic candidates might not be their cup of tea, but hey you can't make an omlette without breaking eggs. 

My recent interview with Leon Gettler.  

I explore a way I've come to think about society with my friend Peyton Bowman and represent in a diagram which is the first slide in these slides. (Here is the pptx, and here is the pdf.) (Note only the first two slides were used in this talk). 

The diagram illustrates the principles which should characterise communication within any kind of community — in which I include organisations like a firm or something larger like a national polity.  Isegoria — or equality of speech — is a 'horizontal' value — calling for everyone to be heard no matter their status in society. But, the ‘vertical’ concept of parrhēsia is also absent. “Parrhēsia’ is usually translated as 'freedom of speech', but it’s a richer idea infused with mutual ethical obligation. It is the importance of speaking truth to power, but it also entails the powerful's duty to listen to what they're being told. 

In our society those lower down are mostly expected to flatter those above, and so they 'gild the lily', and tell the kinds of stories the powerful want to be told. The result is lies all the way up the line.  We explore these ideas in the classroom and then in organisations. I use the example of Toyota which shows how empowering those on the line is an astoundingly more productive way to make cars efficiently than having people directed by, and fearful of, those above.   There are two other orders within which we explore these ideas. Throughout the discussion, we refer back to political life, and towards the end we also talk about science, which also enables us to discuss an additional concept in the diagram, the notion of fidelity. That leaves a fourth principle ‘merit’ to be explained in a future discussion!  Part Two of this discussion is here.

How much should we defer to expertise, and how do we know who’s an expert and who’s not? How does ‘the system’ know that? How did Kaggle revolutionise not just the way data science was done, but how we recognise expertise in data science. And why does weather forecasting offer the epitome of what I call ‘Socratic expertise’?  

As usual, this was a wide-ranging and exciting conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman. 

You can find the video here. 

This was a great conversation with a friend of mine Sam Roggeveen in which Sam solves the dilemma of how to get to a republic once and for all!  Sam argues we're mistaking decline in the party system for the decline of democracy. 

I think the foundations of democracy have been under attack for a generation or more. We both agree that social media has accelerated the decline.   What’s going on in the US is a crucial test for Sam's case.

We both think that citizens’ juries and similar institutions have a lot to offer. 

Then Sam comes up with a novel solution to the republican dilemma! Allow the people to choose the president but rather than an election for the president, have them selected by a citizens’ assembly.   

We then offer our advice to the government and to the independents.  The video can be seen here. 

I enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman and our guest James D'Angelo who has campaigned for greater secrecy in the committee stages of Congress. Why would he do that? Surely we need more, not less transparency? Turns out too much could be strangling our democracy. It’s strangling his country’s response to gun violence. 

It strangled Australia’s capacity to deal with climate change. And it brought about Brexit against the better judgement of — say — four fifths of the British Parliament. It’s a good discussion though it takes a while to get going. Start at the beginning if you wish, but I’ve set the link above about ten minutes in where we start getting down to it. From there it just gets interestinger and interestinger as Lewis Carroll might have said. 

The YouTube video is available here. 

I enjoyed this conversation with Peyton Bowman.   Can you remember the names of any Swiss Prime Ministers? Peyton couldn’t. I couldn’t, and neither, I’m guessing, can you.? The answer is a few minutes in.  More generally, what do we get and what do we lose from politics being as entertaining as it is? And why are some of the most dysfunctional social institutions of ours

Harry Corbett, founder and mover and shaker behind the Intelligence Forum (https://www.intelligence-forums.com/) wrote me a letter (!) mentioning that, on account of encountering me on the net, he would like me to talk to his forum. I suggested that my ideas on democracy would be appropriate and so that's what I talked about. So … for anyone who wants to hear a 25 minute summary of my views and/or listen to an excellent question and answer session lasting nearly twice as long, here's the video.

The video — which can be useful in identifying speakers in the Q&A — can be watched here.

Peyton and I recorded this discussion last week with my friend Isabella Perez. It arose from my own dissatisfaction with much of the commentary I was reading. Everyone seemed preoccupied with whose side you should be on and what it all meant for #MeToo. These are of course legitimate questions, but then the commentators’ ideological preferences were no secret, nor was the way the case could be ‘spun’. If a woman is unanimously held by a jury to be lying about domestic violence, then that will set back a movement if one of its slogans is ‘always believe women’. Anyway, have a listen and let us know what you thought of what we made of it all. If you prefer video, the YouTube video is here.

A discussion with Leon Gettler on the election of the Albanese Government. I reprise the arguments I set in this essay which I wrote in 2008 just after Kevin Rudd had been elected for government by coalition-building and compromise around solving national problems rather than by divide and rule. The success of the independents in this election means it's very much in Labor's interest to revive that model of governance.