Heidi Burgess Talks with Daniel Yudkin about the Beacon Project and Potentialism

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Interview Transcript: Daniel Yudkin, the Beacon Project / More in Common

Interviewer: Heidi Burgess, Beyond Intractability

Heidi: Hi. I'm Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability, and I'm here today with Daniel Yudkin with the Beacon Project, which is part of More in Common — an organization we have written about quite a bit before. I'm going to ask Daniel to start by giving us a bit of background on More in Common and how the Beacon Project relates to that, and then tell us what the Beacon Project is.

Daniel: More in Common is an international organization. We were founded in 2015–2016 in response to the assassination of a British member of Parliament named Jo Cox. Jo was committed in her political career to finding ways for people to resolve disagreement across difference. She always believed that people had more in common than what divided them.

In response to her assassination, a group of her friends and allies got together — there was a huge outpouring of support — and they founded this organization in the UK in 2016. At first, it was an organization committed to hosting events that brought people together: dinners, other gatherings, to help people have better conversations and resolve differences.

Over the coming years, the organization began to develop chapters outside of the UK. I joined More in Common in 2017 here in the US. What we started out doing was research projects aimed at using tools from social psychology to better understand political polarization and political differences, and then potentially use those insights to help resolve and heal division.

In 2017 and 2018, we wrote a report that ended up being fairly influential, called Hidden Tribes. I know you are aware of this, Heidi, and I believe you've written about it in the past. Hidden Tribes tackled the question of whether America is a 50/50 country, as we are commonly led to believe. Is it really red versus blue, liberals versus conservatives, Democrat versus Republican?

We did a survey of 8,000 Americans. We asked them a range of questions about what we call their core beliefs — their underlying views and values, how they think about group identity, what their moral values are, their parenting philosophy, their views about agency and personal responsibility, and other questions. We used a statistical technique called hierarchical clustering to identify groups of people in the American population who hold similar core beliefs. This approach yielded seven different groups — what we call tribes — ranging from progressive activists on the far left, about 8% of the population, to devoted conservatives on the far right, also about 6% to 8% of the population, and a number of different groups in between: traditional liberals, moderates, the politically disengaged, traditional conservatives, and so on.

What the report did was break open this notion that we're such a divided country, and really began to shed light on the different kinds of perspectives that Americans hold — perspectives that don't necessarily adhere to the traditional stereotypical view of either side.

In addition, we discovered a group that we call the exhausted majority. The exhausted majority is about two-thirds of the American population. They experience politics a little bit differently from the people on the political wings. They are less likely to get involved in political arguments and post political content online. They're more flexible in their views, and they're more frustrated with political division. They want politicians to work together to solve shared problems.

The overall picture that emerged is that the American political landscape is far more nuanced and complex than we're typically led to believe by the traditional narrative. We have a lot of Americans who hold more nuanced and complex perspectives and beliefs than you might think based on their party affiliation, where they live, their racial identity, or anything else.

From there, we continued to build on this work. More in Common founded chapters in a variety of different countries. We now have teams in Poland, Spain, Brazil, France, the UK, and Germany. We've been continuing here in the US to expand this work and explore different ways of understanding polarization and continuing to release reports. The most recent one looked at a segmentation of Trump voters, examining how they differ from the traditional stereotypical MAGA identity and how they hold differing views as well. So that's the long answer to what More in Common is.

Heidi: Before we go on to the Beacon Project, I'm curious — are you finding similar groupings of tribes in countries outside the United States?

Daniel: Not really, actually. I think the United States is a unique situation. We are more polarized than the vast majority of other democracies in the Western world. You also have more extreme views being held on the wings — the wings are farther apart from each other than in other countries.

There are more extreme or wing-identified groups in other country settings, but their differences are tame compared to the differences we have in the United States. It's a complex story, because on one hand we want to say that Americans often do have more in common than they typically believe. But that is really true mostly for the people in the middle.

Heidi: Okay. We call them true believers.

Daniel: True believers. That's right. Whereas the active and vocal, very convinced members of the political wings really do have considerable differences.

Heidi: All right. Jump from there to the Beacon Project.

Daniel: One of the questions that emerged from Hidden Tribes is about the exhausted majority. As I said, they feel as though their views and values are not reflected in political discourse. They feel as though the wings don't speak their language, don't resonate with their actual views.

