LESSWRONG
LW

All of Augmented Assembly's Comments + Replies

Augmented Assembly10

'Citizen Participation and Machine Learning for a Better Democracy' Abstract:

The development of democratic systems is a crucial task as confirmed by its selection as one of the Millennium Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. In this article, we report on the progress of a project that aims to address barriers, one of which is information overload, to achieving effective direct citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. The main objectives are to explore if the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine ... (read more)

Reply
Augmented Assembly20

The potential positive links between AI and Politics is a topic that I believe isn't given enough time. I would recommended the wonderful paper 'Citizen Participation and Machine Learning for a Better Democracy' as an introduction for anyone who is interested. Equally, for a shorter specific example of how these two forces can interact I would recommend the LessWrong Post 'African Wild Dogs Vote By Sneezing - Can AI Help Us Do Better?'

Reply
1Augmented Assembly
'Citizen Participation and Machine Learning for a Better Democracy' Abstract: The development of democratic systems is a crucial task as confirmed by its selection as one of the Millennium Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. In this article, we report on the progress of a project that aims to address barriers, one of which is information overload, to achieving effective direct citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. The main objectives are to explore if the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning can improve citizens' experience of digital citizen participation platforms. Taking as a case study the "Decide Madrid" Consul platform, which enables citizens to post proposals for policies they would like to see adopted by the city council, we used NLP and machine learning to provide new ways to (a) suggest to citizens proposals they might wish to support; (b) group citizens by interests so that they can more easily interact with each other; (c) summarise comments posted in response to proposals; (d) assist citizens in aggregating and developing proposals. Evaluation of the results confirms that NLP and machine learning have a role to play in addressing some of the barriers users of platforms such as Consul currently experience.
African Wild Dogs Vote By Sneezing - Can AI Help Us Do Better?
Augmented Assembly10

Thank you for the considered feedback, I will go through over it with an editor I know. Also, if you really like the idea please feel free to write your own post on, or inspired by, Augmented Assembly

Reply
African Wild Dogs Vote By Sneezing - Can AI Help Us Do Better?
Augmented Assembly20

Thank you very much for the positive feedback and upvote. I would certainly be willing to edit my post further. Admittedly, I wanted to condense the proposal into a ~5mins read and if people wanted more depth they could view my sources. However, this constraint may have made my writing become overly condensed and loose readability. I will think about your general feedback but I would also be happy to consider altering any specific elements you found to be the least legible.

Reply
4the gears to ascension
I don't think merely condensing points is the best way to make things easy to parse quickly anymore. Instead, I'd recommend focusing on visual layout - make different things different, similar things similar. Right now your post is a series of text blocks; to make it easy for someone not yet convinced of its value to read, intro with a summary, outro with a summary, titles of each section that follow the flow of the summary, each section explains the details. Pretty standard way for posts to work, I really only explain it to contrast it with some of the ways one might try to get too clever using summarizer AIs; though of course it's definitely not trivial to create a good version of this layout, and I hardly blame you for just posting what you had, it's not like my posts are even as good as this. don't bend over backwards to do well - I describe the ideal version because it's a target and I always aim for posts to be widely shareable. Informed minds can disagree on this sort of stuff.  About to sleep - I'll read through properly tomorrow!
African Wild Dogs Vote By Sneezing - Can AI Help Us Do Better?
Augmented Assembly30

This is true, and it is very fair to bring up that a nuanced communication pathway does currently exist; however, it is arguably not an effective mechanism. I am skeptical of how "listened to" people who write to their legislator truly feel. Gratification from this act will likely be unreliable and highly delayed. Thus, the main barrier is not so much the effort to communicate, although I certainly don't think that this is a non-trivial factor, but the experience derived from such communication. In an app or website, there could be a level of immediate gra... (read more)

Reply