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

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, challenged, and examined. And from that exchange, you can actually make sense of the issue. That is deliberation. That is how adults solve problems.
I was fortunate recently to have that exact kind of experience when I presented the first session of a four-part series on using artificial intelligence to help people write their own personal stories.
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The Overton Window and Why It Matters Here   
Before I get into the specifics of what we covered, I want to take a moment to explain a concept that is useful for understanding how people think about what is acceptable and what is not, whether in politics, in public discourse, or in something as personal as your own writing style. It is called the Overton Window.
The concept was developed in the 1990s by Joseph Overton, a policy analyst at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Overton observed that at any given time, there exists a range of ideas and policies that the general public considers acceptable or at least worthy of serious discussion. Ideas inside that window are considered mainstream. Ideas outside it are considered radical or extreme. Politicians, Overton argued, generally will not champion policies that fall outside the window because doing so risks their electoral standing. The window is not fixed, however. It shifts over time as societal values evolve, as advocacy groups make their case, and as circumstances change. Prohibition, for example, was once squarely inside the window. Today, virtually no serious person advocates for making alcohol illegal again. The window moved.
Now, some critics have taken issue with the Overton Window over the years. Some argue it reinforces a false idea of a moderate center, that it oversimplifies the genuine diversity of opinion that exists even among people who call themselves moderates. Others have suggested the concept can be co-opted to serve particular ideological ends, that it is biased, or that it inadequately captures the full complexity of how ideas gain or lose traction in a free society. Those criticisms have merit as academic discussion points, but in my experience, the people who spend the most energy attacking a framework like the Overton Window tend to be the same folks who prefer debate over deliberation. They are more interested in discrediting the tool than in using it to understand one another.
Here is why I bring it up. I want you to apply the Overton Window to yourself, personally, as a writer. What is the most simple and the most complex type of writing that you are comfortable with? Where does your own window sit? Do not let someone else tell you where your window should be. That is your business.
I have a memory from kindergarten or first grade, I cannot recall exactly which, of a teacher who covered the picture on the page of a book and asked me to read the words and then describe what I imagined. I did my best, and when she uncovered the illustration, it was nothing like what I had described. She smiled and told me something I have never forgotten: reading allows you to see whatever you want to see, but a picture shows you only what it shows you. That, right there, is the power of the written word. And that kindergarten lesson, as simple as it was, defined the boundaries of my own Overton Window when it comes to writing. Words are more powerful than pictures because they invite the reader to participate in the creation of the image. Your writing can do the same thing if you let it.
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What We Actually Did in Session One
Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I spent roughly forty hours, and yes, that sounds like a lot, because it is, thinking about that very first meeting and how to set the stage properly. I knew from experience that in any four-part series, you start big and the numbers dwindle. Most people would not come back for session two. And if someone walks in for session two without having attended session one, catching up is going to be a real cha...