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In this episode of Meyerside Chats, Evan Meyer speaks with Cesar Hidalgo, a Chilean Spanish American scholar known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. They discuss the problems with democracy today, such as political polarization and identity-based politics. They also explore the idea of augmented democracy, using AI agents to support politicians and citizens in the voting process. They highlight the need for a more direct and nuanced representation of people’s opinions and propose starting with low-stakes contexts to test the effectiveness of augmented democracy.
Meyerside Chats seeks to eliminate the “us and them” narrative and toxic polarization by striving to create virtuous community leadership and authentic conversation. We showcase the humanity in those who take on the often thankless jobs of public service, civil discourse, differing points of view, and how we can improve our politics and society as a whole.
Recorded July 18, 2023
About Cesar Hidalgo
César A. Hidalgo is a Chilean-Spanish-American scholar known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. Hidalgo leads the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute (ANITI) of the University of Toulouse and the Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies at Corvinus University of Budapest. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester. Between 2010 and 2019 Hidalgo led MIT’s Collective Learning group. Prior to working at MIT, Hidalgo was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Hidalgo is also a founder of Datawheel, an award winning company specialized in the creation of data distribution and visualization systems. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelor in Physics from Universidad Católica de Chile. Hidalgo’s contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2018 Lagrange Prize and three Webby Awards. Hidalgo’s is also the author of dozens of peer-reviewed papers and of three books: Why Information Grows (Basic Books, 2015), The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press, 2014), and How Humans Judge Machines (MIT Press, 2021).
About Evan Meyer
Evan is the Founder of BeautifyEarth.com, a tech platform and marketplace that speed tracks the urban beautification process through art, as well as the original 501(c)3 sister organization and public charity that beautifies schools in the communities that need it most. Beautify has now facilitated thousands of murals around the planet, working with hundreds of communities, community organizations, cities and national brands.
He is also the Founder of RideAmigos.com, a tech platform that optimizes commuter travel and behavior through intelligent programs and analytics for governments, large enterprises, and universities, serving many regions across the US.
As a civic leader in the City of Santa Monica, he is the past Chairman of his neighborhood (Ocean Park), giving residents a voice in the public process, as well as helping the City of Santa Monica with innovative, actionable ways of civic engagement.
Podcast Highlights
03:00 The biggest problem with democracy today
08:00 The need for belonging and identity in politics
10:00 The psychological aspect of political identity
13:00 The division in society and loneliness
17:00 The impact of social media and technology on relationships
22:00 Introduction to Augmented Democracy
25:00 Success of augmented democracy platform during the Chilean revolution
27:00 Starting small to prove the effectiveness of augmented democracy.
28:00 Using voting systems in low-stakes environments to explore potential challenges and solutions
29:00 The importance of understanding and addressing user interface problems in political participation
30:00 The need for validation and testing in political contexts, even on a small scale
31:00 The potential of machine learning to sustain and increase political participation over time
32:00 The challenge of sustaining political engagement and the potential of augmented democracy
35:00 – The importance of trust and feedback in political participation and decision-making
37:00 – The challenge of inefficiency in policy-making and the need for simpler and more accessible policies
40:00 – The challenge of distributing decision-making power in society and the importance of accountability and responsibility
43:00 – The vision for contributing to the understanding of knowledge growth and diffusion
49:00 – The personal goals and contributions Cesar Hidalgo wants to make in his lifetime
52:00 – Cesar Hidalgo’s admiration for Richard Feynman, Edwin Land, and Louis Leon Thurstone as inspirations in science and other fields.
Podcast Transcript
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Evan Meyer: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining another Meyerside Chats. It is my pleasure to introduce Cesar Hidalgo. He is a Chilean Spanish American scholar, known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization and applied artificial intelligence. Hidalgo leads the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial Natural Intelligence Institute at the University of Toulouse and the Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies at Corvinus University of Budapest. He’s also an honorary professor at the University of Manchester. Between 2010 and 2019, Hidalgo led MIT’s Collective Learning group. Prior to working at MIT, Hidalgo was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
[00:00:44] Evan Meyer: Hidalgo is also a founder of Datawheel, an award winning company specializing in the creation of data distribution and visualization systems. He holds a PhD in physics from the University of Notre Dame and a bachelor in physics from [00:01:00] Universidad Católica de Chile. Hidalgo’s contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2018 Lagrange prize and three Webby awards.
[00:01:10] Evan Meyer: Hidalgo is also the author of dozens of peer reviewed papers and three books: Why Information Grows (Basic Books, 2015), The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press, 2014), and How Humans Judge Machines (MIT Press, 2021). He has presented in more than 200 events, including keynote and invited talks at academic conferences and professional events. He’s presented at TEDx and the World Economic Forum and at both Davos and the Annual Meeting of New Champions.
[00:01:35] Evan Meyer: Sir, it is a pleasure to have you on today.
[00:01:39] Cesar Hidalgo: Thanks, Evan. It’s a pleasure for me to be here today.
[00:01:41] Evan Meyer: I’ve Inspired when I saw your ted talk. I think it’s a revolutionary way of thinking And it made me see what’s possible It gave me a lot of hope and as i’ve learned more about your work It [00:02:00] shows that you can do something this exciting in this revolutionary, but also in a thoughtful way. So I think that got me really excited to have this conversation and I believe that you are the perfect person to be having this conversation.
[00:02:18] Evan Meyer: My background in local politics is made me even more interested because I see all the flaws in local politics. And I see how much room there is for growth when it comes to voter turnout when it comes to voter knowledge cognitive bandwidth what people think they understand and how they look at various issues versus just complain about things right?
[00:02:41] Evan Meyer: And all of this gets harder and harder as you go from local to regional to state to national understanding of issues so with that said what do you see is the biggest problem with democracy today?
[00:02:55] Cesar Hidalgo: I think democracy has a number of problems today. And [00:03:00] I think, one of the problems that we do have is that we have systems in which we are required to elect bundles of proposals or preferences, through political parties or through politicians that at the end of the day have pushed us towards forms of polarization or political discussions that are not the most constructive. I do think that we have advanced to the point in which we value democracy as a form of governance.
