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Economic Independence Based on Universal Position

Contrary to what one might think, opposing totalitarianism with words and logic while assuming the current democracy is nearly impracticable.

Perhaps that is also the reason why Heidegger fell in love with totalitarianism. And it is also the reason why the author, at the end of the previous entry, suddenly brought up the judgment of taste that “I hate totalitarianism.” At any rate, we can only say “I hate it” if another democracy cannot be devised.

The origin of totalitarianism is the idea of some “ doctrine” (be it racism, patriotism, communism, or an ideal commune) as a means to solve in a snap the slow pace of implementing liberal democracy, the corruption, the emptiness that formalism, the isolation of the individual who is stripped of community and granted freedom and responsibility, and so on.

Usually, a charismatic individual popularizes the ideology, though the groundwork has already been covered for the charismatic mobilization.

Discussions and enlightenment are naturally absurd to individuals who are desperate for the consequences of liberal democracy. It is also useless to persuade them to build up a steady accumulation to address minor problems. They are a mob that despairs the slowness and the fact that these will eventually be cheesed off. Furthermore, it is vain to oppose the loss of human life and violence. They have yet to find a human institution that doesn’t involve murder.

These people are addicted to the principles not because they are stupid. Totalitarianism is, in a sense, an “ advanced “ version of today’s democracy.

Yukio Mishima, a clear-headed and calm Japanese writer, committed suicide by cutting his stomach, “a street performance almost considered a joke (Nabokov).”

After giving a speech in which he urged the (Japanese) Self-Defense Forces to stage a coup d’etat as a leading force to revive the Emperor’s rule, he suddenly committed seppuku.

The SDF members could not hear his voice because of too much noise. The next day’s newspaper featured a picture of Mishima’s decapitated head.

What kind of joke is this? Even if you are not Nabokov, you may desire to say, “What a jest!”

However, Mishima was perhaps even more cynical than Nabokov (and many of us), who mocked him. Mishima was the only one capable of understanding the situation. “Cynicism” in this context is the self-awareness of superiority that comes from “not believing in a value others believe in, or knowing that it is worthless due to his information not admitted to touching.”

Mishima’s cynical position was thoroughly completed by playing the role of a “totalitarian fake” who dies for a “principle he does not believe in.”

His seppuku, in essence, is a statement of such a stance that “creates a position where all positions can be mocked and no longer allowed to be refuted. Simultaneously, he added the “performance piece” of “actually dying” as a rhetorical operation to enhance the truthfulness and silence the opposition.

As with all totalitarian ideals, his arguments are meaningless. Or there is no mechanism in detail to implement it. Purely as a rhetorical maneuver, seppuku was wonderfully effective; even after nearly half a century, Mishima is not forgotten in Japan, leaving any shortage of people pondering his mysterious death.

In his later years, Mishima held several conversations in which he lamented the irrelevance of “death inside a work of art” to “actual death,” and each time forced his interlocutor to express the common-sense opinion that “work and reality should be irrelevant.”

Mishima’s intention with his “ artwork” can be summed up in other words: to set a trap in advance for (in a sense innocent) people like Nabokov who would later come to laugh at him.

Those who laugh at his act as a “ meaningless performance” do not grasp Mishima’s intentions, nor do they have the logic to escape from it as well. No one has yet discovered how to reach outside the current path from democracy to totalitarianism. Hence, even now, nearly a hundred years after the beginning of the 20th century, the ghosts of totalitarianism are beginning to roam the world.

Only someone who has figured out another way would be qualified to laugh at Mishima.

Nabokov, therefore, has no right. He is just too naïve to realize it. A child wanders into the abnormal play of adults. If there were a means to keep that child from growing up to be an adult akin to him or her, the child wins, indeed.

However, the author disapproves of (though respects) the twisted sublimity of Mishima. Consequently, “ another” democracy, not the current one, is foolishly sought. Without accepting the current democracy, a path that does not lead to totalitarianism is possible.

At first glance, these topics have nothing to do with what we have been talking about so far.

Yet, if the fight against fake news, anti-intellectualism, prejudice, and totalitarianism were grounded in naive liberalism, the conclusion would be “more discussion, more enlightenment.” The road to totalitarianism, however, stems from the awareness of how impossible or pointless this kind of enlightenment is.

Enlightenment, debate, and the naive Socratic method of dialogue, therefore, are not the solution.

Next time: Summary and Conclusion.

Previous entry

Decentralized Socrates can be tied to prediction markets.