The question then emerges: if the prevailing narratives don't speak to the exhausted majority, what is a narrative that can speak to this group? What is a story, a framework, a set of values that resonates with this group of Americans? That is the question the Beacon Project was set up to investigate and try to solve.

The Beacon Project is an initiative that I started two years ago at More in Common. It's under the More in Common umbrella, so we're still part of the organization, but we operate semi-autonomously. From a nuts-and-bolts budget standpoint, we have our own little fiefdom under the More in Common regime.

We are working on identifying a story or framework that can resonate and appeal to a group of Americans who feel as though neither side is speaking their language right now. We use a variety of different tools to do that. Part of our work is empirical — we conduct surveys and polling work. We also engage with political science research, social psychology, political philosophy, and history to identify trends and narratives over the course of American history that have resonated and are deep in our founding mythology. Sometimes these are stories just below the surface of people's awareness — things that people take for granted but don't always explicitly acknowledge.

We also have conversations with ordinary Americans as well as with experts and scholars, and we bring people together to make progress on this question: what is a defining vision for America's exhausted majority?

Heidi: Are you focusing entirely or primarily on the United States, or are you broader than that?

Daniel: Our work is currently focused on the United States. We don't want to bite off more than we can chew. Getting a narrative for the United States is already pretty significant, pretty hard. We'll start there — just get a story for the whole country, and then we'll move on.

Heidi: I wouldn't have asked that except that I saw that you held a conference a year or two ago in Italy. So I thought, "Oh, maybe they're global."

Daniel: We had an opportunity to host a convening in Florence. 

Heidi: Burgess: How do you turn that down? 

Daniel: We thought that a little geographic and physical distance might help people get in the right mindset to have the kinds of high-altitude conversations that I think we need to be having right now. But it was Americans who were there.

Heidi: All right. I want to jump ahead and talk about that in a little bit, but let's go back. I'm curious to unpack the idea of core beliefs a little bit more. What are core beliefs?

Daniel: It's a great question. There's a loose definition, and then when you start to get into the specifics, it gets a little bit challenging. In psychology, there's theorizing that suggests people hold certain underlying commitments to a particular perspective on reality.

For example, you might ask someone: what plays a bigger role in determining how someone's life turns out — their own agency, their own hard work and effort, or luck and circumstance? Or: is it more important for children to be obedient or creative? These are examples of what psychologists describe as core beliefs because they are considered to precede political attitudes. If you believe that obedience is more important for a child to have, that might have downstream consequences for how you think about what it means to be a parent, and even about the relationship between the government and its citizens.

The way we think about core beliefs is as early-forming and relatively stable belief structures that then go on to shape and inform how people make sense of complex political topics, ranging from gun control to abortion to immigration.

Heidi: I'm probably going to be really annoying with this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. When I get questions like that, I really chafe — I don't know about the obedience-versus-creative one, but I'm thinking back to the question "are people's successes due to luck or hard work?" And my answer is always going to be, "Well, both." Your either/or framing doesn't allow for a "well, both" answer. How do you deal with that?

Daniel: We handle it in a range of different ways. We often try to allow people to have more nuance in their responses, but sometimes we do force people to choose. And that's not because we don't think that many people would say "both," but because the way in which people lean — the kind of emphasis they place on one or the other — is revealing about their approach to things.

I totally agree that some of these questions feel a little bit artificial. Especially in a world where we're trying to find balance between competing perspectives, it can feel as though you're being put into one box or another. Nevertheless, I do think that things can be learned from people based on the emphasis they put on different values. Even if they think there's merit to both, the way people lean can tell you something about how they approach these different topics.

I'll also say that on the topic of how core beliefs are tricky — there is research questioning the causal direction. The way we think about core beliefs is as precursors to political attitudes: the core belief comes first and then shapes your views about different policy issues. But some research questions that. You might have come to some opinions about X, Y, or Z and then developed your core beliefs later. So it's definitely messy.

But I do think it's a useful way of thinking about how we make sense of complex political questions. We often rely on what psychologists call heuristics — rules of thumb that help us simplify complex ideas. Those heuristics often rely on basic sets of values that we form early in life and that come to shape the way we understand and perceive the world around us. To that extent, I think the core beliefs model provides a useful lens through which to understand how people come to political decisions.

