Most posts on Substack accord to the structure of the classical thinkpiece — a conceptually structured long-form meditation on a subject that prioritises consideration of the ‘Why’ of a subject alongside the ‘What’. It’s a vitally important genre that is generally prioritised in conventional media for more trivial subjects. The breadth of brilliant thinkpieces as can be found on Substack is the foundation of the reason why this platform has won and justified so much affection.
I don’t think, however, that thinkpiecing is the only means by which authors can provide their readers value, on Substack or elsewhere. In a world as intensely complex as ours, the will towards belief in unearned simplicities exerts a stronger and stronger pull everyday. Simplification can be horribly deleterious on our ability to perceive things correctly; but, right up until the point at which it crosses this threshold, simplification is actually the most vital tool we have for forming the most accurate and connected possible picture of our world. The world is too complex for complete understanding in breadth and depth to be possible. But by staying on the right side of that threshold of simplification, simplifying the right things in the right way and to the correct extent, we can get as close to such breadth/depth understanding as we’re likely to be able to.
The trick to staying on the right side of that threshold of absolute simplicity resides in the tools we use for understanding things. Heuristics, useful shorthands, mental models; lenses and frameworks, themselves often very simple, that can be applied to thinking of all kinds about many different subjects in order to ensure that, in our thinking, we:
Resist the pull of internal biases, such that can cause us to fool ourselves about ourselves or about that which we are considering
Resist the pull of external biases, which can be particularly destructive if we are members of in-groups (and which, if we are indeed members of in-groups, can be particularly destructive not only to our own thinking but to others’, too)
Understand not just the self-sufficient nature of a given subject, but something of that subject’s relation to other subjects as well
These kinds of tools-for-thinking are what I think Substack, as the premier destination for expressions of free, considered expert thought on the English-speaking internet, ought to provide more of. So I’m going to provide a few of my own here.
For all the articles I publish in the ‘Tool Kit’ series I’m going to largely keep to a kind of “half-paid” mechanic, whereby the paywall for the content can be found a little way down the stretch. Free readers should be able to glean a good amount of usable insight from the universally accessible portion [1]; the juicier details, insights and advice around implementation will be for paid subscribers only.
We begin with a table for three.
[1] Free readers should also, by the measure of the content available to them, be able to decide if they think having access to the detailed stuff is worth their while.
Few traditions in Western society have endured like the two-person debate. Having originated independently in civilisations as ancient and far-afield of each other as Athens in Greece and Shastrartha in India, the debate first became a fixture of European social life in London in the 1740s. Initially the restricted preserve of private clubs and secret societies, the debate eventually became an emblem of the Age of Enlightenment itself, as public debating societies welcomed participants of both genders and all walks of life to participate in a good intellectual spar while paying customers looked on.
Some 250+ years hence, and it has to come to feel that, if we have not come to live in the debate society, then we have certainly come to carry them around at all times in our pockets. The widespread balkanisation of discourse of all kinds, owing largely to the hostile conditioning of personal interaction and communication by social media, has led to increased polarisation. As personalisation algorithms that rule newsfeeds subject people to more views and perspectives amenable to their own, the gulf between the poles of a given issue broadens and buzzes with greater hostility. But this is a familiar story outlining a familiar problem. What is needed is some form of a solution.
One may have been found—in the course of investigating the flaws of the two-sided debate, and trying to make room in an existing debate scenario for a gifted third participant, the contestants and I hit upon the concept of the Trialectic. A trialectic is a debate format between three champions designed to test their ability to develop their knowledge through exposure to each other and the audience, as well as maximise the audience’s learning opportunities on a given motion.
The Origin of the Trialectic
At my old outlet Wonk Bridge, I was preparing to chair a debate on the subject of “Good faith” and “Bad faith”, and how both concepts interacted and mutually governed discourse and thought in the Early Digital age. This debate was to take place between two of Wonk Bridge’s most notable voices, Oliver Cox and Sebastian Vogelpoel. Sebastian had been inspired by Oliver’s assertions in his article, A Short Introduction to the Mechanics of Bad Faith, and a two-way discussion had been arranged to give the two authors outlet to go at it.
That was when, Ruoji Tang, a third of our most notable voices, entered the arena, brought to my attention that she too had been stimulated by Oliver’s piece and produced a response of her own: Some Thoughts on the Mechanics of Bad Faith. The natural instinct was to then invite her to participate in the debate. But how?
We could have installed Ruoji as a chairperson, but that wouldn’t do, minimising her ability to actively contribute to the back-and-forth.
We could have reframed the debate as a roundtable featuring three participants, though this would most likely result in a pleasant if rudderless discussion, without the interrogative fire (and possibility for conceptual breakthroughs) there to be harnessed in a competitive environment.
It seemed clear that the ideal format would be a three-sided debate. But how? All the conventions of Western debate have taken the need for polarities, for the presence of a ‘For’ party and an ‘Against’ party, as a given. Certainly, no one present had ever participated in a debate specifically primed to enable and balance the contributions of three participants before.
Working without much in the way of precedent, a three-sided debate, we decided, was to be used as an opportunity to escape some of the more limiting strictures of the two-sided debate. No more need for an issue to be discussed in purely oppositional terms, or according to polarities (“X is good” and “X is bad”), and no more need, therefore, to pretend that the correct perspective on, or solution to, a subject worth debating can be found entirely on one side or another. The three-sided approach would allow for a more interesting and subtle range of distinct positions to be initially adopted on a single and distinct motion, with more scope for the participants to move around freely in the spirit of disinterestedly investigating the subject together, instead of being placed on a rhetorical hill and expected to fight or die upon it.
This three-sided format could still be regulated to encourage the participants to produce all manner of rhetorical fireworks, to compose great oratory and be daring with their ideas, as in a two-sided debate. Meanwhile, such a new approach could be used not just to remove the stigma that is attached to changing your mind in a debate (which, though it may be a wiser option, amounts to a concession); no, it could actively reward the ability to show evidence of learning, mutual engagement and willingness to progress from an initial assertion. With Ruoji in the fold we could hold not a dialectic on the subject of bad faith, but a Trialectic.
At Wonk Bridge, we had made it a point of editorial principle to abhor the non-pluralistic, science-agnostic, ahistorical, narrative excesses that plague the global media environment — an environment which has made itself wealthy and powerful via the stoking and maintenance of division between people’s hearts and minds.
It was, therefore, most exciting to have developed this new approach to the discussion of unwieldy, difficult, or tough-to-apprehend topics between multiple actors, aimed not at victory for the best speaker, but at the mutual improvement of understanding. It is a method that neither gives over-incentive for participants to try and ‘defeat’ their opponents, nor one which allows speakers the luxury of easy conversation that avoids the forcible admixture of possibly incompatible ideas.
I hope it may be of use to you as well.
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