Who will be the site or person closest to the position at the center of gravity, or the no-position, described in the previous entry? That cannot be predicted until we compute it.

Calculation of “Zero Position” = Decentralized Socrates

Suppose the amount of computation required for rhetorical verification is sufficiently large. In that case, it will be difficult to predict the results in advance, so a lot on the outcome can be feasible.

Therefore, we will forecast and place wagers on entities and sites near the center of gravity = universal position. The results would be announced periodically, and the participants’ stakes are shared proportionally (e.g., according to the distance from the center of gravity) not only among the bettors but also the entities (or sites) near the center of gravity = universal positions.

With this prediction market, the act of “talking as much as possible to avoid taking a particular position” itself would possess economic value.

Coupled with prediction markets, this could initiate the universality economically independence. And if this were to happen, besides the personal hatred of being debunked, it would also clear up another issue that the Socratic method had, the issue of economic sustainability.

• The Unsustainability of the Method of Dialogue: Hatred for Bias Removal and the Need for “Weak…
• The Unsustainability of the Method of Dialogue: Economic Independence

At present, the economic benefits of positional talk and mobilization, which increases followers by calling out expressions that stir up emotions as much as possible, are enormous. However, if decentralized Socrates + prediction market or alike grows, it can become a counter axis.

The universal position is common and fundamental in scientific writing (although fake achievements have recently increased). For the types of texts that are not reproducible or disprovable, however, without a mechanism like decentralized Socrates, it is tempting to become relativistic and antinomian, saying that they are all equally positional talk.

And these positions produce a large number of individuals who have emptiness and nihilism inside. These spirits are exploited for totalitarianism, a reaction to relativism, in which people dedicate their lives to “noble ideals that cannot be relativized (state, discrimination, religion, whatever).” If everything is the equivalent anyway, let’s just go with the amusing ones. The road to hell is made of good intentions and awakened drunkenness.

The author hates totalitarianism.

Hate? Why the sudden judgment of taste here?

Next entry (coming soon)

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Rhetorical verification is essentially only possible in decentralized organizations. That was the conclusion of my last entry. It is also the answer to the question raised at the beginning of this essay, “What can only decentralized organizations do?”

Rhetorical verification has a byproduct. That is related to the Socratic method of dialogue discussed in this series.

Suppose that rhetorical verification results are assigned to many people and/or sites.

These results would be a collection of data in the form of, for example, “site or person -> {topic 1 x position, topic 2 x position…}”. Ex-President Trump -> {Russia -> +0.7, Mexico -> -0.4…}” and so on. In short, a list with a large number of topics and positions would be allocated to each site and person.

Then there is a kind of map where many positional talks are embedded at the same time. You could force it to be displayed as a two-dimensional or three-dimensional cartography.

Yet, there is something more crucial. It is possible to calculate the corresponding “zero position or center of mass,” which is a narrative with a few positions as possible, by utilizing various subjects with different positions as axes.

As a simple illustration, the vertices of a triangle represent subjects based on various positions, and the center of gravity of the triangle represents a subject not belonging to any position. Once we have the positions corresponding to the triangle's vertices (or the base axis positions calculated from various positions), we can derive the “center of mass = zero position” and who are the subjects close to it.

Of course, the actual calculation is not for triangles in two-dimensional space but m-gons or more complex shapes in n-dimensional space. Also, there are various approaches to calculating the “center of mass.” As pointed out last time, such heterogeneity of calculation methods is desirable because a single calculation method cannot eliminate the inherent bias contained in the procedure.

An entity that does not express any opinion is position zero. However, that makes no sense. In this case, there is no topic at all for the subject to mention.

There must be some subjects whose position on a topic is judged to be neutral or close to neutral by rhetorical verification, even though they have expressed many views.

Since “neutral” is a relative matter to other positional talks, the more subjects engage in diverse positional talks, the easier the system to see the subjects with relatively neutral positions and extreme ones.

This is where the decentralizability of rhetorical verification comes into play. A sufficiently decentralized system, like nature or the market, cannot itself take a particular position. As confirmed last time, that fact was the core of the link between the decentralized organization and rhetorical verification.

So a “neutral” position calculated by such a system could be a “ really neutral” position. At least better than the values calculated by specific large platforms and governments having many stakeholders.

We can call such a system to calculate “zero position = an entity or position without a position” from various position talks “Decentralized Socrates.”