[00:03:28] Cesar Hidalgo: We agree that decisions need to be made collectively, but we have reduced that ability to make collective decisions. To relatively simple choices or were candidates rather than proposals and that has generated incentives in several sides to have a conversation that is not ideal. So on the side of the candidates it generates incentives to get candidates that really have enormous egos and are able to survive a very vicious political life.
[00:03:59] Cesar Hidalgo: And on the [00:04:00] other hand, on the perspective of individuals we have learn to develop identities based on our politics. We take a strong identity on what we believe, but these are identities that are quite simplified being a Democrat being a Republican being, conservative being a liberal that we have lost the nuance of the discussion in which sometimes and I’ve seen this with data people often agree on more things that they disagree on but because we have to identify with these camps and because we have to make these all or none decisions we end up fighting more than discussing our points of agreements or how we can make our decisions collectively better.
[00:04:41] Evan Meyer: Yeah. You said a number of things there that really struck home. And one is politics is not about credentials. I don’t know what percentage of it is about credentials. But that’s been one of the one of the hard things to grapple with and to have to build an identity around different issues or [00:05:00] groups and then not even think about the politics but whether or not you’re identifying with being a democrat or a republican or if republicans put forth a bill you know you don’t like you could or that you like you could you can’t even say that you like that bill at this point because you’d be identifying with being a republican And you could never do that god forbid or a democrat god forbid depending on which side you’re on.
[00:05:27] Evan Meyer: So thats really challenging. It’s a weird state that we’re in right now.
[00:05:33] Cesar Hidalgo: And we didn’t get here by accident. There is this book by Ezra Klein that has a very cleverly written introduction that tells a story in which in the 1950s, the United States was not as divided as it is today in terms of politics.
[00:05:48] Cesar Hidalgo: And the evidence of that is that a lot of people would split the vote. Meaning that they would vote for let’s say a Republican at the state level and for Democrat, the federal level and that happens less and less now [00:06:00] splitting the vote is very rare. And what he says is that well in the 1950s, political scientists were worried about that because they say in a world in which people don’t see strong differences between candidates from different parties.
[00:06:15] Cesar Hidalgo: They’re not making well informed decisions. We need parties that are well differentiated. We need parties that in some sense cannot confuse with one another because otherwise people are making decisions among things that might be confused and might not be clear. And they push towards this development of strong differentiation between parties and they succeeded on that program.
[00:06:36] Cesar Hidalgo: But in some sense, the success of that program was the failure for our society because it developed a change. And that’s the argument that Ezra makes in this book, in which people change from having an identity of maybe I’m a middle income family man from the Midwest to I’m a Republican or I’m an East Coast liberal and so forth.
[00:06:58] Cesar Hidalgo: And now when we’re talking [00:07:00] about politics, we’re not having a difference about ideas. We’re having a fight for our identity for our lives and that change in the fifties maybe other forms of identity became more important. And today political identity has become so important that people are not willing to give an inch because you’re not giving an inch in an idea in a discussion or debate you’re giving an inch of your identity.
[00:07:22] Cesar Hidalgo: And basically that’s something that is very intimate and hard to lose. So we got here because we thought we were making things better by differentiating parties helping people choose better. But maybe when parties were more similar and ideas could be shared more easily among them.
[00:07:41] Cesar Hidalgo: The state was better to start with and we might have made a mistake.
[00:07:45] Evan Meyer: Do you think any of that has to do with the loss of being particularly religious or the devaluing religion to what it used to be or at least a lot of people have lost their faith[00:08:00] and they have taken up politics as a religion at least from what I’ve seen.
[00:08:04] Evan Meyer: Do you see that that’s part of the issue in their forming identities with that which they normally would’ve formed that with God or with.
[00:08:13] Cesar Hidalgo: Just to cite another colleague and you probably heard of Stuart Kaufman, he’s generally an MD he became famous in the 1960s in the studies of fruit flies and then eventually develop all of these theories about complexity and how organisms adapt and evolve and all of that.
[00:08:28] Cesar Hidalgo: But he has a number of popular books and one of those books is called Reinventing the Sacred and the book centers on this argument which is that at the end of the day whether we like it or not whether you are an atheist or not we have some sort of need for spirituality and we’re going to look at that.
[00:08:45] Cesar Hidalgo: We’re going to put it somewhere, so yeah, maybe in Argentina, soccer plays that role like people are really big fans of their national soccer team and their neighborhood soccer teams and in the US to some extent you do have big fans of some of the sports and [00:09:00] that plays a role.
[00:09:01] Cesar Hidalgo: But politics can play that role as well. I do think that we do have like this let’s say unconditional love to give to a group which is something that I think religion does build on I do think that there’s something quite natural about that. We want to have that sense of belonging where sometimes we do feel lost as a person if we don’t feel that we belong to something larger.
[00:09:23] Cesar Hidalgo: And in that case we could have a transfer from that need to this different entity or this different group phenomena that would be politics rather than religion. Now I’m speculating here but I do think I’m not the only one that has been speculating in this direction.
[00:09:43] Cesar Hidalgo: There is this need for us to belong to groups to have a strong emotional attachment to them. That’s something that is very much present in religion. And when religion disappears it doesn’t go away. People might search for that elsewhere. And that might be something of what’s going on here.
[00:09:59] Evan Meyer: Yeah. [00:10:00] And it’s funny you say sports. Even in fitness, people, yoga is the easiest example in the fitness category where that can become very devout. It actually gets into spirituality a bit. It crosses the line between fitness and spirituality sometimes. But sports is a huge one and people will fight over that.
[00:10:18] Evan Meyer: It’s politics becomes the intellectual form of the physical sports but all of these are just, I think that’s an interesting way of putting it where there’s an unconditional love that people need to give to something.
[00:10:30] Cesar Hidalgo: That there’s another dimension here which I think is interesting. I had a colleague at MIT.
[00:10:34] Cesar Hidalgo: It was called Henry Lieberman. And one of the things that he did was that together with his team they have collected a lot of data on common sense reasoning. Okay. So this was before GPT chat and all of those things. I’m talking about like the AI of 2009, 2010. And one of the things that people struggle with was common sense reasoning the thing that water goes inside the cup, not on the cup.
