"What is both a rectangle and a circle?" Mahomed Hussein asked me. Was it a trick question? "Nope". Ok?... that's a head scratcher!

A rectangle, an &, a circle, and then an equals sign equalling ?!

And the solution to this question is found by moving from a lower dimensional space (2D) to a higher dimensional space (3D) as you can see here: https://wikisim.org/wiki/1122

This pattern for resolving a seemingly impossible question is so powerful and has helped me see our feverish public debates in a clear light.

Different camps of people have some of the puzzle pieces, but if they can bring themselves together, and bridge the gaps between them they can find the bigger picture.

They're both blue-ish! Two characters arguing with each other. One saying "IT'S THE SUN!!!" with a picture of a puzzle piece with a sun in it. And the second retorting "IT'S A LAKE!!!" with their puzzle piece above their head showing a lake in the background and hill side and trees in the foreground.

That's not to say everything someone says is right but there is always some truth in what they are saying. If the opposing side can find it and then make the strongest argument¹ they can from it then their opponent will almost invariably reward them with some pieces of the puzzle they didn't know they didn't have yet. When in the thick of a discussions it can be helpful to remind oneself that

No one is smart enough to be 100% wrong.²

...even if sometimes you have to be quite patient to find those verifiable truths.

And so if you can approach conversations with curiosity³⁴, and patience then with some luck you might both⁵ arrive at a bigger picture,

A beautiful landscape picture of mountains, blue sky, sun, soft clouds, sun beams, a lake, farm land, and hill top with the previous puzzle pieces showing and the two characters reconciled as they now realise that it is sun, lake, mountains, farm, field and more!

It's worth mentioning that there is a lot of respectful debate online, in professional and academic circles, and in person where people are generally more polite⁶. People avoid name calling, and stick to things they can observe or feel, and that's peaceful, refreshing and productive.

With WikiSim.org, those practical and philosophical approaches are being baked into the core of the project to help us make better sense of our complex world together through the use of back-of-the-envelope calculations, interactive visualisations (as you saw above) and simulations. If you're interested here's a 5 minute presentation on WikiSim.org; a few people said they'd prefer WikiSim's current state, & plan in written form so I'll do that for you soon, I promise!

¹ Steel manning an argument is listening to someone and then trying to make the strongest argument you can from what they've said. This is the opposite of straw manning which aims to misrepresent or take the weakest elements of someone's argument.

² This quote might be from Ken Wilber.

³ Curiosity about @jonmills.swns.com's post on BlueSky, and gratitude for his patience and answer (which was also very helpful and taught me something new).

⁴ Curiosity about Piet Knijnenburg's post on LinkedIn, and gratitude for his patience and longer answer (which I've yet to wrap my brain around 🙂).

⁵ Note that this article says "one or more people can unify" instead of "two or more". This is also another powerful pattern: we don't need to wait for others to agree with us, we can agree with them first. We can work towards accommodating and integrating both our and their seemingly incompatible perspectives. This unilateral action subverts and shows the irrelevance of the zero sum, hero-conflict narratives baked into our current model of debates and the fictional narratives of our cultures. And yet it is a peaceful and unifying action; it is quietly yet powerfully productive.

⁶ Jazz Emu's "Content" including a comment on online vs offline interactions.