DeSocSci = Decentralised Social Science

(loads of images because these days people don't read long wall of text in favour of scrolling)

TLDR

Due to CANCEL CULTURE and SOCIAL DESIRABILITY BIAS people are too afraid to say what they really think, that's particularly true for controversial / contentious / polarising matters.

The purpose of this project is to design a tool / framework / mehodology / infrastructure allowing to figure out the real opinion of the people.

Design of an experiment

We are open source, transparent, collaborative, building in public. Your feedback, comments, suggestions matter. Telegram chat: https://t.me/DeSocSci 💬

Option A

The simplest MVP experiment that could work:

1. Ask a question about controversial matter (nuclear, GMO, abortion, cannabis, same sex marriage, etc...)
2. Then and repeat the same question but reveal the actual intention of the research

we are here to evaluate if people answer questions a certain way in order to appear more favourable (social desirability bias)

Theory / hypothesis / assumption / something to verify: does the diclosing true intention of the question makes respondents answer it truthfully? Will the answer change?

Or maybe the answer changed due to "priming"? Exact wording TBD TBC.

Option B

A series of questions, each on the scale 1-10, similar to Keynesian beauty contest:

• what do you think?
• do you think your opinion is acceptable in public setting, such as live on TV?
• what do you think others think?
• what do you think other think about your thinking?

Exact wording and list of quesitons TBD TBC.

Screenshot from hackathon project:

Background / history / origin

Our adventure with DeSci originated a year ago during EthCC and FtC (Funding the Commons) in Paris. We attended a workshop organised by Nicholas Brigham Adams, PhD (LinkedIn) and it was an eye-opening experience that got us familiar with the field.

Bunch of links from around that time:

• Personal blog describing some potential experiments: link
• ETH Global Paris hackathon project in the theme of DeSci: link
• Slides from that project, highlights below:

"cancel culture" 🤷‍♀️

"Cancel culture" is the main reason for this project.

Source: Daily Mail (sensationalist title but you get an idea)

It was so bad a new law had to be established: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2862

A Bill to make provision in relation to freedom of speech and academic freedom in higher education institutions and in students’ unions; and for connected purposes.

Press release: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/university-freedom-of-speech-bill-becomes-law

We’re making history with the Freedom of Speech Act, ensuring that fear does not undermine the rights of students and academics to debate controversial ideas and securing the right to an open exchange of ideas in universities.

Recently there were elections in the UK, new government: Labour decision to pause freedom of speech law branded ‘chilling’

I personally believe that if people were telling their true intentions, true preferences the world would be a better place. I personally share my preferences so that other can consider them in the evaluation process, and there is nothing selfish about it.

All these factors encourage us to revisit that hackathon project

What was innovative about it? These features are already implement, although "hackathon quality":

• using WorldCoin to guarantee unique users
• for non-WorldCoin users requiring to record a short video (face and voice are also a good indication of uniqueness)

Roadmap / timeline / plan of action

Assuming the funding round is successful:

Phase 1 (6 weeks): research, spec, design. In parallel: feedback, consultations, discussions, inviting constructive criticism.

Phase 2 (10 weeks): developing the platform. In parallel: wordsmithing the exact questions.

Phase 3 (5 weeks): using the platform in practice

Phase 4 (5 weeks): synthetising research

To be noted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

Another approach to timeline would be Elon Musk style impossible (near-impossible) deadlines but due to collaborative nature of the experiment we err on the side of "more time".

Potential challenges

• Being cancelled. Someone may not like our approach.
• Too little funds to hire a dev (we will be resourceful, even a small amount of funding should be sufficient)
• Ensuring representative sample of people

One additional feature that we would like to implement is repeatability. Asking the same question again, after some time, just to verify if the initial answer wasn't random. Some challenges around privacy / storage / unique identifiers anticipated.

Team

Mars Robertson: LinkedIn. LEAD, initiator, firestarter, spark, curious 🧠

Nicholas "Brigham" Adams, Ph.D.: LinkedIn. ADVISOR. Sociologist, inventor, and founder dedicated to empowering people to improve complex social realities. His career spans electoral campaigns, think tank leadership, and the creation of new data science methods for large-scale natural language processing. Adams played a key role in the early development of the UC Berkeley Social Science Computing D-Lab and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, founding several initiatives within them.

Potential impact: massive

To tell what is real = gamechanger. We can run many more experiments and opinion polling questions using our methodology.

RELATED: Trust in media (and government) is at all time low:

Source: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/08/news-republicans-democrats-trust-partisanship

Even if the media / government say something, can they be trusted? Our goal is to establish what people really think in the independent, decentralised, trustworthy way, while also discovering / quantifying various cognitive biases.

Also silent majority:

The silent majority is an unspecified large group of people in a country or group who do not express their opinions publicly.

We genuinely believe that we found an interesting niche and thanks to the Gitcoin / Web3 / DeSci funding we can advance the tools / methodology / frameworks of doing research. We also believe that whatever happens, it will be a good research, we will make sure to pre-register to ensure that we are on the hook to publish.

Contact / questions / suggestions

Telegram chat: https://t.me/DeSocSci 💬