Apologies for the light posting here. I’m mid-project on a few issues that I’d normally blog about here, so blogging will be a bit uneven for the time being.

In the meantime, here’s a quick stop-gap while IA while ago, I posted something here on the common misconception that many of us have about consensuses (consensii?).

I think that this is important for democracy, as one of the harshest charges that politicians face is that they are out of touch or that they don’t listen to us.

Now, in a week where the ‘We are the 99%’ meme is doing the rounds, here’s a nice post about the False Consensus Effect….

“which states that individuals view their own preferences, behaviours and judgements as being typical, normal and common within a broader context; it also suggests we find alternative characteristics as being more deviant and atypical than they actually are.”

Worth bearing in mind.

I started to write a second follow-up post on the Local Gov Camp data-visualisation session (I’ll probably finish it later today) when I stumbled on this post on conversational politics (in a very wide sense of the term) from my favourite US blogger – it made the point I was inching towards better than I could:

“It turns out (from a study of ethics rather than our topic, politics) that people “have a hard time offering an account of their moral reasoning that contains consistent substantive content.” They are “largely incapable of articulating their moral decision-making process in substantive, propositional terms.” Often, their responses to open-ended questions are rationalizations of what they have done, not reasons that will guide what they do.”

A couple of weeks ago, I posted here on some of the thinking that casts doubt on the suitability of voters to …. er … vote – a sort of briefing for a ‘devil’s advocate’ – and I’ve been looking for way of articulating any of the powerful reasons why the political process matters.

Do read the whole post because it’s very interesting on the way we respond to multiple choice questions and how easy it is to predict our conclusions. But something else occurs to me.

Peter concludes:

“We ought to give good reasons to justify (or criticize) our own actions. We should be interested in other people’s reasons and their reactions to ours. The act of interpreting the public thoughts of working-class urban youth thus has a moral motivation, even if those reasons are not strongly influential in their own lives. I don’t think that current psychological research precludes the hope that good arguments can change people’s implicit stances or premises, which then affect their behaviors.

In short, we should strive to understand other people’s arguments in case they are right and to decide how to respond effectively if they are not.”

Surely there’s a bigger opportunity than understanding how people articulate and assert their political preferences? I’m really interested in the way that people go beyond this and collectively describe the problems that they face – particularly ones that aren’t well-trodden arguments that have gone mainstream.  It’s one step further away from the politics that Peter is writing about – but currently one that is monopolised by the small number of social forces that shape our perceptions and define our options so effectively.

Can’t think of a word for that collective entity – can I just refer to it as Babylon seeing as I’ve got Bob Marley playing in the next room at the moment?

I’ve tried to boil down the killer argument in the whole ‘blogger v journalist’ debate, and it runs something like this:

Take the best article you’ve read in a newspaper recently. The one that was well-written and argued and the one that met a particular need that you have personally. You can be almost certain that a better article was written somewhere on the blogosphere. The only problem is finding it. As social bookmarking and ‘collaborative filtering’ improves, you will increasingly be able to access a personalised stream of these articles that will partly negate your need for a newspaper.

To illustrate the point, here’s a great post by James Cridland on how you can weave your own personalised radio station together. That’s the sort of innovation I’ve been awaiting for years (more in ‘innovation’ below). And then, to add a bit of flavour to the argument, here’s something on how journalists can build their own reader-communities. And while we’re on the question of the media, here’s some breaking news; Murdoch’s paywall idea isn’t suicidal after all. Murdoch isn’t stupid and isn’t afraid to think differently and take on big beasts. Who knew?

