Scaffolding deliberative community and the sharing and growth of knowledge
Ideal network structures for community, scaffolding better conversations, and the latest from the Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy salons
"What is the ideal network structure for a scientific community? And how do industrial propagandists influence the progress of science, as well as public belief?" writes Cailin O'Connor in a study of social structures of science.
Structures of science and of scientific collaborations has been one route into the ideas animating the Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy salons. Science is a natural laboratory for understanding deliberative community and the sharing and growth of knowledge--two ancestors shared by modern problems in science and democracy alike.
Cailin’s work, including three books and pioneering philosophical writing, has been praised widely, including by the New York Times and Scientific American. On May 4, she provided the provocation to the latest salon and its unexampled network crossing art, science, spirituality, technology, complex systems, and philosophy. The conversation that followed was an uncommon example of reweaving civic community.
Why was this one so profound, so affecting, so utterly meaningful? Perhaps it was the people that joined -- a wonderful critical yeast of individuals with an uncommon quality of attention. Perhaps it was the structure--a balance of framing, provocation, and invitation.
This post explores that recent salon:
Sharing the framing for the conversation;
Articulating the structure these salons are creating for more meaningful conversation and healthier relationality; and, ultimately
Drawing out the major themes to invite you to amplify the discussion of the importance of the structure of scientific and civic collaborations.
Framing
In the hopes of sustaining and amplifying momentum from May 4, I want to provide the same framing and welcome here as a way of inviting you (in your own inward landscape or in some way thinking in public with us) to experience the elation and transcendence of unboundaried thought. So, below is the framing we created and some of the generative narratives of our discussion as fuel for your creativity and becoming. But most importantly, below is a first attempt to articulate what we are scaffolding with those salons.
We began with a quote from Vivek Murphy, drawn out by the inimitable Krista Tippett on her show, On Being.
That’s our collective responsibility to one another. When you have a circumstance where we put that aside and say it’s each person for themself — then this is what happens: you have people struggling in pain, you have situations where people can’t come together around solutions because they can’t agree on our common responsibility to one another.
And I think this, to me, is one of the fundamental issues that we need to talk about, is: What is our responsibility to one another? This is a moral question. It’s a spiritual question that has implications for policies and for programs, but it has to start at the moral and spiritual level. We can build the best programs and policies in the world, but my belief is that none of those will work as well as they need to if we are not clear on the values that should be guiding us in our work.
If you were to ask people right now: What are the values that guide us as the United States of America? I don’t know that you would get a clear, consistent list of values. Everyone may have their own sense of what that is. And one of my beliefs here, Krista, is that we can’t get clarity on that unless we have a conversation as a country about that. My belief is that we need to be a nation that is kind, where people take care of one another, where people step up for one another because they can and because they know that we are all better off when we are all, in fact, better off. And I want us to be a nation where people are generous with one another, where they recognize that there are times all of us are going to be in need, where all of us may stumble and fall, but we have to help each other up.
And finally, I think we’ve got to be a nation that fundamentally recognizes what strength really is. Because strength is not just about how much money we have in the economy or about the might of our military. Those are important. But our greatest source of strength comes from, I believe, our fundamental ability to give and receive love. We don’t think about love as a source of strength, but I find it hard to think of any force that is more powerful than love. And I think we need to talk about that more...
Vivek's admonition that we don't know what our values are echoes with most people I talk with. Murphy says we can’t get clarity on our values unless we have a conversation as a country about them. Conversations, as a counterpoint to debates, is about fashioning and refashioning. Apart from the obstinacy of a debate, conversations call to mind an ongoingness and an unfolding in the critical reflection on our values.
We then took inspiration from Danielle Allen, who writing in Justice by Means of Democracy makes the connection to how we govern ourselves, "There is no end to history, no state of rest for democracy." The same is true of our knowledge commons--our shared information spaces and the openness, governance, and trust required to create a participatory ecosystem whereby the whole community maintains and evolves them. Indeed, our very vitality, our flourishing, rests in the continual unfolding of conversation and the unfinishedness of our making a life and making our lives together.
Beginning to articulate what we are scaffolding
Before talking about the substance of the salon discussion, I want to say a few words about what we are building in those events. We are grappling with the question of how, of what, we are scaffolding to support more flourishing in these knowledge spaces, both for scientific knowledge creation and sharing and for our civic society. We articulated three tenets of that scaffolding (these can be taken as pillars of any flourishing civic space):
Adopt a spirit of intellectual friendship (enjoy this event and the connection with others): Be open and willing and accepting of all ideas. Treat the conversation as exploration, co-creation, and being curious together;
Cultivate epistemic humility; and
Self-organize to build a living conversation: Take initiative to hold conversations with people also engaging with these salons and newsletters. Bring that ambition to the group and create discussions that enrich these salons and use those events together to build, make, create solutions and new connections.