Decentralized Socrates is a system that can calculate “zero position” from diverse position talks. “Not promoting a particular position = no bias” was the first stage of the Socratic method of dialogue, a state of bias = position disarmed by the self-contradiction pointed out by Socrates.

Decentralized Socrates is an automated version of this benefit of the question-and-answer method. It is decentralized and has no agency. Therefore, no subject can be hated. In this sense, it removes one of the issues facing the method of dialogue: the unsustainability of hatred. Naturally, there will be individuals who will hate the “Decentralized Socrates” system itself. A blockchain, though, will be more resistant to attack than a vulnerable individual.

The characteristic of decentralized Socrates that there can be no one to hate in principle is also vital, considering the psychological origins of totalitarianism (or anti-intellectualism). The anti-intellectual attitude is likely to occur when a person feeling “unable to follow the arguments of the liberal elite” often engages in the psychological strategy of “ scorning all discussions” due to hate for a good debating opponent.

The more enthusiastic the debate, the more winners and losers are created, and the fewer winners there are. Hence, the undecentralized Socratic method of dialogue produces, as successfully as it works, a multitude of hatreds. If presumptuous people who know this structure dare to deceive the majority, they will be on the road to totalitarianism. Therefore, debate and enlightenment are, unfortunately, the path to totalitarianism, regardless of the intentions of enlighteners.

If a person or a site does not want to be labeled as “having a certain positional bias” against Decentralized Socrates, they can simply act like it. If the decentralized Socrates is sufficiently decentralized and the algorithm is transparent, the person will be judged to be standing in “zero position = universal position” from various perspectives.

There is an important hypothesis here. In the same way for us to optimize searchability, it is impossible to “pretend to be in the universal position” by exploiting weaknesses in the decentralized Socratic algorithm. Or, if we do such mimicry, it will end up behaving the same as the universal position, a hypothesis I mentioned in Part 13.

Since decentralized Socrates is updatable, this hypothesis is feasible to a great extent. Contrary to security strategies, attackers who take action against decentralized Socrates must devise more troublesome information manipulation (rhetoric), which is more costly and less understood by humans (i.e., less beneficial).

What is key here is the constraint that “in the end, humans must take the meaning of the information.”

The technology for AI to deceive each other is being actively researched. If AIs are to fool other AIs, endlessly complex rhetorical and defensive maneuvers will evolve. There is the constraint, however: the need to write articles understandable by humans. In that case, complex rhetorical maneuvers will be hampered by cognitive limitations and will not be worth the cost.

Anyway, if zero position = universal position can be calculated by decentralized Socrates, what is the significance? Since everything, including good and evil, is just a mere relative judgment of taste, shouldn’t we rather obtain followers driven by hatred based on ridiculous beliefs than strive for a universal position if these beliefs are known to be false?

Even if decentralized Socrates could calculate zero position, it would be meaningless or just a hindrance for such a person.

Can’t we create a more proactive mechanism in which “people’s attempt to stand in a universal position” itself becomes beneficial to their “survival”?

Next time, we will discuss this point. Translated with

Next Entry (coming soon)

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Rhetorical verification would involve a large amount of text analysis by some AIs. It is possible to create a blockchain and decentralized organization to handle this analysis work.

The work and resources could be paid for, and the validation of the rhetoric verification algorithm could be done by other entities than those in charge of the analysis. The technology that forms the basis of this area is already in operation within several blockchain projects as mechanisms for decentralizing computing resources and various types of validation.

Ideally, we hope to create a system in which everyone understands that the contents of information, including its meaning, cannot be biased under the control of any particular entity.

Starting from the literal identity without touching on the semantic content, the assurance of validity becomes more difficult in the following order: no manipulation of impressions by rhetorical manipulation, no mistaken meanings or facts, and validity of arguments and inferences. “The concept of (decentralized) assurance of validity” is still an unexplored area, including whether and to what level it can be effective. It is significant, nevertheless, that only by stepping into this realm can a “degree of objectivity” emerge in the context of subjective evaluations and intentions often filled with endless arguments and relativism.

The existing guarantees are at the pure data level, such as transaction ledgers and document data. In recent years, however, technological innovations in natural language processing have made it possible for AI to extract the semantic content of individual documents to some extent. Under limited circumstances, many tasks have already passed the Turing test. This progress implies that decentralized content verification should eventually become possible in the semantic layer as well.

The rhetorical verification is the most simple place to start, as it can only attempt to detect bias in the “narrative” without going into the content.

