Should-Read: Nicholas Gruen: The middleware of democracy. Or from knowledge to wisdom: or at least knowledge 2.0

Should-Read: Nicholas Gruen: The middleware of democracy. Or from knowledge to wisdom: or at least knowledge 2.0: “Simon Heffer’s High Minds presents us with a portrait of the mid-Victorians in which they consciously set about building… ours… liberal democratic world…

…To do so they recognised the need for all sorts of public goods… education and health… an honest public service chosen on merit… civic virtue… a stirring and a sobering story reflecting an age which I think had a more balanced understanding of the necessary ecology of public and private goods each reinforcing each other in building the Good Life. Today… our contemporary vision is profoundly skewed toward private good and private endeavour…. As Heffer makes clear, this Victorian quest was not just economic. It was a political project…. They knew that democracy was coming, so they needed to get The People a decent education before they used their vote to wreck the place….

The Victorians rightly spent a lot of their time worrying about the tyranny of the majority and so championed things like the independence of the judiciary. We also have various lower levels of independence for institutions like statutory authorities, the central bank, the bureaucracy and and so on…. The class basis of democratic capitalism–in which the middle class and its preoccupation with respectability defended various abstract principles like ministerial responsibility–is being broken down by the bread and circuses of vox pop democracy and the politico/infotainment complex….

When I was doing the Government 2.0 Taskforce I was wondering–as were many people–how can we get a Wikipedia of government…. In figuring out how the world ‘is’ or even ‘will be’ we have made some good progress in the last decade or so with

• Wikipedia and similar informational goods on the net
• Prediction markets
• The Good Judgement project.

But while all of these new things help discipline the process by which we aggregate and judge views–including, crucially, sorting good from bad views–the fact remains that these things only measure good judgement regarding predictions of the way the world is or will work out not how it should be or work out. That’s what YourView was built to try to do, and it seems to do a reasonable job of it…. YourView is currently largely in mothballs and not being promoted by its owners any more. They’ve promoted it pretty vigorously for a good while now, seeking  support from media companies, philanthropy and various educational and intelligence organisations but so far without sufficient success to ensure viability. So next time you hear someone banging on about how data isn’t information and information isn’t knowledge and knowledge isn’t wisdom and all that stuff, ask them if they know about YourView and if they’re helping it try to scale the solution to that rather large problem…