Heidi: Do core beliefs change?

Daniel: They do, but not in the same way that political attitudes change. If you ask someone "How well is the economy doing right now?" you see wild switches as soon as a new president gets elected. If your president is in power, suddenly the economy's doing great. If the other guy gets in, suddenly it's not doing so well anymore. There are a variety of ways our views about the world can change based on circumstance, whereas core beliefs are more stable than that.

Core beliefs do change slowly over a lifetime. People do change their political affiliation — you get people going from more liberal to more conservative, and sometimes the reverse, based on life experiences or the community they're a part of. A different friend group can influence you in important ways. People's minds do change. But when we're looking for core beliefs, we're looking for things we expect to remain relatively stable from year to year.

Heidi: You've used the terms interchangeably occasionally — core values and core beliefs. Are they the same or different?

Daniel: In my mind, they're interchangeable. I don't have an internal definition that says one is different from the other. I think of core beliefs as an overarching term that describes a whole range of different values — your moral values, how much you care about harm versus fairness versus loyalty versus purity versus authority. That's the Jonathan Haidt Moral Foundations framework.

But also, as I said, parenting philosophy — that's not necessarily a value per se; it's more about what you think is important for kids to embody and reflect. And then these ideas about agency: is it a belief that circumstances play a bigger role in determining people's life outcomes than their own agency? I would call that more a belief than a value.

Heidi: I'd agree with that. Part of the reason I'm asking is personal curiosity. I got into a discussion yesterday where somebody said t”of course values are negotiable.” And I went, "Oh, that's interesting — I've always said that values aren't negotiable." So we got into this discussion, and he said, "Well, there's this kind of values and that kind of values." And I was trying to determine whether your core beliefs were negotiable or not. And what I'm hearing is probably not.

Daniel: I think it depends on what you mean by negotiable. Does negotiable mean persuadable?

Heidi: I think it means: I'm willing to change my values if you'll change yours, or if you'll do something for me — more transactional.

Daniel: I don't see values in that way. There's a lot of research on what's called the "taboo trade-off." That's a concept from scholar Phil Tetlock, who was researching at the University of Pennsylvania. He gave the example of being invited over for dinner, and when you leave, you put a $20 bill on the table. There's something that feels sacrilegious about that, because it turns what was a non-transactional interaction into a paid activity. That feels wrong to us. He used this to illustrate how some activities and moral values just can't be traded off or negotiated, because they are that deeply held.

Heidi: Yeah. I agree, but I was taken aback yesterday and thinking, "Well, maybe I've got this wrong." I was interested.

Daniel: That is interesting.

Heidi: You list on your website — I think it's five, maybe six different projects that you've undertaken. I'm interested in talking about each of them. The first one is called Agency, Justice, and the American Potential, and I'm particularly interested in it because of the notion of agency. Your reporting of Americans' sense of agency runs counter to my personal experience. Obviously, you've got way more data than I do, so I'm really curious.

I have been saying for quite a while that one of the big problems in the United States is that people don't feel that they have agency. Now, I think the difference is that I'm thinking in terms of political agency and you're talking more about personal agency. But tell us more about your research on agency and how you think it relates to a sense of political agency.

Daniel: That's a great question. This is a major report that we wrote over many years. We kept finding this very basic, pervasive, pattern in our survey responses over the course of almost a decade. When you ask Americans how much control they feel they have over the way their life turns out — and what plays a bigger role, luck or hard work — Americans across all demographic groups, all generations, all races, all political parties really have this cherished belief in the power of the individual to transcend difficult circumstances and make the most of their situation. This is a pervasive and ubiquitous trend, and it relates very much to the mythology of the American dream.

One thing I actually regret not doing more of in this report — and that I'm very interested in — is exactly the contradiction you point out. When you ask people, "Do you feel like politicians care about people like you?" — [people answer] “no. "Do you think you have a voice in the political system?" — no. "Does your vote matter?" — no. You've really hit the nail on the head with this distinction: when it comes to making a successful life, people believe in individual agency. When it comes to affecting the political system, they don't have that same confidence.

