🤯Climate Change - Untie the Knot of Argument
From Knot to Know
The best place to start is the summary which illustrates how the STPrism ideas can untie the knot of argument and division and illuminate productive lines of understanding. It provides a platform for exploring the basis and logic of the ideas of those positioned on ‘different sides’ of the argument.
This enlightenment comes from taking a Systems Thinking perspective of the situation and proposing a scaffold in which a productive debate can be formed.
It is a demonstration of how the principles from different Systems Thinking / Complexity Science can be introduced to break the deadlock and degradation (ultimately to name calling) often experienced over contested topics. It unties the knot that comes from position taking - for example the accusation of climate denier - and instead allows both proponents and critics of key ideas to investigate the merit of each idea more thoroughly.
The various pieces - summary, platform, perspective, scaffold etc - start with the prompt used to generate the response. The responses are from Gemini but are based on the Systems Thinking expertise held as single NotebookLM file (you may notice this is referenced as QSet), this QSet file itself is derived from separate NotebookLM files for each author/source in Systems Thinking / Complexity Science.
tl;dr Technical Outline
Once the nature and nuance of the perspective approach is established by the STPrism approach and expressed in the form of a NotebookLM it can be used to ‘condition’ queries into wider sources and bodies of work and/or opinion. Going ‘straight in’ with a query to a Gemini (or OpenAI, Perpicacity etc) suffers from the ‘colour run’ or grey problems you see when you wash all your clothes together - the sort of murky blue grey of aggregate consensus rather than the primary colours of the individual ideas.
The QSet summary notebook (here referenced as qset:all concatenated) establishes the specific focus, a Systems Thinking focus, before then delving into the detail from the broader sources. It can be considered a form of evolved prompt but without having to be specific, and perhaps locked down in terminology, it introduces the critical gist of the perspective(s) being used.
Otherwise small details in the prompts here are important. It sets the frame by directly critiquing the ‘settled science’ rubbish in the first prompt ‘contested science’ and then introduces specific name references, for example Judith Curry, in the analysis phase.
For those interested in the development, and use case, of these prompts the order is important. The perspective prompt started the sequence, this led to the scaffold prompt to unlock/unstick the dilemma, then the summary prompt to explain the context and finally the specific platform prompt of what to do next.
As a Research-Project I ran the same queries but using the Stafford Beer NotebookLM to define the point of view. The result was very informative tl;dr less useful in providing breakthrough approaches and a critique that was rather general and unspecific
🤯WOW
This whole discussion wins a WOW because of the ease with which we can introduce a complex, multifaceted point of view into a contested topic and produce an answer, including the Rich Picture, which avoids the petty binary arguments and insults ‘climate denier’ but instead looks into the structure of the challenge.
Link to original