[00:10:56] Cesar Hidalgo: And all of those types of statements. And when they [00:11:00] looked at this corpus of data they realized that the first dimension of the common sense reasoning was a moral dimension was looking at good or bad things. Okay, so it’s not the clean socks and the dirty socks. We make short cuts.
[00:11:17] Cesar Hidalgo: It’s the good socks and the bad socks, it’s like the good pair of pants it’s like you have two cars the good car and the bad car. This moral shortcut. It’s a very easy way for us to think about the world because sometimes describing things more precisely is cognitively demanding.
[00:11:29] Cesar Hidalgo: So we have like this dimension in which we either or dislike something or we find that it’s good or bad and we organize the world in that way. Now when we bring this to what we were just talking before which is this belonging to groups we want to feel that we are part of the good group so religion is very much tied to some morality.
[00:11:45] Cesar Hidalgo: If you practice a religion, there’s a certain code of conduct that you consider to be virtuous and that you try to follow nationality has a component as well. I’m an American citizen. I understand that the identity of being American in part it’s an identity that is associated with some [00:12:00] sort of virtue that gets blended into that cultural identity.
[00:12:04] Cesar Hidalgo: But when you like a sports team you like the good guys you don’t like the bad guys and when it comes to politics you have the same when it comes to food. People can be very opinionated and moralistic about food. I’m a vegan or I’m a vegetarian or I know here is someone that doesn’t eat vegetables.
[00:12:18] Cesar Hidalgo: It’s like the opposite of a vegetarian. And they take that very seriously in each one of them. But if you simplify it if you look whether it is a sports or whether it is food or whether it is religion or where it is whatever group you are belonging to there is a simplification in which you are always on the side of the good guys and that simplification I also think it’s important because it’s not just developing a sense of identity it’s developing a sense of identity in which you see yourself as morally virtuous and that of course generates a conflict when you have groups that are very well defined because both groups look at themselves.
[00:12:54] Cesar Hidalgo: As morally virtuous like in the United States the Republicans and the Democrats in [00:13:00] themselves they’re going to look at themselves as the good guys of that movie.
[00:13:02] Evan Meyer: And not even just morally virtuous, but sanctimonious where not to play on a recent political thing that’s been going around.
[00:13:12] Evan Meyer: But there’s something about that you can see even in places where you wouldn’t expect it. You wouldn’t necessarily think that places that are not religious and are very healthy. Let’s just say In general like a Los Angeles they don’t tend to be as religious and don’t tend to be and they tend to be particularly healthy but can still after overcoming so many things sometimes I think people lose perspective of after even after let’s just say you found things that work better for you.
[00:13:45] Evan Meyer: They work better for you They don’t work better for everyone but then to lose empathy right? There’s a loss of perspective and understanding even though your parents feel that way maybe even and people have divorced their families because of [00:14:00] politics these days right?
[00:14:01] Cesar Hidalgo: It’s across the world it’s not just an American phenomenon, like across the world I think we are in a world in which the center has lost there’s only in a few countries in which politicians from the center are still being elected but there are fewer and fewer and we are entering this let’s say, late stage of representative democracy in which countries are getting stuck on this very hard swings between the left and the right and I think the United States we know we have more recently entered that cycle, if you think about let’s say in the 90s someone like Clinton was still a little bit of a centrist for today’s standards quite a lot in many ways being maybe a little bit more open in terms of economics but a little bit more let’s say liberal but not so much in terms of social issues compared to people today.
[00:14:48] Cesar Hidalgo: And now we don’t have that anymore. And I think it’s disappearing. I live in France, in France we do have a centrist right now and I think it might be the last centrist of France for a while because the next election [00:15:00] is going to be one of his rivals to the left or to the right that is going to eat maybe that center where he’s in right now.
[00:15:06] Cesar Hidalgo: And Argentina is going through the cycles Brazil is going through cycles Chile is going through the cycles. It’s an accelerating oscillation that we’re observing in politics around the world which is concerning because it’s not the same as being in the middle when you’re going violently from one side to the next I think a lot of things getting built and destroyed and I don’t think it’s a very stable situation.
[00:15:28] Evan Meyer: No, it’s psychologically unhealthy too. And what’s always boggled me is why people will get so hung up on things that they have nothing to do with or not willing to change or get involved in anything to do in any capacity other than share things on social media and somehow think that’s helping the situation but the the willingness to participate is not really there but people it’s a psychological phenomenon to [00:16:00] me that someone it’s almost the same thing that would bother or affect a relationship in a marriage. It’s like very similar to the type of thought patterns that I believe are affecting a person’s relationship with politics and the rest of society.
[00:16:18] Evan Meyer: They’re very close in terms of the way that you would hope to treat another person, right? The way that you would hope that you can communicate effectively the way that you would think that the person can garner enough information learn enough and share and hear perspective and share perspective and ultimately come up with a well rounded holistic and empathetic approach even if they radically disagree. ———
[00:16:43] Cesar Hidalgo: Sorry, did you ever watch the movie The King of Comedy?
[00:16:49] Evan Meyer: Have I seen the king of comedy?
[00:16:51] Cesar Hidalgo: Like Jerry Lewis, Robert De Niro, Sandra Bernhardt.
[00:16:54] Evan Meyer: Oh yeah. You know what? Did you watch the Joker? The new Joker?
[00:16:58] Evan Meyer: The Joker movie?
[00:16:59] Cesar Hidalgo: No, yeah. [00:17:00] It’s a rip off of the king of comedy many ways, because the king of comedy is about Jerry Lewis being this very famous late night host and Robert De Niro being this like low level New York character like the Joker type of character which fantasizes about becoming a comedian in this show and eventually with Sandra Bernhardt which is like this rich but cuckoo high class New York gal they kidnap Jerry Lewis and it’s all because he has like a sorry Robert De Niro’s character has this imagination in which he’s thinking about him being on the show and telling those jokes and being liked by everyone and so forth.
