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About this document
We live in a world that insists on dividing us into two camps: left versus right, us versus them, pro versus anti. But what if this binary view is not just oversimplified—what if it's actively preventing us from understanding ourselves and finding paths forward on complex issues?
PatCon, a civic technologist working with opinion mapping tools, recently demonstrated how new approaches to collective sense-making can reveal the hidden complexity beneath seemingly simple divisions. His work extends Polis, a platform for large-scale opinion gathering, to show us something remarkable: most of our conflicts aren't actually two-sided.
Polis starts with a deceptively simple interface. Participants see statements about a topic and can only agree, disagree, or pass. No lengthy explanations, no nuanced positions—just binary choices. This constraint might seem limiting, but it serves a crucial purpose.
"The whole point is we are high-dimensional creatures," PatCon explains. "When you force people to the only thing they can do is agree and disagree, then you push the resolution of that discomfort into language itself. If you want to be understood, you have to write a new sentence."
Instead of allowing people to hedge with "I sort of agree but..." responses, the system pushes them to articulate their true position through new statements. This creates what PatCon calls "high signal" data—responses that clearly differentiate between genuine differences of opinion.
As people respond, an algorithm clusters them based on their patterns of agreement and disagreement. The result appears as a map, with each cluster representing a group of people who consistently agree with each other and disagree with other groups.
In one transportation consultation, what initially appeared to be a simple divide between car drivers and transit supporters revealed itself as something more complex. The algorithm identified three distinct groups:
That third group was invisible in traditional left-right framing. These were people who supported transit investment but had fundamentally different concerns—they wanted better connections between cities, not within them. They were progressive in values but rural in context.
"If you live in a city, you might think there's just the car drivers, then there's the bikers," PatCon notes. "But in this sort of conversation, you get this surfacing of, oh no, one side has separate things that bind them. We're not just this monolithic us versus them."
The implications go beyond just finding more groups. If there are two groups, there's one boundary between them—one site of tension to navigate. But three groups create three boundaries. Five groups create fifteen boundaries between all possible combinations.
"Every boundary is a conversation," PatCon explains, "and every boundary that we cannot see together is a conversation that we probably can't have together."
When our media and political infrastructure treats complex issues as binary choices, we're essentially trying to have one conversation where fifteen different conversations need to happen. No wonder everything feels broken.