Consensus Toolkit
I Love Questions, They Breed Answers
The other day, I did some thinking-out-loud over on Twitter/X (still the best place for doing this). In response, I received this wonderful comment:
I love written questions! They breed answers. Their visual specificity opens a jammed lock in my aphantasic musician brain. Without this essential act, nothing much happens on the surface, at least by way of communication.
For me, “the right question” is never solicited, only found. When it is found, it acts as a key. When that key turns, my mental text engine roars unexpectedly to life, its giant gears suddenly engage, great loops of my otherwise inexpressibly hidden ideas are pulled into the churning machinery, and out pops a written answer.
This is that answer.
Here is the question once again:
“How do we get that consensus going” is THE question to answer, yes? Which makes it a great question.
This question can be answered on many levels, so I’ll give you my answer below in four parts.
If this were a heroic quest, those four parts might correspond to a Toolkit, a Compass, a Spirit Shield, and a Magic Talisman.
Let’s look at them in order.
I. Toolkit
The Toolkit is your day-to-day operating system. Basic stuff, mostly obvious, but with a few nifty tricks here and there.
Find a starting consensus. Apply common sense. Keep it simple, keep it obvious, keep it easy. “We don’t agree what the main problem is, and that’s our new main problem.”
Test for urgency. Apply Ben Franklin’s Razor. Do we need a consensus RIGHT NOW? "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Test for separability. Apply Occam’s Razor. Do we need a consensus AT ALL? “Do we need to fight this one out, or can we break this into smaller problems and solve them independently?”
Maintain focus. Keep the ball rolling. Do we STILL HAVE a consensus? “Let’s avoid ‘my way or the highway,’ it has such a bad ending.”
This of course is just a starter toolkit. We can add more exotic pieces later, but you get the drift. THe basics appear in the green and red boxes below.
II. Compass
The Compass is your guiding light. Its lofty ideals (see the yellow box) shine from on high, helping you aim your day-to-day Toolkit operations in the right direction.
Universality. Your proposed consensus has no exceptions, none at all.
Invariance. Your proposed consensus is based on timeless principles.
Consensus. Everyone agrees that the above conditions have been met.
Self-evidence. Everyone can check for themselves whether or not the above conditions have been met, whether by introspection or by direct observation.
These are ideals with practical purpose. The more closely you align your day-to-day operations to the Compass, the more effective your efforts will become, and the more friendly support you will attract.
III. Spirit Shield
The Spirit Shield protects your sanity.
Consensus-seeking is a hard road to travel. Patience and good humor work to make it smoother, and perhaps a little shorter. That’s where your shield comes in.
“Ninety-eight percent of the time, they aren’t mad AT YOU,” the Spirit Shield says, “they are mad AWAY FROM THEM.”
It’s still personal, it’s just not personal for you.
Use the shield. Be patient. Simply let the personal vitriol flow on by, wait for an opening that may or may not come, and ply your consensus trade.
Pass the time by cultivating a healthy sense of “you and I are already allies in this, it just isn’t obvious yet.”
(There are much more detailed, highly nuanced strategies to get into, but they properly belong to higher levels of the Toolkit, which can wait for later.)
IV. Magic Talisman
DISCLAIMER: At this stage in the game, use of the Spirit Shield is an untested act of faith.
“How do you know,” you might well ask, “that it will work?”
The Magic Talisman is the source of the necessary faith. Not coincidentally, it is also the direct source of the Spirit Shield’s power.
Activating it is MY quest.
The Magic Talisman is activated by collecting the first three items (the Toolkit, the Compass, and the Spirit Shield) and then bringing them to bear on a particular target:
The universal, invariant, self-evident, consensus-driven aspects of humanity’s decision-making process itself.
What aspects of human decision-making do NOT vary from person to person? How can we be sure?
Once the Magic Talisman is activated, all sorts of secondary quests, many of them urgent, are unlocked:
What standing waves do these universal decision-making effects create in the emergent fabric of human society? Can we map their rise and fall, their highs and lows? How well does the resulting map explain/predict what is (and is not) happening in our society, as we blindly traverse a complex underlying societal terrain? How can we be sure?
Are there better parts of the terrain to build a lasting society than others? Can we identify them? Can we get to these so-called civilizational heights from here? How do we navigate from here to there together, without getting fooled by the map’s many dynamic pitfalls? How can we be sure?
How can we get enough other people on board?
I have a lot of work to do.
Wish me luck.