The Power of Visualisation
How we miscalculated the climate change
When I was a member of a debate club at the Faculty of Law (despite being an architecture student), we often had workshops on proper and effective argumentation. How to persuade the opponent and, more importantly, the audience and the judges.
One of the most challenging skills to master was visualization. You must not only tell that this or that is bad, but you must also visualize the direct consequences of why it is bad. Those consequences have to be presented as vividly as possible, and the speaker has nothing but their imagination to do the job right.
It is not enough to argue that a specific policy is terrible because many people will lose jobs; the speaker has to visualize what that means on an everyday level.
When people lose jobs, they run into all sorts of problems; they have difficulty keeping up with the bills, their health deteriorates, and they are more often sick and in pain (imagine it!), plus they burden the medical services. Imagine those nurses being needlessly overworked and nervous with innocent patients. Do you want to be taken care of by such a nurse?
Also, their kids are doing poorly in school, they are less likely to develop their talents, and so the society loses many new potential Teslas, Beethovens, and…