So. Great blogging: take the last couple of days as an example. I’m interested in how far politics is about the clash of social forces rather than the public discourse around the ishoos. Here, Peter Hetherington (admittedly, writing for the evil MSM) has a post on how local v central is a cross-cutting issue. Ingrid has a very perceptive question: Hang on, isn’t there a local election happening at the moment as well? And wasn’t teh Hinterwebs supposed to create a space that allowed the local to re-emerge? My only quibble with Ingrid is buried in the notion of the availability bias.Surely well-targeted local coverage is only seen by local people? It reminds me of the popular misconception among politicians about Facebook. It looks like a mirror – after all, you only see your friends – people who wish you well. So for Labour politicians, it looks like The Guardian and for Tories, it looks like The Telegraph. But, it’s actually a two-way mirror with all of those vindictive Express and Mail readers behind it – rubbing shoulders with … well, the list that Fremania has draw up (see below).

Hugh Flouch of the verygood Harringay Online will be partially addressing this question on these very pages shortly.

The other day, Chris Dillow highlighed David ‘Two-Brains’ Willetts really fascinating-looking book on an inter-generational conflict of interests. Chris’s concluding question ….

“Isn’t there an unavoidable tension between intergenerational justice and democratic politics?”

… is, I suspect the mask for a much much bigger question. Insert ‘long termism on climate change’, ‘global social justice’ or any one of a dozen other issues to see what I mean.

Oh – and in my highly-cultivated collaboratively-filtered stream of bloggery and journalism, I’ve noticed that there is an inverse relationship between the focus on Climate Change and the nearness of the election. What does that tell us (apart from something about the failings of my own filters)?

What else? Oh yes: The Power 2010 campaign. I have no words the express my irritation at the quality of demagogic simplification that underpins this whole campaign. Think Martin Bell in his white suit tied to Esther Rantzen and times it by ten. Thankfully Sadie – a returning exile from the blogosphere – has dug into the whole question. Warning: There’s wit as well as wisdom in that one.

Not content with a brief return, Sadie is also on Left Foot Forward here writing the post that this blog should have carried about the objectively anti-democratic nature of the superficial Tory appeal to invite us all into government. Freemania goes one step further and lists the specific individuals within Cameron’s proposed new government that he specifically objects to. Again, funny and perceptive stuff. It includes…

My boss

My boss’s boss

Kerry Katona

Piers Morgan

Cab drivers

Estate agents

Bankers

Disgraced former MPs

Nick Griffin

My weird neighbour

That kid I hated at school

Those bastards who still haven’t been convicted of Stephen Lawrence’s murder

People who find the ITV early evening news too complicated to follow

People who apply for all those incomprehensibly-titled public sector jobs in the Guardian but get turned down because they’re too petty-minded

The tenor in the Gocompare ads

… and many more.

What else? Oh yes – there’s a couple of good points about the impact that social media is having on public debate – one from 21cfix and one from Hopi (again) – that last link is on the diminishing power of journalists.

Changing the subject, here’s a great report my Martin of Currybet on what people really want from the word ‘innovation’:

“People don’t actually want innovation ….. everyone thinks they want a hover board, but actually they want the same thing they had before but actually works.”

Read it all though.

Back to the MSM (just to prove that I have lingering doubts about my own arguments here) Jenni Russell has an excellent article on Ed Balls’ disgraceful treatment of Sharon Shoesmith in Haringey. This raises a massive question for me: If Balls had refused to respond to the tabloid witchhunt, would Shoesmith still be in her job? Would Balls? What are the implications for the whole ‘politics should be about ishoos and not personalities’ question?

And there’s loads more that I’ve not included, but that I have read and enjoyed. I’ve spent the last couple of days traveling without the need to buy a newspaper. You can see what I read and shared on my phone on these two feeds.

Confused? You will be! Stay tuned to the next exciting episode from the bloggers. Better than the newspapers since people started using Google Reader properly….

Here’s a reminder of how it works if you’ve not tried it:

… or ‘we get the politicians we deserve, pt1′:

Via Mick, this is worth a look over at the Daily Mail for people who recycle The Independent.

Pic: Click for credit

“Academics …. found that “not giving straight answers to questions” scored an average of 8.45 when people were asked how much of a problem it was on a scale of zero to 10. “Making promises they know they can’t keep” scored 8.13, the same rating as “misusing official expenses and allowances”, while “accepting bribes” scored 6.43.”