Any method of rhetorical verification may lead to unjustified results. Suppose an AI trained on data containing many racist statements becomes a chatbot repeating such words. It is not incorrect as the behavior of the program. However, it is not justified. The algorithm + data pair is not appropriate. Therefore, the ideal system consists of various rhetorical verification AIs, and the source code for execution, data, and execution results should be transparent and re-verifiable.

Such a mechanism does not currently exist. It is also challenging to create it immediately due to the lack of computational resource maintenance, knowledge of semantic storage, communication formats and protocols, appropriate UI, and economic motivation. Nevertheless, the most complex part in principle, namely, to make the computer understand the semantic content of each document somewhat, is rapidly being solved.

As mentioned in the previous article, the actions of a particular platform to label something “by its own judgment or algorithm” can be interpreted as large-scale position talk if transparency is not ensured. Supporters of former US President Trump have argued for this reason against the attempts of companies (such as Facebook and Twitter) to ban him from SNS.

The operation of existing companies relies on the decision-making from only a few management teams in reality. Proving to a skeptic that they do not have any bias is impossible. A slightly clever fake news author can generate as many new phony stories as they want, fueled by the fact that their documents are flagged.

Removing this potentiality of the policy shift by a few decision-makers (which may be arbitrary or benign to others) from existing organizations is very hard. This difficulty is because the centralized organization is originally a method to enlarge the will of a few decision-makers.

Therefore, in principle, the rhetorical verification can only be done in a decentralized organization. The centralized organizations cannot overcome the “unreliability of the referee” described in the previous article. The verification requires “ to be known as unchangeable by the will of any particular party.”

This is the essence of “what only a decentralized organization can do,” already latent when the first blockchain, Bitcoin, was proposed as “a mechanism to prevent someone (arbitrarily or with good intentions) from deciding monetary policy.”

In the case of the rhetorical verification, the subject of legitimacy assurance through decentralization is abstracted from “the appropriateness of the amount of currency issued” to “the absence of bias in the information.” It can be said, though, that the scope of what is “ hard to justify in theory to entrust to a particular authority” is just being discovered anew.

As we will see later, despite being manufactured, decentralized organizations can behave as a kind of new “nature.”

If the “verification of semantic content” mentioned earlier is conducted in a decentralized organization, a new domain of “meaning and intention as natural phenomena” will be available in conjunction with its validity level. For the author, this is probably the conceptual significance of a decentralized organization. In a field that has been polarized into natural phenomena and subjective opinions, an intermediate field could arise in some structured form. Of course, philosophy, law, other humanities, and social sciences have created similar intermediate domains with natural language. At that time, however, forced searches for evidence to bring them closer to natural science, words that frequently appear in analytic philosophy such as “intuitively natural,” or in legal judgments such as “socially acceptable,” made their objectivity dubious. This doubt eventually led to the “unreliability of the referee. Because there are too many cases where intuitive naturalness and social common sense have been exploited for arbitrary and conspicuous distortions.

At the time of this writing, for example, there is an experiment with a blockchain-based news site that uses timestamps to check for data tampering.

Also, although slightly different, blockchain can play the role of file data storage that cannot be censored or deleted by anyone. The news that volunteers uploaded the data of the Ringo Daily, which was forced to cease publication and delete data by Hong Kong’s State Security Maintenance Law, to a blockchain to store the files permanently on a self-organized basis is fresh in our memories.

Besides “preservation of value independent from national currency policies” and “speculation and investment that does not require centralized authority,” these events will inform the public of unique ways of utilizing decentralized organizations. It exists for the “preservation of information whose authenticity cannot be guaranteed in principle by centralized institutions.”

The essence of the philosophy behind decentralized organizations is the guarantee of truthfulness. Concrete examples such as the preservation of value and the permanent storage of files are by-products of this zero trust. Looking at it in this manner, the idea of decentralization still contains a vast amount of change, just as the “preservation of value” through Bitcoin has attracted quite a large scale of investment and speculation solely by its potential.

If decentralized organizations are simple “organizations whose every decision depends on voting,” they may end up as “cumbersome organizations whose decision-making is only slow.” For this reason, we should ask ourselves, “Why do we need decentralized organizations? or “What can only decentralized organizations do?” in addition to the technical feasibility of its realization. There is still enough ground to ask these questions.

Unfortunately, the concept of the decentralized organization still appears to be exploring areas that are unique to it. We hope that a time will come when the above questions lose their worth.

Furthermore, the rhetorical verification comes with a nice bonus.

