Two weeks ago Banksy installed a fantastic statue in Waterloo Place in London. A man walking with strong reassurance, holding a flag in front of him as his reason to move forward. But the flag covers his face, blinding him, not letting him see that he will fall off the pedestal. I look at the statue and I can quickly think about many leaders that are blinded by a flag, an idea, a conviction, and they even hold that flag to blind all their followers, and no one can see that they will fall into the abyss. That might be the easy and quick observation of this brilliant work by Banksy. The next observation and thought that came to my mind might be even more important:
Am I blinded by a flag?
And in the community I belong to, are we blinded by a flag?
Groupthink is one of the cognitive biases that don't let us see the faults in our reasoning and we make decisions just because they can easily be confirmed by what the group thinks. If we want to improve our decision making process, we need an explicit effort to remove the flag from our faces and see outside of our convictions. We really need to force ourselves to think "upon which evidence would I change my mind?". And the problem is that the group would probably bring more ideas to confirm a decision, instead of ideas against it. And we actually want to test the idea against its flaws.
In the Wikipedia article about groupthink, there is a section about prevention where roles such as the "critical evaluator" and "devil's advocate" are mentioned. There is also a reference to the work of Joris Graff, proposing a debate format designed to prevent groupthink. The goal of the debate is not to have a winner, but to find consensus and compromise by bringing diversity of arguments to the discussion.
In the PostgreSQL community sometimes we hear ideas such as "Postgres has won", or "just use PostgreSQL for everything". But maybe we are just blinded by a beautiful blue flag featuring a funny elephant called Slonik. At PGDay Lowlands we want to test those ideas with a debate, and we want the community to be part of the exercise. We want them to think out of the conformity of the group, for the benefit of the group. We want to challenge the community to exercise critical thinking so that we can make better decisions. The debate does not aim to shame those who bring ideas opposed to ours. The debate aims to remove the flag from our faces as Banksy is trying to warn us.
We invite everyone, from the PostgreSQL community and especially from outside our community, to submit your arguments for any of the debate topics that you can find in the Call for Debaters. Even if you are convinced in favor of an idea, make the exercise to think about arguments against that idea. That will test and challenge the idea and make it even stronger, or you may realize that the idea was actually bad and you will be able to celebrate that you are no longer blinded by the flag. We welcome people from other communities to help us think better and prevent our groupthink. The deadline is May 18, 2026.
Getting back to Banksy's statue, the representative of the Mayor of London said that Banksy's work "always draws great interest and debate". Getting back to Joris Graff, the fact that he is a philosopher of the University of Utrecht, the city where PGDay Lowlands will take place this year, is just a happy coincidence.
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