Interview
Taiwan's experiments on how to do democracy | Audrey Tang (2022)
- The host anticipates the current year will outperform the previous year and plans to launch a new program next year focused on thorough preparation and prioritization, including hiring career advisors with applications closing February 20th and a new head of job board with applications closing February 27th.
- Audrey Tang intends to launch an English-only podcast styled after 80,000 Hours to answer "Twitterverse" questions, projecting an audience equal to or larger than her existing Mandarin platform, featuring a Taiwanese perspective recap, debates, and social media inquiries.
- Tang expects that publishing non-privacy data immediately upon collection will maximize public trust and anticipates that the OpenStreetMap community can correct data bias within 24 hours, citing a prior instance where face mask distribution optimized in one day.
- The Polis platform is expected to facilitate consensus on contentious issues like UberX entry by identifying ten broad agreements across opinion clusters, which are predicted to converge over three weeks to form an overlapping consensus citizens can accept.
- Crowdsourced agendas are projected to be binding for setting but not decisional authority, while the pay-for-success model relies on a judge panel distinct from government trustees or crowdfunding, pending the maturation of quadratic funding and Gitcoin's prevention of civil attacks.
- Digital civic spaces are predicted to foster pro-social behavior compared to optimized social media, with the belief that a citizen's jury requires significant investment and is reserved for major projects, whereas Slido with live streaming offers higher bandwidth than textual petitions.
- The Sunflower movement is described as establishing a public ledger and normalizing a 60-day regulatory conversation announcement period, a reform implemented by the 2014 Ma administration that continues to influence the current government's treatment of petitioners as co-creators.
- Assisted intelligence and augmented collective intelligence are forecast to become the norm in pro-democratic nations, potentially countering authoritarian AI, while immersive realities and brain-computer interfaces are expected to enhance value communication and attention management.
- Taiwan's digital democracy model is expected to persist globally through innovation export, acting as a safeguard against adverse geopolitical scenarios, with the conservative anarchist philosophy aiming to render state coercion obsolete by prioritizing social groups.
- Mask rationing is expected to cease by last year due to innovation-driven abundance, and machine learning is projected to eventually support low-resource languages through general assistive intelligence paradigms.
- The Presidential Hackathon aims to award five teams annually with a presidential commitment to scale their local innovations into national public policy within the following fiscal year, following a community-voted topic selection process.
- The double appointee system in Taiwan is expected to sustain a nonpartisan environment where all four parliamentary parties compete on openness, driven by the implicit threat of occupation and a collective desire to avoid past democratic failures.
- GovZero originated after a YouTube advertisement was flagged as spam, and while the Ministry of Defense is unlikely to second staff for certain projects, most interns remain for two to four months before transitioning to the private sector.
- Tang expects to maintain a vegetarian diet excluding oysters and mussels, with the view that mussels have a minimal self-pattern similar to plants and synthetic meat culture cells likely do not suffer.