[00:17:39] Cesar Hidalgo: And it shows that an aspect of American reality which I think was very poignant especially at that time and I think it has grown since which is a society divided between people that are relatively lonely and celebrities which are people that are gathered an enormous amount of attention and people fantasizing about being in contact with those celebrities and this is known in psychology that [00:18:00] basically people tend to think that they have a close relationship with people that are famous simply because they hear so much about them that in some sense there is a familiarity to them.
[00:18:08] Cesar Hidalgo: But when they would meet them of course the famous person doesn’t know them back. And that generates a huge Clash and I think a American society being a society is so media centric we have in some way evolved into a state in which a lot of people are interacting in a way that is mediated and it’s through the celebrity.
[00:18:29] Cesar Hidalgo: So yes, it’s is this person that has been on my living room every night for years but that person in reality is a character from television or a host on a TV show. They don’t know you, but they have become in some way a member of your family. The media has engineered that closeness as well, that closeness now like it translates into politics in which now you’re interacting through these characters.
[00:18:53] Cesar Hidalgo: Through these identities that are developed and it’s a symptom of a to me would [00:19:00] be considered a rather lonely society because what I find is that I only talk about famous people when I’m with people that I don’t know very well. But when I’m with people that I know very well and we have friends in common we talk about our friends in common.
[00:19:15] Cesar Hidalgo: We talk about like the other people that we know and in substance all of that world of fame and celebrities and power disappears into the background because we have our own little life that is filled here. But if that disappears all that is left is the connection to the —–.
[00:19:31] Cesar Hidalgo: And I see that as part of these micro mechanisms that lead to a psychology that you were describing.
[00:19:37] Evan Meyer: And it all actually the generation that is mostly sitting in their room watching TikTok or and not developing close personal relationships or intimate relationships with friends and family because they’re in the room I could see that becoming even worse.
[00:19:54] Evan Meyer: It’s a catalyst for the type of behavior you’re even you’re talking about.
[00:19:58] Cesar Hidalgo: Yeah, that’s our struggle now is like getting [00:20:00] kids out of the screens. And like I put my daughter on the summer camp or these other activities because yes, we have to get them out of the house to get them out of the screen and to interact with people.
[00:20:10] Cesar Hidalgo: And I think a lot of parents, that have kids around the age that I have like my daughter’s nine right now feel identified with this struggle.
[00:20:17] Evan Meyer: Let’s jump in a little bit to see now that we’ve understood a number of the problems here augmented democracy this fascinating concept and we’re talking about lacks of a lack of perspective.
[00:20:31] Evan Meyer: We’re talking about cognitive bandwidth or time to be able to understand issues to be able to understand the way I see it as understanding issues means understanding perspective understanding how it affects the most amount of people, how any issue can affect the most amount of people why it’s the right a good a someone who is representing people is a good representative of people, whether it’s your local or state politician or whatever.
[00:20:58] Evan Meyer: When they think about what’s good [00:21:00] for everybody, not just what’s good for them and their people. And that’s what we’ve got to also now, where you’re condemning one group and you’re praising another for their values. And this is tricky. Can augmented democracy help solve the issue of perspective in addition to just Cognitive bandwidth.
[00:21:25] Cesar Hidalgo: Yeah. So first let’s talk a little bit more like what this augmented democracy idea is. And the idea of augmented democracy is the idea of using AI agents, basically software that would live on, on, on sort of personal cloud to help represent individuals and their preferences in a way in which we could have levels of representation that are much more direct and nuanced than the ones that can be afforded through representative forms of democracy. Okay, [00:22:00] so a world in which people are represented by their issues and by their preferences rather by their allegiance or loyalty to a candidate. And this is an idea that as you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, it was in this TED Talk I presented in 2018, and that I had the chance to explore a little bit in 2019 when there was a big revolution in Chile, so in 2019 there was a revolution that started late in October, in which everything was normal.
[00:22:33] Cesar Hidalgo: Let’s say on a Wednesday and on Saturday morning, over 70 subway stations have been burned or damaged. There were a large number of places that had been vandalized and the country woke up to a state of chaos and uncertainty. That honestly I had not seen, during my life and within that context together with people in my software company we organized as a small citizen group.[00:23:00]
[00:23:00] Cesar Hidalgo: And we created a platform that grabbed 90 proposals in the beginning. These were things that people were voicing out on the internet on Twitter or in other places as potential causes of this revolution so people could help prioritize them collectively. Okay, so these were things like, increase the minimum wage or improve pensions or there were other things that were more political create a new constitution, or there were things that were more frivolous legalizing marijuana and so forth.
[00:23:26] Cesar Hidalgo: And we created this new form of social media to put it in a very simple way in which people could collaborate to prioritize these proposals. And we discovered first of all that people were willing to participate. We collected over a period of about three to four weeks over 7 million preferences from the population of people that came to participate.
[00:23:47] Cesar Hidalgo: Also, we found that for the most part there was a large amount of agreement in the population. Everybody thought that minimum wage was a big problem or that pensions were a big problem. And we could identify Issues that were [00:24:00] the source of this agreement and the decisions that were the source of the agreement were interesting because there was part of the population that believe they were really important that they were the cause of the conflict.
[00:24:09] Cesar Hidalgo: And part of the population believe that they were not the source of the conflict that were distraction, and they were not important so they would push them to the bottom or the top of the ranking depending on which side they were on. And one of those issues for instance, was the idea of a new constitution.
[00:24:23] Cesar Hidalgo: It was a very polarizing proposal and Chile then underwent a constitutional process, that it started, about six to eight months after we launched this platform from the beginning of the revolution and that constitutional process failed and it was very controversial and now there’s a second constitutional process underway which it’s unclear whether it’s gonna lead to a new constitution or not.
[00:24:45] Cesar Hidalgo: So I did find that, there is a world in which you can build some of these digital technologies and people might be willing to try them. They might be willing to roll the die at the moment that everything breaks at the moment that Twitter and the [00:25:00] TV news are just flames. They’re willing to try those things and we found that they work, the data, the information that we’re getting was very reasonable. And it involved a platform in which people were even though divided they were forced to collaborate because the platform did not allow you to comment. They don’t allow you to fight with another person.
