Sublime

How much more powerful and consistent could we expect the influence of public opinion to become if it were built on really solid foundations—if it were the product of the entire society thinking about the issues and coming to a considered judgment?

This ancient mechanism is put to a novel use in the modern world: it has some influence on how people vote. Todorov showed his students pictures of men’s faces, sometimes for as little as one-tenth of a second, and asked them to rate the faces on various attributes, including likability and competence. Observers agreed quite well on those ratings.

Polis is a prominent example of what leading ⿻ technologists Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn call "collective response systems" and "bridging systems" and others call "wikisurveys".

This expansive effect of questions has been studied by Dan Rothstein, who along with his colleague Luz Santana established the Right Question Institute, a small and fascinating nonprofit group formed in order to try to advance the teaching of questioning skills.

axiom of political science in that country that the only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely.

flushing out the Black Swans—and exploiting them. Remember, your counterpart might not even know how important the information is, or even that they shouldn’t reveal it. So keep pushing, probing, and gathering information.