The following article will discuss this topic.

Next article

Decentralized Socrates (Part 14)

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If rhetorical verification is done well, it can be a mechanism to detect and warn of position talk and fake news that cannot be fact-checked. This verification could solve one of the difficulties noted earlier in the fight against fake news.

Rhetorical verification of texts and sites, however, can be seen at first glance as a mechanism for labeling someone. Some organizations, entities, or platforms performing rhetorical verification may intentionally apply the “fake rhetorical bias label.”

Just recently, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry told the British BBC that it was a “fake news station” and that it was “no wonder it is unpopular with the Chinese people” and that “there is no such thing as hatred without reason.” These sentences are the Chinese side’s response to the BBC’s protest toward personal attacks by people inspired by CCP related organizations against the BBC reporters covering the floods in China. This episode is an example of the “fake rhetorical bias label” because the BBC does not look like a fake news outlet to the author. Nevertheless, that is just for me.

A similar case is that of the coronavirus vaccine. There are numerous fake news stories such as “Bill Gates created a vaccine to spread a virus for remote control of the human body” at the end of the spectrum.

In response to various biases and fake news, it is possible to explain that they are scientifically unfounded. However, it is not possible to refute that the explanation itself is a conspiracy.

This difficulty is another issue in the anti-fake news fight: the unreliability of the referee (neutrals).

Namely, the removal of bias by a particular platform cannot in principle erase the possibility that the act of verification itself is “platform operator’s position talk” (from the perspective of other parties), even if the intentions of the platform’s organizers are perfectly well-intentioned and factual.

In this case, unlike rhetorical manipulation, fact-checking can disclose inconsistencies with the facts in articles. However, fact-checking is still ineffective because the complaint is that the research and points made by the “neutrals” are themselves biased, which is “referee unreliability.”

The problem is not “actually lying” but “being able to lie in principle,” and that is where the conspiracy theorist’s attack comes in. No matter how often the major media reports that the Corona vaccine's possibility of intentionally altering DNA is extremely slight, it is useless. Because the reports are indeed “potentially fake and manipulable by a select few.” This possibility is why conspiracy theorists can coolly admit that they are perceived as conspiracy theorists and contradict all the opinions of the influential media yet repeat their theories endlessly.

As long as specific large organizations (corporations, governments, etc.) engage in rhetorical verification, we cannot overcome the unreliability of the referee. History is replete with examples of large, supposedly neutral organizations spreading fake news.

However, the task of rhetorical verification can be decentralized and does not require trust in a single referee. This opportunity is the key to bridging the gap between what only decentralized organizations can do and the insistence by conspiracy theorists and fake news creators that the referees themselves are untrustworthy to guarantee authenticity.

Next article

Decentralized Socrates (Part 13)

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The “ negative to positive” type of rhetorical manipulation mentioned in the previous entry can be detected automatically in principle for the following reasons.

In most position talk, the topic intended for a positive impression is not changed very often.

Therefore, it is possible to detect, without fact-checking, that multiple articles on a website consistently form a “negative to positive” shape regarding the news of one specific position. As long as the author of that documents does not change his or her position, we can expect stable detection results. Position talk is hard to change frequently a position he or she wants to impose. Propaganda is only effective when it persistently repeats the same stance, as Hitler said. This “positional adherence” is the inherent property of positional talk, making the following inference very tractable.

It is possible to infer “position × rhetoric” from multiple opinions and actions of a certain site or person.

Current achievements of AI technology permit inferences on uncomplicated interpretation and style of a text close to average humans’. What AI is not good at is inferences using real-world facts. For example, it is absurd to say “I went on an overseas tour trip” after the sentence “humanity has perished” (because if humanity had perished, there would be no one to carry out the tour trip), although detecting this type of contradiction is still challenging to current AI.

However, with rhetoric detection, such alignment between the physical world and the text is irrelevant. Rhetoric detection combines style detection in writing and inference of a position some speaker is pushing. The task of judging whether the evaluation of a particular item will end up being positive or negative from reviews is “sentiment estimation.” AI can do it quite well, even if it still ignores the reality outside texts. This technique is already familiar to us from the movie review classification. Style detection is another kind of task which AI is capable of treats. So, this rhetoric detection can be implemented by current AI technology.