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about this. It ignores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in a way that no-one with an ounce of sense should do.

For me, perhaps the dominant theme for this election – as with many previous elections – will be the Prisoner’s Dilemma – or the BF, as outlined in this slightly homophobic post.

As Colonel Nathan R. Jessep puts it here, “the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

Both of the UK’s main parties knew that the expenses scandal damaged politics and lost them votes. Both stoked it by shopping each other. A duck-house? I’ll see that and raise you a porno channel!

Both of the two main parties are privately committed to a nasty combination of tax rises and spending cuts shortly after polling day. Both refuse to detail where the cuts and rises will land.

In both cases, this is the Prisoner’s Dilemma at work. On the tax-and-cuts question, the voters will punish honesty without an ounce of mercy. In both cases, the media is the ultimate beneficiary. All but the most idiotic of journalists fully understand this dynamic. It is what puts bread on their tables.

Yet like a lawyer that fails to advise a client of the quick painless way to settle a case, the media refuse to frame the debate in this  way.

And this is where my inner Marxist comes peeping out. Politics is not about niceness, presentation or honesty. It’s about the clash of material interests. Politicians, commentators, pressure-groups, lobbyists, newspaper proprietors and political funders are all avatars in that conflict.

When we compare the performance of those players, in recent years, the people that we elect have been very significantly weakened.

Here’s Peter Levine on the way that the healthcare debate has been reported by the press in the US:

“…the news media spent a year feeding American citizens a steady diet of stories about Congressional procedure, the possible impact of health-care reform on elections, and quotes that falsely described the bill or denounced its critics. Americans never showed any desire to watch Congress “scratch and claw.” They would have appreciated some information about what various legislative bills would do.

Now that the bill has passed, reporters finally feel an obligation to explain it. Bernard’s story lists the major provisions, although The Times also feels obliged to run a front-page “news analysis” of Obama’s alleged strategy (he cast a “bet that the Republicans … overplayed their hand”), a separate article about political fights to come, and a panoply of one-liners: “Freedom dies a little bit today …” “It is almost like the Salem Witch trials …” The ratio of substance to horse-race reporting remains low, but I predict that weekly news magazines and metropolitan dailies will begin to run helpful explanatory pieces.”

I find it impossible to believe that politics could be treated in the same way here in the UK.

I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:

My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.

It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib‘s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends).

All-in-all though – leaving the graphic aside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was being framed to suit a desired outcome. I’m sure that there are comparison charts where Barnet’s performance is closer to the mediocre than the outstanding.

Now Barnet are something of a controversial local authority. They fell out with Ken Livingstone when they removed a lot of traffic calming measures a few years ago. As the Association of British Drivers put it, “Barnet is on the front line against Ken Livingstone and TfL’s anti-car policies by adopting common sense policies on transport.” They also have a hawkish approach to social care and the EasyCouncil model are not without its critics.

I’m not here to go over these issues, but it’s worth looking at some of the more bog-standard questions that I think a lot of councils would benefit from answering. My biggest problem with the way Barnet are doing this (and I should be clear, I’m picking on Barnet because I live there – you could do a similar exercise with any council, and you may find that Barnet have gone further than most in even bothering to ask) is that there seems to be a political and managerial monopoly on the framing of the consultation.

Surely the opposition groups could have been provided with comparable resources to describe the situation differently and frame the options to suit their agendas?

Or even better, they could have adopted the following workflow:

1. Follow The Conservative Party’s lead in using Google Moderator to crowdsource a set of questions from the public. Get dozens of people to ask questions (invite texts and tweets – they don’t need to all be from local residents!) and try to drive thousands of people to bid those questions up or down. Texts are crucial here – any local lists that can be used, and any way of incentivising people to do so – perhaps even a small prize for the selected questions?
2. Then commit to getting an independent body (not selected by the council) to answer those questions on the council’s behalf. Invite all councillors to provide their own commentaries on the answers if they wish.
3. Provide the raw data and offer a cash prize (say £3k?) to anyone who can take that data and use it to help visualise what the key decisions are most effectively. Invite a group of local residents to award that prize to the people who help improve their understanding and clarify the issues the best
4. Only then, present your options to the public – and get indicative results by reaching out over the heads of the hard-to-avoids to the hard-to-reach local residents – I have a suggestion of how this could be done here.