[00:25:20] Cesar Hidalgo: You don’t allow you to participate in a collaborative game in which no matter where they were from the left or the right, you were all contributing towards the same goal.
[00:25:29] Evan Meyer: Yeah, and to bring it back most people do tend to think similarly on a lot of things and we’ve divided them in media, we’ve divided them through identity politics and a lot of it is reminds me of Noam Chomsky’s manufacturing consent. A great book for those listeners who haven’t read it, it seems that there is so much opportunity here.
[00:25:50] Evan Meyer: And one of the things that you’ve mentioned I don’t remember if it was on this podcast or I read it, but about that there it’s about [00:26:00] starting small, right? To be able to show that you can use something like an augmented democracy that can be an assistant not a replacement, right?
[00:26:10] Evan Meyer: Just to be clear for the cognitive bandwidth problem for the amount of bills, the amount of reading for the amount of understanding that’s required if you start small. You can prove that this can work in things that are relatively inconsequential, right? Or even just in an experimental toy version, I know you like to call it but where can we start that’s pretty small that can show that we can solve the cognitive bandwidth issue around what we’re willing to spend our time on and learn and how can we show and prove through some of these smaller activities maybe what some of those activities are or examples not necessarily activities, but examples where this could work in small instances.
[00:26:55] Cesar Hidalgo: I would separate what it means to work into two things, one that is let’s [00:27:00] say, a context less and another one that is context specific. So from a context less perspective I do think that, we could try using this voting systems or paradigms in situations in which we are maybe even if it’s a large scale playing with low stakes.
[00:27:22] Cesar Hidalgo: A type of phenomenon. So for instance, let’s say and I talk with my students about building this idea. We never managed to do it but let’s say we were to run a contest about Instagram photography. There’s a lot of people that participate in Instagram photography.
[00:27:38] Cesar Hidalgo: And let’s say we make categories, landscapes, portraits, no animals, whatever. And the way that we run that contest. It was by having some of these voting mechanisms, as the way to find the winners and assign certain prices and we could use something that is as low stakes of that because if this puppy wins or this puppy wins in the [00:28:00] pet category. It’s not a big deal. Hopefully we want the pictures to actually be good, but it’s a low stakes type of thing. But we could start figuring out how do we avoid bots gaming this how do we avoid cheating? How do we make the system fair? How do we keep people engaged?
[00:28:14] Cesar Hidalgo: Like how often they want to participate? How often they want to run a contest? Like we could explore many of those things in a low stakes environment that is in the wrong context, because that’s not a political context and then you have the question of how do you get this to work in the right context, which is politics, which is much different because that’s a high stakes context, so in the political side, I think.
[00:28:34] Cesar Hidalgo: We have had a few chance in which we have seen the plane fly to use a metaphor and I like to use that metaphor because I say that the Wright brothers are credited by invented the airplane, not because they cross the Atlantic it’s because the first flight was literally like several seconds long, they were able to keep a plane off the ground enough for other people say, okay no it’s flying, but they’re not really going to the moon or crossing the Atlantic is [00:29:00] that like short period that validates the idea.
[00:29:02] Cesar Hidalgo: And then there is a long sequence of events that helps perfect that technology and bring it to the scale and reliability that allows you to feel safe. Bringing paying customers, across an ocean and to me in 2019 for a few weeks, we observed that plane flew there was a while in which there were hundreds of thousands of people participating on that platform.
[00:29:27] Cesar Hidalgo: And they were engaged with the results that were being discussed on television as the things that maybe could help solve the conflict by senators of the Republic that was flying and it was during a short period of time. It was flying not in calm winds during a very stormy period, where there were lots of other things going on, but it showed validation in the right context but in a short time scale.
[00:29:50] Cesar Hidalgo: And I think you want to try to explore both things. You sometimes could go into the right context in a small scale or in a short time period, get lessons from that. It is difficult because [00:30:00] it’s a very complex context, but you could also develop a lot of those things in other contexts that are not as heated ,there are lower stakes and that could help you identify many of the mathematical and user interface problems that at the end of the day we’re going to have to figure out
[00:30:16] Evan Meyer: Yeah, and getting to trust the system this system right for people to be able to want to put their data into a n algorithm that will you know tell them how they feel about a certain thing.
[00:30:29] Cesar Hidalgo: Or that allows them to communicate and express because that’s like the thing that we have right now, too, is that we live in a social media environment in which few people post many people watch, and the problem of political participation is also one that it’s difficult in the sense that expressing your opinion is something that people don’t do that willingly, especially openly.
[00:30:49] Cesar Hidalgo: It’s good that votes are secret and they’re private in because of that in part and other reasons but if we want to have higher frequency of [00:31:00] participation. We might need some support for that participation through, some technology that can preserve privacy but can understand you well enough that could help increase the frequency with which you participate because that’s something that we’ve learned and there are many systems like the ones that I described that have been deployed in political and non political context, and the levels of participation when the systems work is very high for a very short period of time and then crickets people disappear and they stop using this platform.
[00:31:32] Cesar Hidalgo: To me, that was one of the motivations of the ideas of augmented democracy. I know that some of these engagement can happen, but sustaining engagement or participation for a long period of time is difficult. Could we learn enough in that short period of participation to help get more juice out of the same orange?
[00:31:51] Cesar Hidalgo: Is to stretch that participation using machine learning methods that learn from the participation that we’ve given to help us provide, [00:32:00] more participation per unit of attention.
[00:32:02] Evan Meyer: Yeah. And something that I guess. I even think about is the feedback that makes people feel comfortable when they’ve participated that we are in alignment with the algorithm or the support mechanism, the avatar, the whatever is in alignment with the way you actually think and that consistent feedback and it’s.
[00:32:24] Evan Meyer: That to me is one of the things that I know would make me feel comfortable where it’s like the incremental levels of feedback and trust building.
[00:32:31] Cesar Hidalgo: No, I wouldn’t call it the algorithm in the sense that I always been proposing these ideas, like one algorithm per person or one, system per person that is highly personalized because I think that’s another motivation.