I think it must have to do with personal experience. When it comes to the American Dream or personal agency, people see the successful people in their lives as people who worked hard and applied their skills and aptitudes in particular ways. That gives them evidence to support the belief that people have control over the way their lives turn out. But it's very easy to be fatalistic about the state of politics. And so, I can definitely see a tension between these two forms of agency.

Heidi: And the thing that interests me is that if people believe they have the ability to direct their own lives and be successful, but no ability to affect the government, that suggests they see a complete split — that what happens in politics is pretty much irrelevant to what happens to me. And in fact, I think some of your data showed that people didn't put that high a value on how much government actions affect their success. Which then leads me to wonder, because one of the things we're working toward is trying to get people more involved in the political process.

We just wrote a couple of newsletters based on Braver Angels' new notion of "courageous citizenship," trying to get people more engaged. And if people see a hard division between personal success and the actions of government, that's going to make it really hard to get people engaged.

Daniel: Totally. Civic agency — I think that is where quite a lot of effort is starting to be directed. A lot of the civic education work — Rajiv Vinnakota's work with Citizens and Scholars], Eric Liu's work with Citizen University — these are all efforts to help people step into their role as citizens and feel the empowerment that comes from that.

And it's bidirectional, right? Not only do people feel they can't affect the political system, but they also feel the political system has no impact on their life either. So, what do they care? It's alienation from the political process in both directions. 

Heidi: And you can even see it as zero-sum: if I spend time working in my citizen role, I'm not spending time furthering my own career.

Daniel: I would push back on that framing, because I disagree that they are zero-sum — in fact, they are probably positive-sum. And look, there's the gerrymandering stuff happening right now, politicians choosing voters, rather than voters choosing politicians. People have absolutely good reason to feel disillusioned and feel as though their vote and voice doesn't matter. Not to mention the influence of money and corporations and the oligarchic influence of billionaires on the political process, operating behind the scenes and twisting the levers and getting things to go the way they want.

There's no wonder that people feel disenfranchised and disillusioned. But I think the only antidote is to go local. There are more and more organizations encouraging people to focus on their own communities, and that is the only antidote — the baby steps of civic empowerment start in one's neighborhood.

Heidi: I'm going to jump way ahead to what I thought was going to be my last question, but it plays in here. If you succeed in developing this story for the exhausted majority, would that help tie these two domains together? Would it be a story that could help people decide that they have political agency as well as personal agency?

Daniel: Oh, I love that question. Let me tell you a little bit about where our research has taken us at the Beacon Project, and then tie in why I do think there might be reason for hope here.

Over the past several years, we've done an enormous amount of work — hundreds of conversations, thousands of data points. Our research has led us toward a particular framework or idea that we think holds promise for offering a vision for the exhausted majority. It begins with a really simple premise: everyone has something to offer. Everyone has a gift. When we share our gifts, it helps other people, and it also gives our lives a sense of meaning and purpose.

The story we're exploring is this: if we take as a basic assumption that everyone has something to offer — that everyone has a gift — what does that mean for how we think about the social contract, about what we owe each other? 

The first thing you might say is that you want a society where everyone has an opportunity to develop and share their gifts. This means implementing various policies that ensure a basic threshold of fairness for everybody, so that no one is unfairly deprived of the opportunity to develop and share their unique gifts because of circumstances outside of their control.

But if sharing and developing our gifts is something that gives meaning to our own lives and also helps the people around us, we should think of it, not just as a right, but also as a responsibility.

So, what this looks like is a renewed understanding of the active role that we each play in enhancing and improving our own lives and the lives of the people in our country and community. The really simple framework that comes out of this is: everyone has a gift, and a right and responsibility to develop and share that gift.

Because this is a framework that speaks to fundamental questions of how we structure our society — what our rights and responsibilities are, what the social contract is — you can think of it as a political philosophy. And we actually give this framework a name. We call it potentialism.

Potentialism is a political philosophy that says: everyone has a gift, and a right and responsibility to develop and share that gift. When we have conversations with people, it often strikes them as fairly intuitive. The idea that everyone has something to contribute — that contributing is an important part of living a meaningful and directed life — resonates. And we should see it as an obligation, because it is something we can do to improve our communities.

