Jamie Joyce and The Society Library

This post is a collection of quotes from Jamie Joyce in an interview on the Intelligent Conversations podcast in 2022 titled Making Great Choices Based off the Most Information. The video for this interview can be found at this link. The Society Library can be found at this link. I recommend listening to the interview and visiting The Society Library. There are 10 quotes listed below chronologically.

(For readability, these quotes have been slightly revised from the original recording.)

1. "At The Society Library we create a variety of different knowledge products that are meant to serve the public's informational needs. So, one product that we create is the library itself. The Society Library is all about collecting all of the arguments, claims and evidence from across different media types, so its not just the content in books and scholarly articles and government reports and industry reports, but also what are people saying on TikTok and Twitter and in documentaries. What is everyone saying about this issue and how can we bring all of this knowledge together and structure it so that everyone can get both a bird's eye view of all the different positions from all points of view but also be able to dive down as deep as they want to find all of arguments and claims and evidence and the argumentation that refutes or supports claims and arguments? And so essentially the service that we're offering society for the library is essentially just saving thousands and thousands of research hours and organization hours by doing all this research for people and creating this curated collection so people can explore." (3:37)

2. "We're not interested in censoring content. We're not interested in driving people towards assuming certain conclusions. We're just about organizing all points of view, contextualizing it by evidence and type of evidence and some helpful categorizations, and just let people come to the truth themselves." (4:37)

3. "We serve city councils by collecting knowledge from all stakeholders and then organizing it into a micro-voting protocol... When people make decisions they're often times making decisions in the black box of their own minds, and they're making all sorts logical calculations and they're weighting things in ways that may not be obvious to them... The problem with that is that we may not be easily able to detect where we are cognitively bias and where we're making logical mistakes." (5:35)

4. "So our decision-making models are about laying out all of the pro-con argumentation, across different dimensions of a decision on paper so that its externalized in way in which we ask users of the decision-making model to go through every single tiny piece of knowledge, one step at a time, and make a little micro-vote on pro, a con, what have you, and essentially at the end what it tells them is this is how you think about the economic dimension of this issue, this is how you think about the environmental dimension, this is how you think about the idea itself versus how its executed. And so it tells people once you've actually sat down and gone through the methodological process of including all information in your decision-making, here is your decision." (6:20)

5. "What The Society Library's goals are is to figure out, okay, if we're all coming from different backgrounds, we've interacted with different ideas, we have different values and assumptions, and we have different sets of knowledge that we're operating on, how do we create media artifacts and knowledge artifacts and societal institutions to enable the possibility to see from different points of view?" (14:11)

6. "...there are still decisions being made in terms of how knowledge is classified and organized and what tags are on it, and how its cleaned up and steel-manned and all those things. And so in the meantime, in the short-term, what we have are some, you know, anti-bias principles, we've got 22 different methods to overcome our own bias in our research methods, we got our virtues and values and we have our knowledge policies which people can see on our website. Long-term... I want to create a twin system in which the same work is being done by two different groups of people, one could be The Society Librarians internally, and another one could just be open for the general public." (18:20)

7. "...if there's something The Society Library knows, its that our mission is inquire into truth, not to tell anyone what it is." (19:55)

8. "The Society Library is actually a long term plan. What we are dedicated to is figuring out what is the best institution for future generations to grow up with... If our goals are to enable people to understand complexity and nuance and see all these different points of view and interact with media in a way that's going to make them more wise if they choose because they're going to emotionally understand things, and they're going to be able to dive deep into every single subject, and we're going to save them all those thousands and thousands of hours of research and consolidation and all of that stuff. You know, what does that have to look like? And then how do we get it into people's hands as early as possible?" (26:55)

9. "How much knowledge can we compress into a visualization that people will still understand without being overwhelmed? How do we make sure that we're collecting from all points of view? How do we make sure that we're not falling into knowledge policy traps..." (28:42)

10. "The last bit of data I saw was from a Pew survey which suggested that trust in libraries has maintained and that's because they literally just exist to serve the public. They're not there to make money. Librarians are a wonderful caricature in terms of that they literally exist to give you the information that you want and help you find it and they're not trying to, you know, convince you to believe one thing or another, and they're totally anti-censorship." (31:35)