[00:32:45] Cesar Hidalgo: And sorry to interrupt you, but like another motivation that to me is really important is that with the level of technology that we have and the democratic systems that are now in place. We are basically standing on a razor’s edge in which on the [00:33:00] one hand we have what is probably more likely, which is autocracy powered by artificial intelligence and digital technologies.
[00:33:09] Cesar Hidalgo: And we might be going in that direction artificial intelligence makes surveillance much easier and control and all of that stuff or we might go into this a way that I am proposing, which is much more difficult and much more unlikely which is a more distributed form of governance in which technology allows us to escape the autocratic tendencies of representative systems in which power gets concentrated. And that’s why I think it’s really important to emphasize that is not the algorithm because otherwise we communicate an autocracy or a direction towards one. And is there’s many algorithms as you have people. And these algorithms are in some sense in some constant dialogue, and there’s an emergent outcome that we believe that is better than any centralized decision making system.
[00:33:59] Cesar Hidalgo: So a little bit like [00:34:00] the difference between the market and central planning, applying this into our context of democracy.
[00:34:06] Evan Meyer: Do you think that eventually, because to me, it does make especially if you’re trying to push this forward in the beginning, it’s a support mechanism. It’s not just trust the algorithm, right?
[00:34:15] Evan Meyer: It’s support. You’re asking for help so that you can do more with less, right? At some point, as things get better support becomes more like thinking for you in a lot of cases, right? And you could see how that as the AI gets better is there a point where it gets better at thinking about our own feelings and values than ourselves?
[00:34:43] Cesar Hidalgo: I wouldn’t rule that out, but I think the right question is does it get better at thinking about or about making collective decisions that are current collective decision making system because yes, it might not be [00:35:00] better than us individually but the problem is that individually, we’re all very different and we have to come to some sort of consensus or to some sort of agreement collectively.
[00:35:10] Cesar Hidalgo: Right now, we have some sort of system to get to that collective agreement, which is a very contentious system that has like relatively little bandwidth because just being part of the decision makers of that system consumes a lot of the energy of those that participate in it. Politics are very intense, not only on the policymaking, but on the politics themselves.
[00:35:31] Cesar Hidalgo: The question is, if we would have a system in which technology augments individuals and we can have an ensemble or a collection of agents that are deciding together using information about their users, but without centralizing them in an individual algorithm, would they provide a better outcome than what we’re doing right now for collective decisions and I think there is a chance, I guaranteed because it’s an empirical question it would have to [00:36:00] happen, but I don’t think that we are at the optimum right now or close to it that I refuse to believe that this is the end of history. I refuse to believe that when I watch the sci fi movies, I always find weird that in a Star Wars, you can travel at the speed of light and so forth.
[00:36:17] Cesar Hidalgo: And they have either an emperor or a non functioning Senate, they’re still stuck into kind of like this institutions. I believe that there must be something beyond the institutions that we have discovered and that democracy has to at some point catch to our technology.
[00:36:34] Cesar Hidalgo: Yeah, sure.
[00:36:35] Evan Meyer: And hey, the good news is you can blame the AI instead of each other. So maybe that’s one of the benefits of introducing this third party support system. We can reduce toxicity and and the toxic polarity that plagues our whole world at the moment.
[00:36:52] Cesar Hidalgo: And that’s really important.
[00:36:54] Cesar Hidalgo: Like in architecture, one of the things that people always emphasize in education is that one of the reasons [00:37:00] why people are asked to build models. Is that by taking your idea out of your head and putting it on the table and everybody walking around it, criticism is not taken personal because it’s right.
[00:37:10] Cesar Hidalgo: It’s not that you are wrong. It’s no, this part of the house could be better or could be different. And even though it might sound a little bit like a joke, externalizing things provides maybe an easier way of discussing them.
[00:37:24] Evan Meyer: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You’re both looking at the same object call it. Yeah, instead of looking at each other you’re now have the opportunity of looking at and converging.
[00:37:35] Cesar Hidalgo: I don’t get better and that object better is maybe many systems in our society the healthcare system, transportation system.
[00:37:43] Evan Meyer: So this is 1 of the things that also.
[00:37:45] Evan Meyer: We’ve already. We’re way on the path where technology has outpaced policy by, I don’t know, an order of magnitude of what needs to be done, and not just that but it also can’t correct the old policy. [00:38:00] There’s two parts of policy. How fast can you make new policy and how fast can you remove the spaghetti code?
[00:38:07] Evan Meyer: Yeah. That is the current policy. The ordinance, the books and books, volumes of ordinances that don’t make any sense anymore. They need to go away. That some code compliance officer is ah, that thing, you’re in trouble. And you’re like, that thing’s from 50 years ago. It doesn’t make any more sense today.
[00:38:26] Cesar Hidalgo: And that’s a big problem. Like when there are surveys on the literature on law and that try to assess how people feel about the legal system and one of the things that people would agree on is that policies are not written in a way that is accessible or understandable and that people do not have a full understanding of the law, so if you were to have a system that involves these forms of participation that might seem.
[00:38:51] Cesar Hidalgo: A little more simplified, would you get closer to that level of understanding in which people are not recipients of rules [00:39:00] but actually more aware of what the rules are how they change. And I do love simplicity. I do think that sometimes few rules with a good emergent phenomena are better than having so many details but we are definitely on the opposite extreme, and we need all of these legal assistants in terms of lawyers and accountants just to operate in the world. If you’re doing anything.
[00:39:19] Evan Meyer: Exactly. A simple bill becomes a legal exercise, a simple way of looking at things that can be understood in a few words needs to become this pages long of legalese that no one’s going to read and it needs to be interpreted.
[00:39:33] Evan Meyer: And one of the things I always say is if you want to go and understand, if you really want to understand the nature of the bill, read the bill. I wouldn’t put my life on the line on a contract I haven’t read yet. Yes. And you know that all that the rest is hearsay. Rest is just interpretation of a document that is up to interpretation anyway.
[00:39:56] Evan Meyer: Exactly. So why don’t you make your own interpretation of the bill so you could say [00:40:00] this is what the bill said. There’s a few very controversial bills here that I went back and looked at and in order to avoid getting political on it. I won’t name the bills I went back and looked and they’ve they made huge media attention huge big identity politics like as far as it can go and then I went and read the bill and i’m like Wow, it doesn’t say that at all and the whole campaign was built on like a phrase that they just sold book after book, right?
