I’m becoming a real fan of Daniel Little’s UnderstandingSociety blog.

Here he considers “how good is deliberative democracy?”:

The approach that starts and ends with voting among alternatives has a major shortcoming: no one gets a chance to make persuasive arguments to other citizens; no one has the opportunity of having his/her own beliefs challenged; no one is exposed to new facts or novel considerations that might make a difference in the choice. In other words, the “vote first” approach simply takes people’s preferences and beliefs as fixed, and looks at the problem of choice as simply one of aggregating these antecedent preferences.

The deliberative approach, by contrast, looks at belief formation as itself a cumulative and reasonable process; one in which the individual needs to have the opportunity to think through the facts and values that surround the choice; and, crucially, one in which exposure to other people’s reasoning is an important part of arriving at a sound conclusion.

I’m going to keep hammering this until people are sick of it: The Mindset of the Future is Process. It’s the key conceptual adjustment we need to make in order to address our current challenges — and to move towards the next generation of new opportunities.

Until now, both individuals and groups operate under assumptions of permanence — “this is the way things are” — until a crisis occurs and people start to say “but now we need to change.”

Our own institutions and ideas unintentionally conspire to fool us to believe that change is the exception when the truth is it’s the rule.

Permanence is not just exceptional, it’s deceptional — it’s mythological…

If you look deeply enough into your opinions and beliefs, you’ll find they aren’t just existing there, they actually depend on your ongoing efforts to reinterpret the world, adapting a supporting cast of ideas to keep your opinions and beliefs in accordance with new facts — like a balancing act.

All of this is background for my aim of digitizing our decision-making processes (which I’d like to get back to before this gets too metaphysical).

Any process needs both hard and soft aspects in order to function, i.e. it needs to have an element of fluidity, as in face-to-face conversations, and an element of solidity, as in putting it in writing.

Digital media does both.

The conversations we have in coffee shops and town hall sessions may generate a lot of energy, but that energy has to be channeled and stored or it dissipates. Everyone goes back to whatever everyone does until the next morning or next month when another batch of energy is generated and wasted all over again.

We also tend to forget (or misremember) exactly what our positions and ideas were. Without objective accounts of our conversations (and even with them) we can be astonishingly self-deceptive about our beliefs and reasons for believing.

Without articulation and objective deliberation (or at least deliberation that aspires to objectivity) we fail to notice inconsistencies in our thinking so we miss most of the best opportunities to learn and improve-by-process-of-correction — we fail to make our ideas and institutions more sustainable.

In other words, by failing to embrace change, we become more vulnerable to it.

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