Potentialism also differs in important ways from other prevailing political philosophies. In its commitment to securing people's right to contribute, it actually has a higher floor of social support than, for example, libertarian philosophy, which says the government needs to leave people alone. But in emphasizing the notion of responsibility, it goes beyond much thinking in liberal and progressive circles, which are typically reluctant to say that people have duties or responsibilities aside from pursuing their own good in their own way.

So, it differs from other philosophies, but it is intuitive. Because of this, we think it holds promise as potentially offering a new way of understanding what our rights and responsibilities are as citizens — a stronger social contract in which we expect more of ourselves and ask more of each other.

The question we're asking is: what would it look like to take this seriously as a legitimate alternative to the prevailing political philosophies of our time? What would it mean for even 1% of the American population to identify as potentialists — a group of people operating together to exert political force in service of a particular vision, one in which the government recognizes its obligations to secure basic rights for people to contribute, and each individual recognizes their corresponding duties to make the most of those opportunities?

As a friend of mine described it, it is a comically ambitious idea. But who knows? It might be just crazy enough to work if you take a long enough timeframe — over the course of decades.

And this speaks to your question, Heidi, about bridging the gap between personal and civic agency. Potentialism explicitly acknowledges the ways in which our personal flourishing is wrapped up in the well-being of the community. We all have gifts that we have a responsibility to develop not just for our own sake, but for the sake of the collective and to share with other people. That is an element of our civic identity — seeing ourselves as integral members of a civic community who have an obligation to show up and contribute.

We see the fulfillment and realization of our own potential as not just for our own sake, but as having a collective dimension, because our personal flourishing has implications for the well-being of others. When we're truly manifesting our personal agency — truly being our best selves — it has civic implications, because it allows us to show up in our communities in the fullest possible way. Through that mechanism, we come to see ourselves as having the ability to impact other people's lives, and that becomes a cyclical, positive flywheel. It's actually the first time I've considered it from exactly this angle, but that's my answer.

Heidi: The thing I'm playing with in my head is what I think is — I wouldn't say a similar formulation, but maybe a related one that we've come up with, which is equally ambitious and crazy as yours.

Daniel: Love it.

Heidi: We've come up with the term "the grand democratic bargain." The notion is that democracy is the best tool that humans have come up with to defeat what we call "I'll fight you for it" rules. That phrase comes from a Carl Sandburg poem, where one man says he wants another man's land. "Where did you get it?" "From my father." "Well, how did he get it?" "He fought for it." "Well, I'll fight you for it." I don't want to tell the whole story again, as we've covered it a lot in these interviews.

But our argument is that there are two ways to organize society and bring about change: one is by fighting for it, by using force, and the other is to work cooperatively. Democracy is a tool to allow us to work cooperatively. And the grand democratic bargain is: I will let you do what you want to do, as long as you let me do what I want to do — and we band together to defeat the folks who are trying to stop us by employing "I'll fight you for it" rules. The notion is that by being part of our civic culture, we have rights and responsibilities, and one of those responsibilities is to allow other people to pursue the goals they want to pursue, as long as they do the same for me.

Daniel: It strikes me as somewhat parallel. It sounds very similar to Locke and Mill — Locke was talking about the social contract as a way of protecting property, coming together to not fight each other but to live and let live, to maintain property. And then Mill expands beyond property to talk about people's way of life and how we can pursue our own version of it. It certainly resonates with that political philosophy.

Heidi: We're broader than property, but yes.

Daniel: I think one way that our framework deviates from what you're talking about — which I think is controversial — is that the way you've described it, we come to an arrangement that allows us to live the way we want and allows other people to do the same, and we place no demands on each other as long as we're not interfering with each other's ability to pursue their goals. That is the fundamental basis of liberalism — toleration. I tolerate your pursuit of your version of the good life, and you tolerate mine, and we agree to live and let live.

What I'm exploring is whether that is sufficient. Is it enough to have a framework that simply says, "We don't expect more from you as long as you don't interfere with my ability to define the good life for myself"? I would suggest that it's insufficient — that it's not a thick enough matrix. 

What we need is to place a little bit more demands on each other without being coercive. It's not authoritarian — it's not "this is how you have to live." But what potentialism is trying to say is: let's look at this fundamental feature of the human condition. We all have a fundamental basic need to feel as though our lives have meaning and that they matter. And we achieve that sense of mattering and meaning by feeling respected and seen by others, recognized for our own distinct humanity, and by feeling that we make a meaningful impact in the lives of other people.