[00:40:32] Evan Meyer: Okay And then you read the bill and it’s one paragraph. You’re just like oh wow That’s the thing they’re talking about. It doesn’t read that at all But when you google the bill when you have to go find the bill just googling the bill is challenging Just to get to the bill It’s a code. It’s an alphanumeric code.
[00:40:51] Evan Meyer: You have to go find very often.
[00:40:54] Cesar Hidalgo: So it’s, yeah it’s complicated. And I think that’s a place where we have under delivered, [00:41:00] like when the agent came along, garments were not the best web developers. And in some sense that even became like a feature came a form of detail occlusion that now we have and we missed an opportunity because I do think that there was a moment, maybe in the late 90s early 2000s, the moment when Wikipedia came of age and before you know, social media to go over the web.
[00:41:22] Cesar Hidalgo: Where there was like some sort of enthusiasm of trying to build things a little bit differently and we failed, I think because building these type of things is hard. And these are things that the private sector is not gonna build because they don’t have that direct business model that would require or that would justify getting all of those developers and all of that code and all of that thinking into the product as you need.
[00:41:46] Cesar Hidalgo: So it’s like a product design, problem that we have in which it’s something that could be a great public good, if we would design better even the sites that we have to interact with bills today but it’s really hard to develop them, [00:42:00] given the system that we have right now in which the stakeholders are more distributed on a many times.
[00:42:06] Cesar Hidalgo: Creating good software requires some relatively hierarchical executive structures in which shit has to get done and someone has to be very careful about the minutiae and things working and things not crashing and things being organized and coming up with systems and that doesn’t happen in committees.
[00:42:25] Cesar Hidalgo: It happens with someone owning the job of the designer like Steve Jobs did for his own products, but that doesn’t happen of course for the website of the U. S. Congress, for instance.
[00:42:36] Evan Meyer: No, they’re in the biz while they’re and their goals are different. It’s not about efficiency and it’s not about making it pretty. It’s about trying to serve the most amount of people which in generally I think is good. If that’s the goal of what you’re trying to do is serve the most amount of people, but you could be spending a ton of resources serving 1% of the population, right? You could be misguiding the money could be misdirected to try to for [00:43:00] this ideal when you’re not actually serving 80% of the population that needs it just to work well.
[00:43:06] Evan Meyer: Fix the problem, get me to the end zone and it could save the government just so much money on like handwritten scanning things. And like the amount of inefficiency is like beyond and the funny thing is even on top of this we look at what it means to be authoritarian or whatever it is like federal level.
[00:43:29] Evan Meyer: But when you look at the power that we give. The people to spend our taxpayer money and that we don’t get to vote on any of that stuff all of that money at the local level not all of it but all the things like you don’t vote on the stuff that is generally important I think either the big issues we’ll call it like stuff around the major issues that we’re dealing with in the country or how money is spent at the city level that can handle trash.[00:44:00]
[00:44:00] Evan Meyer: Let’s just say we don’t vote on any of that stuff. We delegate that power entirely. So there’s this mix of like inefficiency, but also like we’ve allowed for that and our taxpayer and for people to take a hundred percent control of that. At these levels and just spend the money how they need to both of those seem.
[00:44:21] Cesar Hidalgo: That’s hard because on the one hand, if you have too many cooks in the kitchen you might ruin the soup and when it comes to some of these executive decisions.
[00:44:31] Cesar Hidalgo: Yeah, maybe you do want to trust someone to negotiate that contract with the garbage collection company or which might be complicated to do and might require lots of details. So I do appreciate, executive labor but at the same time requires a lot of trust on them doing the things right and for the right reasons.
[00:44:48] Cesar Hidalgo: I’m not providing this contract to their cousins or to people that they’re related to on the other hand, when we’ve tried to distribute decision making system at the local level through participatory [00:45:00] budgeting, the problem participatory budgeting initiatives is that It’s really hard to get people to actually participate, they tend to focus on neighborhood improvement projects.
[00:45:09] Cesar Hidalgo: They don’t tend to focus on spending is usually like investment or playground, bicycling and so forth. But it’s hard to get citizens to contribute projects. No, it’s hard to design a project to start with and to specify them to communicate it in a way and it has been hard to get people to participate simply because there’s so much to choose that usually, whatever gets voted on is whatever is on page one of a page that has multiple pagination, of projects which it’s the opposite of good participation this time it’s an extremely biased form of participation that eventually defaults to what is easier and not necessarily what is best.
[00:45:45] Evan Meyer: So it tends to be all the same people participating too, in those local ones.
[00:45:48] Cesar Hidalgo: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I think there is also a space in which I believe there’s a lot of potential. I do agree with you that at the end controlling the money is where a lot of the real power is,[00:46:00] if we were to control how our taxes are spent or how our cities finance projects we would distribute a lot of power to the citizens by doing that.
[00:46:10] Cesar Hidalgo: But that is a problem that is also extremely difficult. It’s a very complex UI UX challenge. I don’t think it is impossible though. I think it is doable, but one of the things that I would be worried about is for which type of projects and when we want to do this, because I also do believe on the importance of executive decision making and I do appreciate.
[00:46:34] Cesar Hidalgo: People that can do good executive decisions. We do need them. It’s hard work and it can be work that sometimes goes unappreciated.
[00:46:42] Evan Meyer: Yeah. Things that you wouldn’t want to do anyway. And they put the hard labor into do it and they should be appreciated. I suppose sometimes it’s just a matter of not being and this is where I always come to it’s if you are okay with that and you’ve made peace with yourself around, that is what I’m putting my trust in.
[00:46:58] Evan Meyer: I have made that choice,[00:47:00] right? These people can take that work, these group of people are representing me. I’ve made that choice. Whatever the choices that you make, you have to be okay with also the outcome and not become toxic because of it. And I think that’s the funny human psychology balance where it’s okay, you’re going to trust those people.
