A ghost project - Debate visual language

Can you represent the structure of a debate visually, to understand where others are coming from?

A few years ago, the UK voted to leave the European Union. Since then, the UK left the EU. Before the vote, there was a lot of emotion surrounding the debate about whether one should vote to stay or leave. I witnessed the discussion but couldn’t express my opinion during the vote as an EU citizen.

Years after the vote, my biggest impression remains how little of the debate was about reasoned arguments. Both sides were making a lot of social-media-ready memes before the vote. The emotional noise was far louder than the nature of the arguments themselves.

I could not find at the time, and perhaps I wasn’t looking for, a single place where the core arguments for and against leaving the European Union were listed and analysed.

I wondered if it would not have been possible to represent the arguments visually, structure them, and make them easy to understand without the emotional noise surrounding them.

Would it not be possible for the structure of an argument to be understood and even accepted by people who disagreed with the conclusion?

And when a conclusion is not accepted, why is it so? Any of the arguments brought, given the complex nature and uncertainty around the implications of choosing to leave the European Union would rely on a set of assumptions, and one could decide whether to accept or dismiss these assumptions.

I spent a couple of afternoons jotting down some initial thoughts about a visual language to do so. Still, I’ve left the idea to rest until now.

I’m not sure the effort to develop such a language would bring a real advantage over a reasoned bullet list with the main points of a debate listed - ideally together with the assumptions / conditions that would make them valid.

Today, on a long walk, I was examining the idea, and it occurred to me that perhaps this is nothing more than a belief network - an artificial intelligence technology that assigns probabilities on a set of beliefs, using the Bayes theorem as a basis to calculate probabilities given the situation observed.

Now, this is what I vaguely recall about belief networks before hastily checking on chatGpt to see how well I remember.

After checking, I can say that I wasn’t entirely off the mark. Belief networks are explicitly used with numbers and probabilities, more specifically, and they don’t deal with qualitative arguments.

So, while there is a connection, it’s not as close as I initially thought.

I came across existing languages and representations for arguments. The closest match is argument maps, which outline the structure of a debate.

The language I am envisioning is different in a couple of key aspects.

1. In terms of objectives, the visual language should allow you to determine under which conditions you ought to change your mind about the conclusion you have reached. First of all, it is meant to be a tool for self-reflection. It lets you be clear about how much you are looking at the evidence available, what specific points in a debate you pay attention to and which ones you discard. Most powerfully, realise how much your pre-convictions, principles and beliefs determine the conclusion.

2. A second objective is to enable two persons who reach opposite conclusions about a debate, be able to co-create a map of the argument that they can both agree on - stucturally. They can still reach different conclusions. The argument network includes a person’s guiding principles, how valid the person finds specific parts of the evidence, or how much weight the person gives to one part of an argument instead of another in the discussion.

3. The visual language is interactive. You can change weights, ignore parts of the network, imagine that some new strong evidence becomes available, and verify how your conclusion should change in those situations according to the structure you created. Chances are you may not like that initially. I think it’s worthwhile realising that maybe you are not just making a rational argument, after all.

This visual language would be most helpful in arguments about complex topics where there is a lot of uncertainty, and forecasts are little more than a finder in the air.

This remains a ghost project for now. At the moment, my artsy project is Cucinalist, and I will stick to it a bit longer before moving on to another one - maybe this one.

If you are interested in discussing this further, please reach out by email.

Any suggestions of things that already do that would also be more than welcome!