Episode Details

Deliberation, Not Debate: A Casual Conversation on Writing Your Story with AI
Reflections on Session One of a Four-Part Series
By Paul Truesdell

This piece is written for those who attended the first session of our four-part series on using artificial intelligence to write your own personal stories. It is also written for the lady who arrived a bit late and missed the handout, for those who could not attend but wish they had, and for anyone considering joining us for session two. Consider this your on-ramp. Consider this your invitation to keep going.
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One of the things I enjoy most in life, beyond doing the talking myself, is listening. Really listening. Not the kind of listening where you are just waiting for the other person to stop so you can say your piece, but the kind where you are genuinely trying to understand the why behind what someone is telling you.
In my world, the why is what we call the qualitative analysis. You have your quantitative side, of course, the facts and figures, the hard numbers. And those numbers tell a powerful story. But sometimes the numbers alone do not tell the full story. You can have a situation where one plus one plainly equals two, and yet the consensus among a great many people will insist the answer is three. No amount of arithmetic will change their minds. You see this all the time in life. Something is objectively, unequivocally wrong, and yet to another group of perfectly reasonable folks, it is just fine. They see it differently, and that is the end of the discussion.
That gap between what the numbers say and what people believe is where I like to spend my time. When I teach, when I instruct, when I advise clients on their financial futures, I like to explain the why. I like to walk people through the deliberative process. How did I arrive at this answer? How did I come to this conclusion? What is the common sense path that got us here?
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The Difference Between Debate and Deliberation
One of the things I see throughout the world, and increasingly so, is a tendency for men and women to engage in debate rather than discussion. This is the very reason I use the phrase a casual conversation when describing what we do. I will often pair it with the words cocktail and coffee, because the image I want you to hold in your mind is that of breaking bread together, having something to drink, and simply talking. People have been doing this for centuries. It is not a debate. It is a conversation.
We have all met people, usually around the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthday parties, who turn every gathering into a contest. The conversation becomes a debate. People get excited, then agitated, then angry. Somebody storms off. Somebody else sits quietly fuming into their mashed potatoes. And every sensible person in the room thinks the same thing: I do not want anything to do with that.
A wonderful conversation between people, even people who do not agree on much of anything, is one that has moved from debate into deliberation. Debate is about owning another person. It is one-upmanship. It is about winning. I have known people you cannot even share a meal with because they will turn away from you, ignore you, and only engage when they see an opportunity to elevate themselves at your expense. Whether that comes from deep insecurity or simply a gap in their personal development, I do not know and frankly do not care. The result is the same. They are debaters, not deliberators.
Deliberation is about getting somewhere. It is two or more people sitting down and honestly working through a question together. It is what I sometimes call sense-making, which is the practice of not just expressing an opinion, but explaining how you arrived at that opinion, the sequence of thought and experience that brought you to where you stand. When two different opinions are laid out this way, they can both be tested, cha