None of this is likely to prove too attractive to councils for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes a lot of power out of the hands of unelected officials – the monopoly on describing problems was always a key weapon in Sir Humphrey’s armoury. Secondly, Barnet’s Tories would only have been human if they’d framed the questions that they wanted answered. Most ruling local groups will do this. But they did so, and it’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

However, I’d suggest that councils may be pleasantly surprised if they did it my way. The biggest thing missing from Barnet’s current consultation model is that there is very little space for the public to tell everyone something that they didn’t already know about Barnet’s policy options.

I’m not a natural Tory (if you’ve met me, you’ll know that I’m quite the opposite) but I can’t help but be impressed with their grasp of a few of the opportunities offered by new (potentially) democratic tools lately.

The first one is their use of Google Moderator in the Q&A that is embedded in their draft NHS manifesto launch. It’s a very savvy way of avoiding the appearance of control-freakery that has dogged Labour’s ‘Big Conversation’ while at the same time weeding out the trollery that neuters a lot of online political discussions.

But on a bolder canvas, their offer of £1m to the developer of the website that can “harness the wisdom of the crowd” by producing an online platform to solve “common problems” is very striking. The dovetailing of this approach with Cameron’s notion of the post bureaucratic age is very deft.

There are a number of constructive responses to this, but they don’t really include Marina Hyde’s bit of hired trollery. Rosa Prince at the Telegraph has picked up on what appears to be an imaginary hostage to fortune here – the opportunity that the internet offers to give the people who call Radio 5′s 606 phone in the opportunity to pick the England team. The Ebbsfleet United project was designed to offer living proof of this blog’s central thesis – the value of representative democracy – and Anthony’s account of it here is worth revisiting this. But as far as I can see, Hunt has simply not mentioned the idea that the England squad is a suitable candidate for crowdsourcing.

In a recent Times column, Matthew Parris touches on a fair bit of what must – and should – make up the Tories motivation in all of this:

Responding to Margaret Thatcher’s unfairly quoted remark, “There is no such thing as society . . .”, Mr Cameron has said, repeatedly: “There is such a thing as society; it’s just not the same as the State.” I’m sure Cameron wants the phrase to be seen as a philosophical anchor.

He concludes:

There will never be a better time to make that journey, now everybody knows that the State cannot afford its present level of beneficence. Do Cameron Conservatives acknowledge, even to themselves, that if they are going anywhere at all, this must be their destination?

There is a sweet spot here: where doing the right thing is also doing the populist thing and doing the Tory thing: a move to break the monopolies that dominate policymaking – the think-tanks, pressure groups, civil servants and party bureaucrats – is long overdue. Only £1m to fix such an obvious glaring hole? As a Labour supporter, I find the neatness of it to be quite crushing.

But beneath that, a serious attempt to gamechange the failing public policy processes  needs to understand what causes those failings. Using the internet to break one stranglehold only to step into another one would be disastrous, and the Tories do have bad form in this department. For example, this approach needs to be a good deal more literate than last years’ bloody awful ‘localism’ proposals.

What stands out from the Editors Notes in the press release is that – largely – this plan is avoiding many of the populist forms of crowdsourcing that are likely to result in poor-quality policymaking. The refreshing thing here is that there is no simplistic appeal to anyone with a bit of time on their hands to Have Your Say. This is an important concession. There is, however, a danger lurking in the final bit of the editors notes – ‘Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in policymaking’. It looks suspiciously like a muffled appeal for a lot of expressed opinion.

I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the editors notes were written by … ahem …. Tom Steinberg (who does know what he’s talking about and has the imagination to adapt good ideas from elsewhere) and then that last one was added by a politician who didn’t really understand the idea properly.