Once position estimation and style detection are done, we can combine the two to infer that “Speaker A is a frequent user of style (rhetoric) type n in discussing topic X.” This is a rhetoric detection, and in the example above, topic X = the future of stock prices, and “type n” = “ negative to positive” type rhetoric. By calculating this for all topics of each speaker, we can see the rhetorical tendencies of that speaker. As I have pointed out repeatedly, this result has independent of whether the speaker is telling the truth or not.

Even if the authors of the position talk were aware of such a rhetorical detection system, there is no simple way around it.

Suppose a news producer uses a “ negative to a positive “ type of rhetorical manipulation to create an atmosphere that the stock price will continue to rise. He found out that the rhetoric detector caught his manipulation. However, assume he tries to fool the detector by simply using a “ positive to negative” order. In that case, the negative opinion will come last, and the impression it gives will be the opposite of the positive one he wants. Rhetorical manipulation is meaningless in this case.

Of course, it is possible to make an article more elaborate instead of “ negative to positive” or “positive to negative.” Yet, this would probably require more effort and be less effective than simple impression manipulation such as “ negative to positive.” The more complicated the rhetoric, the lower the chance of being recognized, the closer it is to noise.

Also, as mentioned earlier, the position talk is only compelling when it adheres to a fixed position. So it is difficult to avoid the situation by changing the position.

With such a system, it is possible to automatically detect whether a given site or person is prone to position talk, regardless of fact-checking.

Of course, we can mix this detection with other techniques, such as fact-checking or influence analysis using follow relationships on social networking sites.

Yet, as we can instantly see, this kind of verification requires enormous computational resources. Who can provide them? Or who should give it?

Our discussion will return to the DAO and decentralization to deal with this issue in the next post.

Next article

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Let us consider a reasonably naive example of the kind of rhetoric used by position talkers. Suppose, just for illustration, a person or a website wants to promote the position that stock prices will continue to rise. He wants to give his readers the impression that no matter what news comes out, the stock price will still go up, after all. Nevertheless, he avoids saying anything untrue. It is also necessary for him to comment on the news that has caused a stir in public.

In such cases, there is a rhetoric that begins with mentioning the negative side of the news and permanently closes with mentioning the positive side. For example, in the case of stock prices, imagine the news that “ the central bank is rumored to be accelerating monetary tightening to prevent a bubble. This news would simply mean that monetary tightening would decrease the amount of money flowing into stock investments, and stock prices would go down.

However, to change the impression of the news, it is possible to describe the news of monetary tightening as it is, then to insert the opinion of an expert that the impact of the tightening is limited or to include a story about an exceptional case in the past showing a rise in stock prices after the news of monetary tightening. In short, he always puts some opinion that stock prices will eventually rise at the end of the article.

The reason why this is not logical, but a rhetorical maneuver, is the following:

- The argument appended in the second half just needs to be very loosely connected to the first half (or worse, irrelevant).

- The logical order can be positive -> negative. However, to give a heavier impression of the last part, the order is negative -> positive.

Let us call this manipulation “negative to positive” type rhetoric.

Fact-checking is very complicated to deal with this manipulation. This difficulty comes from the point that he is reporting the facts as they are. The sequence of presenting the opinions is entirely up to the writer’s taste, so whether or not he intends to manipulate rhetorically is also unclear.

Are there countermeasures against such rhetorical manipulation?

Next article

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It is a disarming of bias, after all, that is achieved by the Socratic method of dialogue. Let’s call it the “universal position,” that is, the attitude of continuing to eliminate bias or “ to cease reasoning incorrectly according to one’s community, tradition, interests, values, and position.”

The opposite of the universal position is the positional talk and fake news currently filling the Internet. These are activities that, knowingly or unknowingly, seek to spread and reinforce bias as much as possible to protect their interests or expand their power, just the opposite of de-biasing by the method of dialogue.

In this sense, the modern method of dialogue should be “ protecting irrelevant people from the influence of aggressive people who actively engage in position-talk and fake news.”

But can we do that?

Whether it is position talk or fake news, it can be avoided in principle by fact-checking if it is blatantly untrue. So, building a system that successfully automates fact-checking sounds like a good idea. The platform should provide a UI that constantly displays the level of fakeness or positional bias on the site or tweet. Such a system already exists and will continue to improve.

However, there are two problems with this system. The first is that positional talk and fake news are not always false. Elaborate position talk is unlikely to be factually incorrect.

There are various ways of rhetorical maneuvering to manipulate the reader’s impression, such as increasing the size of one’s supportive position on a matter that is open to different interpretations, deliberately erasing opposing positions, or stating opposing positions followed by abruptly ending with a positive remark about one’s own beliefs.