[00:47:20] Evan Meyer: So when they make a wrong decision about which trash company to use, you’re okay with that because you’ve said that’s a decision that you’re trusting experts to take care of. You’re trusting the people and that’s okay. So a lot for me is like in reducing toxicity. In getting people to see perspective better it comes down a lot of times this personal accountability and responsibility of just accepting the choices that we’ve made already You don’t have to hate people for doing it wrong.
[00:47:49] Evan Meyer: You’ve already made the choice that you’re going to trust them That’s the way it goes.
[00:47:52] Cesar Hidalgo: And I agree like in some sense, there’s a lot of hate that goes around for things that are happening, in the public sphere [00:48:00] which might also be unfair and might be more of a reflection of how we feel than about how the system works.
[00:48:07] Evan Meyer: Tell me, what is your vision for the world? All this work you’ve done, ton of experience, ton of awards, you’ve done so much great work. Incredible contributions. What do you want to see for the world in your lifetime that you can that you’re co creating here?
[00:48:23] Cesar Hidalgo: I don’t know if I have a vision for the world.
[00:48:24] Cesar Hidalgo: I have a few things that I I want to try to accomplish before I die, you know That’s what I could tell you so i’m working for example now on a book that summarizes laws that govern the growth, diffusion and valuation of knowledge and knowledge is this quantity that on the one hand is part of our colloquial language but on the other hand it has been formalized in the academic literature in a number of ways in psychology, in economics and engineering and so forth.
[00:48:53] Cesar Hidalgo: And by now, I think it’s going through a transformation which is becoming a formal concept that can be [00:49:00] understood in terms of principles and these principles are important when you’re thinking about innovation, because just like building a rocket requires you to understand about aerodynamics and chemistry and gravitation and so forth if you want to try to engineer innovation in a certain place, you need to understand the forces that shape the growth and diffusion of knowledge so you can do it in a way that respects those natural principles or loss, so that’s for example something that I would like to contribute and I’ve been working hard in this book to help put all of that into a package that makes it easy to understand, but also that provides some novelty to an inside to that space and I do this idea of digital democracy.
[00:49:41] Cesar Hidalgo: I don’t know how much I’m going to get to do with it, in part because personally I’m not a very political person. I don’t feel like going myself to fight for this idea in a heated political environment. I like to spend time on my with my family after work and I [00:50:00] understand that politics can be all consuming, and you have to dedicate to the construction of your political career.
[00:50:06] Cesar Hidalgo: And you have to sacrifice other things that maybe I’m not willing to sacrifice at least not yet and maybe not ever. But I do think I can contribute to help develop some of the foundations for that type of work, in terms of a mathematical models or user interface designs and principles of participation that could be used to bring us into a stage. So these are some of the contributions that I would like to make. I’m doing also a lot of work on collective memory, to understand what is the information that gets preserved in our society and why and how that varies with culture, with language, with geography.
[00:50:42] Cesar Hidalgo: I find that to be quite interesting of a scientific endeavor, it’s not necessarily because it has a policy implication, a technological implication. And on the private sector side, I have this company data with that you mentioned in the beginning and there we have, I think made our mark on the design and creation of data [00:51:00] distribution systems and platforms that are very visual that allow people to interact with the data directly that can be updated with a good level of frequency and so forth.
[00:51:09] Cesar Hidalgo: And I think they’re also, potentially an important contribution on helping at least improve that part of the probably sector, which is the data distribution, accountability, transparency side of things by providing tools that can do this properly and that’s a lot of design and engineering work that I feel very proud about.
[00:51:28] Evan Meyer: Awesome. Do you have one or two or three people that you consider heroes alive or dead that you really look up to that inspire you?
[00:51:39] Cesar Hidalgo: Yeah, I do admire lots of people in history there of course are going to be a little bit of cliches because then You know, these are famous people.
[00:51:45] Cesar Hidalgo: Like I’m a big fan of Richard Feynman, I’ve been for a long time. I’ve visited by training, when you see his videos, how he explains things, you understand that like he understands things so well. [00:52:00] And he can explain them so clearly in that there is some sort of wisdom on his ability, his wits, his humor.
[00:52:07] Cesar Hidalgo: So I do like that. I do like many entrepreneurs, that I think they have been genius or very clever, people like Edwin Land, who was the creator of the Polar Corporation. I thought, I’ve read a lot about him, I think he’s amazing as well. Leon Thurston, he’s an American psychologist, a mechanical engineer.
[00:52:25] Cesar Hidalgo: He invented some of these methods of participation that, for example, the one that we use in Chile he invented this law of comparative judgment, in the 1920s he was also One of the first people to study learning curves, which is one of these principles of the growth of knowledge.
[00:52:40] Cesar Hidalgo: So I find that a lot of my interests converge to those of him and he was a man that was very much ahead of his time. He’s very well known within psychology, but he’s not known at large, like someone like Einstein or Feynman, but I think he’s of that caliber, Leon Thurstone. So people like that.
[00:52:56] Cesar Hidalgo: I I do admire a number of people. I admire a lot of musicians, [00:53:00] because I’m not coordinated like that at all. And I would love to be, I admire people in literature and poetry, so definitely I always grew up admiring great minds in science, in the arts, engineering, et cetera.
[00:53:13] Evan Meyer: Awesome. It’s nice to hear there’s a lot. One of the reasons for that is question even is just it’s a level of relatability for inspiration. I think there’s a lot of that. We all, it’s one of the things that brings us all together is the things that inspire us and it’s nice to hear things that inspire you.
[00:53:32] Evan Meyer: So thank you. And I want to thank you for being here for this time with me and I thoroughly enjoyed this and I appreciate you sharing your insights with the world.
[00:53:44] Cesar Hidalgo: Thank you and I enjoyed this very much too. And I hope it’s not too hot today in Sedona here in Budapest. It has been quite hot today.
[00:53:50] Cesar Hidalgo: So I’m happy to get off this oven and walk to my AC apartment. It’s probably a different kind of hot. It’s yeah, I think [00:54:00] maybe it’s gonna, we’re gonna have a thunderstorm soon.
[00:54:02] Evan Meyer: Yeah. Oh, okay. Good luck with that.
[00:54:05] Cesar Hidalgo: Okay, thank you.