Voters were presented with up to 41 statements that relate to the question, most of which (35) have been generated by the GPT-3 language model. They then agreed, disagreed or passed on the Polis platform.

In a perfect world, I would include my comments in the interactive polis report. However, integrating my elements with the dynamic page would require another day of work. I encourage you to open the report in a second browser window and explore it along with my commentary, which follows the report’s structure.

To you let you the reader participate and embrace the dynamics of polis, I left the discussion open. Therefore, it is possible that someone will answer additional questions or share the link with their friends in the meanwhile. As the groups are quite dynamic, they may be different by the time you are reading this. Nevertheless, the main trends are likely to stay the same.

I erred on the side of brevity, as I did not want to distract the reader from exploring the data themselves.

Interestingly, “You can’t reconcile with it.” (11) is the most controversial statement. I think this proves the value of the polis approach of voting on many separate statements. If we just presented voters with this simple yes-or-no question, we may get the impression that opinions on this are polarized. Without further investigati on, we might not realize how much the voters agree on.

Another point is that different people understood the reconciliation in a different way. Does that mean accepting the destruction? Doing everything one can to avert it, thus be at peace? Again, this is something we can learn from the other statements. Establishing what we mean by each word is often a challenge even in in-person discussions. There, the tendency is to establish one definition, which may not fit everyone. In this sense, polis can handle all the definitions in parallel, without imposing a norm.

It also appears that the divisive statements are more concrete – they make specific predictions and claims about nuclear war, confidence in the future, or past events. That may be because there is something tangible to disagree on, which may not be the case with many of the abstract statements.

There are two ways to interpret the common nature of statements that most people agree with. First, they are banal statements with no added value. The second is that clearly seeing that most people agree on something positive is hugely important.

Granted, this may not be the case here with a question that is mostly theoretical. However, when it comes to moral questions (or let topical issues), seeing that there is a lot of common ground is hugely important to emphasise with each other and have a more productive conversation. The question also does a lot of the work itself starting from the perspective of entire humanity. Quite often, it is easy to forget about this higher view – future, humanity, continuation of life.

note: groups have changed since the comments were writen, the section below is outdated. use the descriptions for inspiration

It is important to note that these groups are tools to help us better understand the opinion space. After all, the point of this tool is to find consensus, so using these clusters to antagonize or disregard opinions would be missing the point. The nicknames I have given to the groups may actually evoke partisan feelings, but they work too well to give them up.

This group focuses on acting quickly and taking responsibility. Its proponents clearly refuse to accept or relativize the threat of extinction. To them, the threat is not something one can or should just learn to live with.

When compared with the hippies, the activists are less concerned with environmental issues – the threat of nuclear weapons appears more prevalent in their responses. They tend to be more pessimistic and are less likely to believe that new philosophy or morality could help us face the risk.

The Hippies are characterized by emphasizing nature, non-violence, sustainability, and self-exploration. They may perceive environmental issues as the main threat to humanity and have focused on statements that address this issue, rather that nuclear weapons.

This is the largest group, which is not surprising on a university campus. In fact, this number seems quite low, given the prominence of environmental topics in young culture. One hypothesis for this could be that the high percentage of STEM students pushed the number down. If the survey was done in an area with humanities students, or let alone on a Western university, I would expect the number of hippies to be much higher.

They do not care as much. Committing to non-violence, or self-exploration does not appear that useful. However, they are concerned about the long-term trajectory of humankind, and absolutely are worried about slow, creeping issues that can harm us in the long run.

The relative prevalence of this group could again be attributed to the STEM background of many voters, as well as a high number of Eastern Europeans (read, Russians), whose cultural baseline may be different.

This section is dominated with confusing, ambiguous, or straight up confusing questions (21). That is a good sign. One interesting outlier statement 14 – The point is that the threat of nuclear war is not only a threat to humankind, but also a to the Human Project. The sentence is straightforward and syntactically sound. The most likely explanation is then that people did not understand the term Human Project or did not see how it differs from humanity. Several people have in fact asked me about it.

Learning that the idea of grand visions and human achievement beyond mere survival did not immediately spring to their minds was a was an important lesson for me, who takes these visions as natural.