Achieving a sense of purpose in life depends on our ability to feel that our lives have some impact in the lives of others. If we take that as a fundamental observation, what it suggests is that we can impose more expectations on people to actually pursue these activities — an expectation of contribution. This is actually asking more of people than liberalism, because it says there is a right and a wrong way to go about things. The right way is to figure out what your gifts are and cultivate them and share them with the community. The wrong way is to let your gifts go to waste. If those gifts are wasted, from the perspective of society, that's a shame.

Heidi: Yeah, that's a good point. And we might add an addendum or something to address that. I do have a cynical thought: what if your gift is being really good at swindling other people?

Daniel: Liberalism has a good solution to this — we're not throwing away liberalism completely. Liberalism already figured this out. The basic idea of liberalism is: you should pursue your own ends as long as they don't interfere with other people's ability to pursue their own ends. We can adopt the same idea. Your gifts should be manifested only to the extent that they don't interfere with other people's ability to do the same. And societies can impose rules that say: you might think that's a gift, but that's not the kind of gift we support. We mean the gifts that are helpful and that increase other people's ability to develop and share their gifts. If the consequence of you developing yours is that it makes it more difficult for other people to do that, that's not a gift.

Heidi: All right. I'll buy that. So let's say you come up with this story — how do you get it adopted? Going back to the beginning of our conversation, core beliefs don't change much. And you're offering, in effect, a new core belief.

Daniel: Great question. First of all, I don't think this is a new core belief. I think this is an old core belief. For many, many people, "everyone has something to offer" would strike them as deeply intuitive. In fact, the idea of contribution and the "virtuous life" is deeply embedded in our founding documents. Jefferson and the founders were really influenced by classical thought and Aristotelian ideas of virtue. For them, the pursuit of happiness is not just a feeling — it's an activity, the activity of living a virtuous life. That's what Aristotle thought: that happiness and living a virtuous life were basically identical. That has been somewhat lost in the way we think about the pursuit of happiness, but it's implicit in a lot of these founding documents.

So I don't actually think the basic ideas around potentialism are new. I think they are old ideas that have been forgotten. One bet we're taking is that this is actually a recovery — that when you say things in this way or explain it to people, it strikes them as so intuitive that it doesn't really require a change in their core beliefs. It's just a naming and a formalization of a set of beliefs that people already hold.

Heidi: But even granting that it's an old idea — how do you popularize it? 

Daniel: The first answer is: slowly. What we're talking about is, frankly, comically ambitious — potentialism being considered as an alternative to major fundamental political philosophies. What that looks like is something that takes place the same way other political movements have: really slowly, and then all at once. Ernest Hemingway described bankruptcy as happening very slowly and then all at once. I imagine it would be something similar — you're making no apparent progress for a long time, and then suddenly people are saying, "Oh, yeah — obviously." It goes from seeming absurd to becoming second nature.

That's the long-term plan. But in the meantime, there are some exciting things we have planned for this year. In June — just three weeks from now — we have a convening of leading scholars and civil society leaders, about 20 of them, coming together at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, to have conversations on this topic and explore what it might look like to have what some people call “a new American founding.” I'm not so sold on that language — let's just say a renewed contract for America. I'm going to be sharing these ideas and asking the people there to consider them. I'm sure others will have interesting ideas and suggestions, and people will come with their own points of view. Maybe some consensus will emerge after that weekend about where to go and what to do.

And then in the longer term, we have other research projects planned. I see it right now as my mission to have as many of these types of conversations with as many people as possible — learning all the ways in which there are blind spots in this framework, what we're not seeing or missing, what concerns people have, what resonates, and ways of communicating it more effectively. Just slowly learning whether this has the kind of potential that we, at this point, think it might.

Heidi: I've got one trivial comment and then a question. You used the term "contract for America."

Daniel: Yeah.

Heidi: You're too young to know this, so I'm going to tell you that folks my age immediately get a red flag from that term, because it was the term that Newt Gingrich used — he was a former Republican Speaker of the House — and Democrats translated it to "contract on America." It was really the beginning of toxic politics.