Such words and actions are lumped together in this article as “position talk.” This is because so-called “fake news” is an extreme form of position talk whereby a person believes in their theory so much that it contradicts the facts. In contrast, the opposite extreme of position talk, which is usual positional talk, is when the writer does not state anything contrary to the facts but only manipulates them retroactively to make the reader’s impression align with the writer’s intentions.

Try to challenge positional talk with fact-checking alone. You will be at a standstill since you cannot do anything to deal with the type of article using only retrospective manipulation. It would violate freedom of speech to warn against an article that is not wrong but leads one’s view to prevail, as anyone would do.

However, the frustration of fact-checking can lead to the stance that every opinion is position talk, after all. No matter how terrible the theory, someone will fall for it. This can lead to antinomianism, saying that it is better to say anything, or that facts and truth are not significant, and that the process of argumentation and the proof itself is a fraud.

Incidentally, almost exactly what was just noted is written in “My Struggle.” Hitler himself claimed what drove him to take such an attitude was his righteous indignation at the fact that in World War I, in which he had participated, politicians working in the background had spent all their time arguing and playing games, forcing the front line to sacrifice itself in vain.

It is worth checking facts to verify the truth. However, one could do something parallel: to exploit the fact that position talk is often a rhetorical and editorial impression.

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There is another challenge to the sustainability of the method of dialogue, besides the hatred caused by the disarming bias.

Universal positions are not profitable.

Repeated position-talking to followers is a better way to expand power than to realize that the community and its members are trapped in bias. Developing power is usually profitable. Hitler did it, and even today, many people on the Internet are busy doing it.

Socrates, unlike other Sophists, did not accept money from his questioning opponents. He did not teach the art of debate with the explicit goal of “getting ahead by debating others within the community. “ Socrates himself was aware that there was no way his oratory skills could be used for career advancement. Therefore, he did not charge for it. On the contrary, the Sophists taught the art of debate to their clients in order to earn a living. The Sophists tutored the art to earn a living, and because they did not want to lose their jobs, they could not disobey the values of the community. “I’ m not like Socrates.”

Good. The demand for a counterbalance is, in a sense, a matter of taste. But then, how did Socrates make a living? The only way is to earn it by other labor or by unearned income.

If it is the former, one can only do the method of dialogue as an extracurricular activity. If it is the latter, it is ultimately incompatible with economic independence. It contradicts the intention of the method of dialogue, “freedom and equality,” as it invisibly exploits others.

Psychoanalysis and counseling, through payment, have become economically independent activities in themselves. Meanwhile, a universal position that breaks down bias can only be inhabited by journalists or within academia, which is external to the market in some sense. The latter (since it depends on high tuition, grants, and donations) is also unearned income.

The author thinks it would be ideal if the question-answering activity, removing bias itself, could be economically independent. Is that possible?

Before discussing this, the author would like to point out the Kantian position where it is not necessary to achieve both economic independence and the elimination of bias.

Common sense morality says, “First, pursue your own happiness, and then try to do good from a public, universal standpoint.” Adopting Kant’s morality of “pursue the good from a universal standpoint first, and happiness is a great blessing if it comes as a result (but it doesn’t bother us if we are unhappy),” it doesn’t matter if we incur the wrath of others or if we can’t make a living.

That is, in this Kantian position, the above issues are not a problem. It doesn’t matter if you are falsely accused of hatred and killed or die in poverty because you cannot support yourself financially, as long as the good is done.

Furthermore, even if Socrates died in vain and Plato parodied his intentions, the writings of his ideas were archived in the Islamic world, thawed during the Renaissance, became an influential factor in the resurgence of rationalistic thinking that led to the Age of Exploration and globalization. This preservation of the Socratic archive resulted in the significant export of liberalism, which advocates a universal position. In this sense, it was a great success except for many advocates who died an unfortunate death.

As pointed out in the previous article, the difficulty of trying to reconcile the Kantian good with personal survival tends, in the author’s opinion, to produce a turn toward pragmatism or a type of dogmatism that denounces others.

Moreover, we know the tragic historical fate of those who adhered to Kantian morality. It is daring to have the faith to persist even after knowing their future. In Kant’s case, he could preserve “God as a thing itself” outside the physical world and inside us (which we cannot recognize but can know through practice). In Kant’s morality, doing good is ultimately “to know God (through deeds).”

