Let’s Get Radical
Your Saturday roundup from Miles Lasater
Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and to philosophy.
Radical Second Chances. Do you believe in second chances for people to thrive in life (or real first chances as the FreeWill founder calls it)? I was inspried by the book Tattoos on the Heart about Homeboy Industries. I love learning about organizations creating jobs that provide purpose and structure to those in need of a second chance.
Radical Voting and Pricing. RadicalxChange promotes “next-generation political economies”. For example, I had heard of plural voting (ie quadratic voting)? Much less well known than rank choice voting and not yet used in governments. But I had not heard of Self-Assessed Licenses Sold at Auction or some of the others. What do they think of deliberative voting? Curious to hear if you have experience with any of these concepts?
Radical Political Civility. We say we want civility but here’s a proposed test for what it means to embrace political civility. “If you struggle to perform those tasks, that means one has a feeble grasp on the range of responsible political opinion. When we cannot even imagine a cogent political perspective that stands in opposition to our own, we can’t engage civilly with our fellow citizens.” Here’s the test. Can you do it?
“First, take one of your strongest political views, and then try to figure out what your smartest partisan opponent might say about it.
Second, identify a political idea that is key to your opponent and then develop a lucid argument that supports it. [In the rationalist community, this has become known as “steelmanning” as the opposite of a strawman argument.]
Third, identify a major policy favored by the other side that you could regard as permissible for government – despite your opposition.”
Until next week,
Miles