Daniel: It was called a Contract for America? 

Heidi: Yes.

Daniel: That's really good to know. 

Heidi: Yeah. Watch out for that term. My question is: I take it the meeting you're having in a few weeks is the follow-on to the Florence meeting. And I read the website on the Florence meeting — you asked four or five or six really interesting, penetrating questions. But there was no report on the outcome on the website. Is there anywhere where that was written up?

Daniel: No. We're hoping to hold these events annually, and this was the very first one. It was experimental, exploratory. There were a lot of ideas and no questions were answered. I hope to produce more insights after these events in the future. But that one — I have a bunch of notes written down in my notebook, but they really didn't end up making it out to the public.

Heidi: Well, I will say, if you're asking similar questions this time, there are a lot of people who would be interested in the answers — not using "answers" as if it's the be-all and end-all, just the thinking.

Daniel: Totally. Well, it was definitely interesting. I appreciate that — it's encouraging, and it makes me more motivated to try to put something together that can be publicly released after this event.

Heidi: Great. Seeing that we're running out of time, I do have one more question I'm really curious about. I see that you're using AI to some extent in what you're doing, as we are. And as I'm sure you know, the negative reaction to AI is very strong. Do you find that at all concerning? Are you forging ahead using AI, as we are? What are your thoughts about using AI given all the negative implications?

Daniel: We used AI in a set of data analyses where we were working with a very large data set. It was actually a form of AI that was a bit more rudimentary — machine learning, natural language processing — not to produce things, but to detect patterns in the data and in the language of the data set we were using.

AI is complicated, and it's one of those unresolved questions. There are a lot of gray areas: where is it acceptable to use? Where is it harmful? Where is it substituting for real thinking versus helping you think? I don't think anyone has totally answered those questions yet, because it's such an early emerging thing and we're all feeling our way through it.

Personally, I have found it to be useful as an entity to bounce ideas off of and to help refine my thinking, and for data analysis it's been useful. But when it comes to generating ideas or doing writing, I don't find it useful in that sense. There are ethical questions that emerge. I don't think we're close to that territory when it comes to any ethical concerns about our work. But it's something we've been keeping our eye on, and will continue to do so as the technology evolves.

Heidi: One of the things that intrigues us about AI is that it has the ability to listen to more people than any person or organization could possibly listen to. In a sense, it's pulling from anyone who puts anything on the internet — which is way, way broader than any poll that we could do. It has the ability to pull all that together. Now, you have to ask: what are the algorithms it's using to pull all that together, and is it benign or is it malicious? And if you assume it's benign or neutral, it sure is an amazing tool to do things that are useful in our field that couldn't be done before.

Daniel: I totally agree. Using it with a healthy respect and awareness of the ways it can go wrong, and with skepticism — using it rather than allowing it to use you — that's the name of the game here. Being aware of its power and the ways it can go off the rails is really important, but it can be a really effective tool.

Heidi: Yeah. So my last question to everybody is: what didn't I ask that I should have asked?

Daniel: Oh, good question. You asked a lot of good questions, and I feel like I covered really all the things I wanted to talk about. I guess I would just say: where can people who are interested in learning more about the Beacon Project go to learn more about potentialism and the work we've been doing? I would love to direct people to our Substack — just Google "Beacon Project Substack" and you'll find it. 

We have several articles that offer a more detailed description of the way we've been thinking about this — the journey to this point and where we're hoping to go from here. For any of your listeners who are interested in learning more, I would love to get feedback from them. Hear from you if it resonates, if it doesn't, if it sounds crazy, if it's exciting, anything in between.

Heidi: That reminds me that somewhere on the website it says "If you want to get involved" and there's a place to click. Is that what you're thinking of in terms of getting involved — giving you feedback — or are there other ways?

Daniel: At this point, yes — if a listener is saying "Oh, this really speaks to me," or "Daniel, you should check out this reading," or "I do the kind of work that could be helpful in a particular way" — I'd love to hear from you. Just read the materials we have on Substack and let us know what you think. Those are the two ways that I think are most useful for getting involved at this point.

Heidi: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I have learned more than I knew from looking at the website, but the website's really interesting, so I hope folks will go there. Thanks.

Daniel: Thank you, Heidi. It was a pleasure.