We live, by contrast, in an age when it has become challenging to implement Kantian morality in its raw form. This situation leads directly to the difficulties of liberalism and the rise of bare survivalism today.

So we seek an ethic little weaker and with as much technical support as possible. From there, the author would like to find a clue to the political philosophy of the DAO. I called it “weak anarchism” last issue.

To achieve this goal, we need some solution to economic self-reliance, not just Kant-like liberalism.

The next issue will focus on this issue.

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Decentralized Socrates (Part 9)

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Socrates’ method of dialogue is a “one-person political institution” that tries to achieve freedom and equality by relentlessly disarming the biases of others.

The author has suspicions about the sustainability of this “ institution.” It requires too much of the “strong individual.” It demands extreme self-control, a self-control that is willing to commit suicide to achieve its intentions.

Suppose the method works. What feelings would the distraught interlocutor have for Socrates? Gratitude? Admiration? That may be the case. But there will also be a lot of hatred for being humiliated. Also, suppose the removed bias is a value that is important to the community (God, money, the state.. etc.). Vested interests who want to protect it will feel more than hatred.

Socrates was shunned by the community of his era and falsely condemned to death. He could have escaped it; however, he dared to be put to death. He knew his suicidal act, and the effect it would have on others will work as a “one-person political institution.” The death of Socrates became an event that would be talked about for the rest of human history.

However, the generation that grew up watching Socrates, such as Plato, did not inherit Socrates’ methodology. Seeing that his “one-person political institution” could not coexist with democracy, Plato attempted to establish another institution that preserved the spirit of Socrates (i.e., the Philosopher King (Part 6)).

In “The Origin of Philosophy,” Karatani criticized the “philosopher-king” as a parody of the intention behind Socrates’ methods of dialogue ( Part 7). The author, however, considers that the method of dialogue itself, intended as a “one-person political system,” is unsustainable and bankrupt if it demands even suicide for belief. There is no necessity for the alternative system to be Plato’s philosopher-king. Still, the method of dialogue as it is described is not a very good political system.

Even if it was a parody of the method of dialogue, Plato's philosopher-king is far from the kind of ideology in which all ideals should be used as a means to pursue one’s happiness (or power). However, a disciple of Socrates, who saw his death, may flip to this kind of attitude. Unlike Socrates’ intention, his death may have no significance. If this is the case, then there is a way to become a mere realist and become a person who lives in a manner far from being as like Socrates as possible.

If there are many such people, the effect of Socrates’ method of dialogue will be essentially the opposite of what he intended. A society full of people who try to avoid being “ a person like Socrates” as much as possible is a society where no one releases their biases against each other. This response is a betrayal of one’s teacher in a different direction than Plato’s philosopher-king who tried to institutionalize “ a person like Socrates.” However, in reality, there are probably more people like this than not.

As a result, in both cases of institutionalizing “a people like Socrates” (philosopher-king) and creating peoples who try to stay away from “a people like Socrates” to the maximum extent possible (realists), Socrates’ method of dialogue produces a different result than intended. Therefore, the “too strong individual = a person like Socrates” demanded by the method of dialogue is hardly a sustainable “one-person political system.

The morality of the method of dialogue denies putting the pursuit of one’s own happiness first. Distortions can occur in that type of morality, however. Such a moral, which says that what we think is right should take precedence over our happiness, forces us to adhere to it or causes others to stick to it. This tendency leads to a dogmatism that is far from the sublime morality that was initially aimed at. The righteousness eventually resembles the totalitarianism that glorifies the sacrifice of life for a noble cause, which this morality would have denied.

What is needed, the author believes, is a mechanism to support people to continue to stray between universal good and personal happiness without being forced to, and a weak ethic blended with it. The author once called such ethics supported by decentralized organizations “weak anarchism.”

Suppose a philosophy that demands too strong a “ person like Socrates” is unsustainable, yielding unintentional parodies and inverted realists. In that case, we need some mechanism allowing the weak “persons like Socrates” to cooperate in a decentralized manner (without a solid centralized responsible entity). Hence, whereas the classical “strong” anarchism of subjects pursuing “freedom for freedom’s sake,” the thought inseparable from the design of the mechanism supporting vulnerable persons ought to be called “weak anarchism.”

Because it is weak, it requires the proposal of a mechanism. Because they are not realists, they will not abandon the ancient ideals of freedom and equality instead of building the architecture to manage the battle royale of populists. They are weak anarchists.

The details of this thought will be left for another time, and next time let the author address the other issue of the method of dialogue.

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