Debate Maps

Maps of society’s arguments, claims, opinions, and evidence on complex issues.

 
  • While The Society Library is dedicated to enabling access to information through our libraries, we recognize the difficult and tricky work of organizing that content into formal deliberation. There are hundreds of cognitive biases and logical pitfalls that can get in our way as human beings. Therefore, as a part of our service, The Society Library endeavors to map the knowledge we collect into “debate maps,” which essentially means we are organizing the arguments, claims, evidence, and opinions from all points of view into a formal debate - and effectively enabling “societal-scale debate.” A feat which may be otherwise impossible to organize in comparable levels of comprehensiveness with the existing limits of media, language, and human bandwidth to which we are confined.

  • Debates usually begin with a question, but at The Society Library - it ends with them. Because the framing of a question can both bias a debate and also give important shape to it, we first collect arguments, claims, opinions, and evidence from various media and from “all” points of view to discover the questions which society is arguing about.

    We call this process “descriptive emergent structuring.” By discovering the “fundamental questions” of a topic, we are given a comprehensive and inclusive framing of the debate which makes it less likely that we will bias it ourselves. We believe techniques like this are very important, as we strive to serve without bias as much as possible. After we have these questions, we flesh out all possible answers to these questions, which are informed collaboratively by the collective reasoning and knowledge of a given population. We then logically link argumentation together via 20+ logical relationships, which therefore structures a debate.

    The Society Library is a small organization, but we work to be as exhaustive and as comprehensive as our resources permit. We only hope to create more informed, inclusive, and less biased collections as we increase in size over time.

  • Debate and deliberation is integral to democracy, and our hope is to contribute to scaling that process. We want to find a way in which all voices have an opportunity to be heard on matters of importance to them, and that their voices are given the best representation in the process. We believe that in doing so, and by mapping and offering these maps for free to the public, that we we can improve the collective intelligence of society as a whole, and that collectively we will all become more informed, less polarized/divisive, become more understanding/empathetic, and be more intellectually humbled by engaging with these maps. We are looking forward to studying these impacts on cognition by more sophisticated means as resources permit. We also believe this data may contribute to the development of more sophisticated decision-making models, and potentially even AI applications, which we are also looking forward to testing.

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This video is a talk given by The Society Library’s Executive Director in 2021.

 

Our Debate Mapping program is branded “The Great American Debate,” a nod to our current U.S. centric focus.

 

Our Library Topics Are Our Debate Topics:


Where We Pull Content From