Consensus Presentation 3-11-2012

On March 11, 2012 I gave a 15 or 20 minute presentation about the Consensus Dynamics Project to the Occupy Oakland Research Working Group.

My notes

I didn't use any slides or other prepared materials. Here are the notes I worked from:

• Background: applied math; complex systems for collective liberation; having a client vs working for movements and people
• [here I wish I'd talked about research I've done in the past, about horizontal processes and cooperation in ecological models, but I forgot to]
• The project: looking at collective decision making as a horizontal dynamic process
  • What it isn't: "finding an equation for human behavior"; asserting humans are numbers; asserting humans are machines that follow simple rules; claiming that the situation is simple.
    • Q: so you don't agree with the premise of Asimov's Foundation novels? A: Nope. Plus doesn't the whole thing fall apart in the third book anyway?
  • What it is: hoping to say something useful about strategies for decision making in big groups, or with complex problems. Possibly contributing tools for evaluating existing or imagined processes. Insight into how to solve problems or reach agreement.
• The starting formulation: there is a problem domain, which is a search space. The search space is a collection of possible proposals, and maybe one of them is a good answer to the problem. There are individuals who each have an objective function, which is a way of evaluating proposals: some people like certain ones, and other people like other ones. The goal is to locate a proposal that the entire group will accept. The research question is what processes are good for solving the problem.
• Run through the pizza exercise quickly, as an example of how I'm connecting with existing literature, an example of a search space, and a way of talking about different processes and strategy issues.
• Mention the simulations I did. Results from that: increasing group size is bad, increasing size of the search space is good. Are those results meaningful?
• Next steps
  • Issues vs. proposals
  • Changing preferences
  • Strategy

Things I got from the discussion:

• A connection to Horst Rittel of UCB and his work on wicked problems. Occupy seems to be facing these kind of problems.
• Importance of race and gender dynamics in meeting process, and how to address them.
• Importance of "where proposals come from" as I put it. There's a whole lot of caucusing and negotiation before proposals come to the O.O. general assembly, and people who are very angry and perceive themselves as being excluded from the real decision-making processes.
• How to decolonize the research, and the process of research. Whom to hold myself accountable to and how?

The note taker's notes

Here are the notes I got from the meeting's note taker:

3. Presentation by Lee on "The Math/Logical Theory of Efficient and Democratic Decision Making in Groups."

Applied math. Lee is interested in how organization emerges from complex systems, crowds. Applied mathematicians have clients, mostly Pentagon and industry. Lee is interested in how applied math can be used by social movements. He's not trying to develop general theory, or grand narratives to explain everything, or reduce people to equations. Rather, he's producing interested in the Foucaldian practice of creating tactical knowledge, knowledge that isn't necessarily "true," but which can be useful in the moment towards particular ends.

Questions: What are good steps for making decisions in large, unwieldy groups? How can we winnow down options from a large field?

Problem Domain

=Search Space

Proposals

People - objective functions

Task - find proposal, mutually agreeable

Pizza example, a multi-dimensional cubed search space of pizza toppings.

Some findings in models thus far:

Consensus breaks down as group gets larger.

More choices = more likely to come to decision because greater degrees of freedom?

Discussion about how models can't say much about how power is actually organized in social settings. Strategies of individual participations to advance their preferred proposal.

The problem of the "wicked problem" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Clearly there are problems with the General Assembly. Relatedly there's a "Re-Imagining the GA" event happening on March 16, 6pm at the Holdout... ways to transform the GA and rework it - http://occupyoakland.org/ai1ec_event/reimagine-the-ga-working-group/?instance_id=180893