If these are pillars, these are the practices we use to construct them:
Start talking;
Listen generously and generatively;
Explore many ideas, be open, move between divergent and convergent thinking;
Share what inspires you; and
Hold difference and tension creatively.
These practices for a better exchange make it clear the salons are kindred to initiatives like On Being’s Civil Conversations Project. To listen and interact in today's society means to engage across mediums (indeed, the medium is the message, so plurality require multi-media) and multi-scale (full salon gatherings as well as sub-groups that sustain and amplify idea flow in more specific topics).
That is a role The Flourishing Commons have played. These newsletters are not only writing, they are not any one medium any more than they are any one scale. They are ‘multi.' They are writing together paired with conversation. They are use of digital technologies together with different tools to connect with one another. They are a place where groups of different sizes are self-organizing.
If we are going to build literacy, curricula, living experience about how to build the knowledge commons and civic community, what projects need to start now?
Provocation
On May 4 we had a wonderful provocation by philosopher, game theorist, author, professor, and mother, Cailin O'Connor.
Cailin is professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at UC Irvine. She is currently co-administering the National Science Foundation grant “Consensus, Democracy, and the Public Understanding of Science” with philosopher of physics James Owen Weatherall. She co-authored The Misinformation Age, authored the monograph The Origins of Unfairness in 2019 and Games in the Philosophy of Biology in 2020. Her work has been called vital for any scholar working on social and political epistemology, and related issues like the role of science and expertise in democratic societies. The New York Times said she offers a ‘way to think through the seemingly insurmountable impasse carved out by political polarization and fake news.’
Cailin skillfully delved into the intricate complexities of misinformation, shedding light on the nature of false beliefs, their origins, and the mechanisms that sustain them. Our collective focus was on understanding the far-reaching consequences of misinformation, particularly in the context of science and democracy—a topic that gained heightened relevance during the recent pandemic.
Guiding us through her research on information spread and modeling, Cailin led us to explore the fascinating analogy of viral ideas. We engaged in stimulating conversations about the relationship between misinformation and flourishing knowledge spaces, contemplating the role of networks in shaping beliefs within communities. These discussions opened our minds to new dimensions of collective understanding.
Cailin and her colleagues model the spread of beliefs via network science. One of the questions we are exploring is whether we ‘observe’ flourishing of a community in a network representation. Naturally the conversation turned toward the diffusion of information in scientific networks. A novel dimension emerged which was about the role of art and artistic expression as potential forms of scientific knowledge, citing abundant examples from history when artistic expression preceded a new understanding of a place like the moon or ocean floor.
Additionally, we delved into the emotional aspects of information, pondering how personal identity intersects with the dissemination of knowledge; discussed the role of time scales in science (e.g., fast vs. slow science); and explored the impact of evolving media technologies on the flow of information in both scientific and societal contexts.
At the heart of our discussions lay a fundamental question: What philosophical underpinnings shape our understanding of science and the ways in which knowledge is constructed in our world today?
With every salon, we curate an uncommon set of resources that trace the discussion and support sustained exploration. Here are a few of those resources:
Cailin O’Connor “Consensus, Democracy, and the Public Understanding of Science”
Getting Plurality as a convening place for technologists and academics who are trying to figure things out
One way we will explore these ideas: The ‘New Republic of Letters’
Stanford HAI’s “Policy and AI: Four Radical Proposals for a Better Society” conference
The way knowledge spreads and the unsettledness of those processes: Central to epistemology - this is a paper that tests our prevailing hypotheses of how knowledge is created
Alaina Kanfer's thesis article "The development of a scientific specialty as diffusion through social relations: the case of role analysis"
Cailin O'Connor’s paper on information zombies
Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
Philosopher Paul Cilliers on the value of slowness in complex systems
Research Equals is trying to address How might we have a variety of ways to “author” knowledge? Could we make it clear that people do different roles in the creation of knowledge?
Reach out if you'd like to watch the recording from the event and join the next one in June 2023.
The ongoingness of the salons and these newsletters
Now what we need is to tinker (à la Sara Hendren) tinkering toward the new generative questions of our time, towards the structures, networks, norms, and institutions that hold those questions together, with more collectivity, more plurality, less rush toward resolution. We need to repair our epistemology, how we make and share knowledge, and our mediums that bolster or diminish it. We need to recognize the common problems faced by science and democracy, pulling wisdom from political philosophy into the repair of science and the wisdom from the philosophy of science into rethinking our governing institutions. And that requires plurality and a quality of conversation (
, , , , , among many many kindred thinkers and activists).Join us as we live questions like, “how do we create spaces (physical and digital) capacious enough to hold the inherent tensions in a democracy in a way that re-weaves civic community?” Answers rise or fall to the questions they meet. With questions this immense, something immense is coming.
There are many ways to join. Subscribe to these newsletters (you will receive invitations to the future salons). Contribute your own thoughts or experiences (in the comments or in your own response pieces here on Substack). Help widen the community by sharing the newsletter with others who might be interested.