There are a number of reasons why the harvesting of expressed opinion will not necessarily (or even usually) result in good quality policy-making. These are – in no particular order:

The ‘detached wisdom’ problem: if you want to find out what people really think, you have to find a way of getting a representative cross-section of people to lodge their mild preferences. Stockbrokers will often advise you make your best judgments when you are not emotional about stock. There appears to be a parallel here with The Long Tail argument: That the most evident views on any subject are either those who really REALLY care or who have a vested interest in a particular outcome. The larger volume, however, comes from the general bubble of conversation that is largely ignored by the media and by politicians. If policymakers only have the opportunity to hear what self-styled experts or enthusiasts have to say about a particular subject, they will miss precisely the wisdom that Jeremy Hunt seems to be looking to harvest.

The ‘active citizen’ problem: related to the ‘detached wisdom’ one: Time-rich, often more materially wealthy than average with particularly strong views on specific issues. It makes for shrill, populist, non-inclusive policy-making and it foregrounds the concerns of a small social group over a wider one.

The ‘convening power’ problem: that wealthy or influential individuals (newspaper owners, celebrities) can campaign on particular hobby-horses at the expense of the issues that have more general lightly-held support from a wider range of people.

The groupthink problem: There is a point here that all points of the political compass should really acknowledge: That high-quality thinking is incompatible with the kind of groupthink that mass-media led politics promotes (a central plank of James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds thesis, by the way). This one is related to the ‘convening power‘ problem. Processes designed to harvest observations from the public will be gamed by political opponents, and particularly by newspaper editors. Outliers will be castigated and apostates will be hung out to dry. It’s also too good an opportunity for your political opponents to turn down.

I’ve argued before that the best way to harvest The Wisdom of Crowds is to quietly eavesdrop upon it rather than do it in a high-profile way. The form that questions take is important as well – asking the public to describe the problem rather than shout their proposed solutions at you. And these are the tasks that the semantic web can solve. It offers a tremendous potential for new forms of collaborative working and interdisciplinary exchanges. Again, the Tories are hitting exactly the right notes by promising to free up public data.

At this point of this post, I need to link to a good easy-to-read politician-friendly article entitled ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking.’ I can’t find any at the moment, but if anyone has seen one, I’d welcome the link.

By the way, I’m not completely opposed to the idea of harnessing expressed opinion and finding ways of getting value out of it. This guy seems to be looking for this idea and I hope that they talk it through. But if the Tories want to spend their money wisely, they need to work with the sort of people who could write that essay and build a spec around it.

In fact, here is an idea that I’ll give them – something that they can do before they get their hands on that £1m Cabinet Office nest-egg: They can take the Conservative Party’s petty cash tin out and offer a £1,000 prize for the best essay entitled ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking.’

It would need to be written for an audience of politicians and party bureaucrats and it would need to soft-pedal on the threat that this approach holds for party bureaucrats as well….

Jeremy. Suffering in silence, as ever.....

If you were to add one blog to your RSS reader at my request, please make it Chris Dillow’s Stumbling and Mumbling.

It’s about ‘Clarksonism.’ Why  tedious self-pitying rich white blokes on the telly the question of ‘subjective well-being’ is an important one to understand and why politicians often end up being forced to expend lots of energy on people with imaginary grievances while ignoring those with genuine ones:

“Almost a fifth of the poorest one-fifth of people – and these, remember, are the poorest in the world – say they are satisfied with their lives, whilst a third of the best-off fifth say they are dissatisfied.

This suggests that subjective indicators – how people feel, what they say – are an imperfect measure of actual inequality.”

This is another example of the way that highly visible citizens can often dominate debate at the expense of other – perhaps more deserving – cases. In another example of this, the Freethinking Economist gives us Theodore Dalrymple. It is the Jeremys, the Theodores and the Victors who are often – as Anthony observed here a while ago – the main beneficiaries of a good deal of outreach and consultation work.