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The Value of Grey Thinking (2016)

153 points by UrbanPiper 7y ago

feanaro 7y ago
A lot of the commenters are linking grey thinking to indecisiveness, but I think these are separate dimensions. The ability to think in a more nuanced way does not prevent you from making a decision. One can be aware of a problem not being reducible to a single T-or-not-T while still being able to reach a decision. The reflex to do this reduction while trying to reach a decision is itself a symptom of infection with black-and-white thinking, in my opinion. Converting a model into a decision is not the same as projecting all components of a model onto orthogonal dimensions (that is, black-and-whiting). Rather, black-and-whiting refers to doing this projection at each step, dropping information and shoehorning conclusions into either being true or false.
givinguflac 7y ago
In my experience there are those who are so set in their views that the mere suggestion of grey thinking infuriates them. Thank you for posting this, it's helpful to have a definition for what I'd like to think I've adopted as my way of thinking.
- mrsmee89 7y ago
  I had the exact same reaction.
mrsmee89 7y ago
In spirit of this article, I wonder why grey thinking is so uncommon. I get it’s hard but it feels like it’s only hard because it’s uncommon. When did removing nuance become such a common way of upbringing? What’s the driving force behind removing nuance? Curious what the HackerNews community thinks.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ssivark 7y ago
  The most plausible overarching factor is being flooded with so much information that one is perennially stuck in triage mode. And in triage mode, you need quick decision making, which leads to adopting black and white thinking. Another reinforcing factor is the zeitgeist that fetishizes attitudes like “getting things done” and “velocity of decision making” — where you’re essentially deliberately trying to place yourself in triage mode. Black and white thinking enables one to proceed quickly because there are no grey areas where I’ve needs to stop and think; greyness/uncertainty is seen as a cognitive tax. The common theme underlying all these is a perceived scarcity of time (busyness). For those not used to thinking, it’s easier to be lost in action rather than lost in thought. Time spent thinking is consciously perceived (therefore conscious of wasting) compared to time spent acting. It is interesting to ponder whether this drive to busyness (note the similarity with business) stems from the “Protestant work ethic”, but I’m out of my depth and I don’t have a definite answer ;-) (refer Weber’s classic “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”)
- username90 7y ago
  > In spirit of this article, I wonder why grey thinking is so uncommon. It isn't, it is just that grey thinkers are all unique so don't easily unite behind a banner. Even worse, a grey thinker can often not recognize another grey thinker since their shades are so different that they look black/white to each other.
phn 7y ago
I call it keeping an open mind and try to be empathetic, but it does feel like sailing in the wind at times. I think people in general tend to avoid that kind of uncertainty in their life.
cjslep 7y ago
The trouble with Grey Thinking is that many people are just smart enough to convince themselves they are doing it, but not honest enough when reflecting on themselves to question whether they're making a genuine effort.
nordsieck 7y ago
There is a dark side to grey thinking: Some people abandon black and white and replace it with a single shade of grey [1]. In order to have effective grey thinking, I think you need at least a basic understanding of statistics. This is also a great defense against others who seek to bamboozle you. ___ 1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallac...
- throwno 7y ago
  Exactly. Once you start to allow grey thinking next thing you know some fascist is suggesting that orangeman may not be that bad and that is something we can't have.
  - incompleteness 7y ago
    Ironic for these to be the only grey letters in the comment section. "A slippery slope; and so it all began..."
    - alasdair_ 7y ago
      I suspect the grey text is due to the use of the "orange man = bad" phrasing, popular on /r/thedonald as a way to trivialize the argument of any critic of Trump. Ironically, dismissing any criticism of Trump as simply this knee-jerk reaction, the people using this phrase quite often make the same mistake they are trying to accuse others of.
    - foolinaround 7y ago
      the other aspect that i just realized as I thought about this is that in evaluating Trump in grey thinking -- one may have him as light grey or dark grey... but this depends merely on the prioritization of the factors that is assigned. People who are benefited to an extent by Trump's impact/policies/actions have him at a light grey. The next thing it leads to is a demonization of the group in light grey by the group in dark grey - instead of white and black. why not the groups just agree to disagree and move on?
- 7y ago
abernard1 7y ago
A perhaps unpopular opinion: "grey thinking" is a particular type of laziness for people in the educated class. In my experience, it's much more common for people to wave away fundamental problems with their worldview by saying "it's a grey area" than it is for people with strong (and "incorrect") views to admit that their model is incomplete. The obvious failure of grey thinking is that there are clear, objective differences in results in the real world when white/black thinking is applied. If we were to take a 1980s Hong Kong "Capitalism is magic and the answer to all our problems!" and compare it to a 2010s Venezuela "Socialism is magic and the answer to all our problems!", it's very hard to square away the grey and say that one of those models wasn't fundamentally true in a practical sense.
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  > it's much more common for people to wave away fundamental problems with their worldview I think this applies equally to black-and-white thinking. Intellectual laziness can dress itself up in many ways. The Meaningness blog[0] sums this up well: > Confused stances[1] are attitudes to meaningness that refuse to acknowledge nebulosity. One strategy is to fixate meanings, attempting to deny their nebulosity by trying to make them solid, eternal, and unambiguous. Another is to deny meaningfulness altogether, or to say that it is not important, or cannot be known. [0] https://meaningness.com/nebulosity https://meaningness.com/nebulosity [1] https://meaningness.com/fixation-and-denial https://meaningness.com/fixation-and-denial
- username90 7y ago
  Referencing the concept when defending your ignorance is not grey thinking. Grey thinking is obviously good, ignoring the merits of the other side is just wasteful and ignoring the demerits of your own side is dangerous. It is just that every good advice will get misused by people who don't understand it. There is no piece of advice that can help such people, they will just turn it around and use it to defend their current way of thinking. Teach them about logical fallacies and they will use it to "poke holes" in perfectly fine arguments, etc.
  - abernard1 7y ago
stareatgoats 7y ago
> the reality is all grey area. All of it. There are very few black and white answers The inherent contradiction in this quote needed to be highlighted. In fact "grey thinking" is superior to black and white thinking in many cases, just not all. In some cases the answer is just simply yes or no, and no buts. As to why grey thinking is so hard I think the article leaves out a major reason: grey thinking is more demanding. We will as humans by necessity always try and simplify things as far as it is possible, in order to save mental resources. Sometimes it is good enough, many (most?) times it leads astray, or at least gives an impression of simplicity that isn't really there.
- username90 7y ago
  In my view black and white are just shades of grey so it should never have better results. I'd say that the only benefits of black and white thinking are that it takes less effort and that it is easier to find like minded individuals when your thinking is simpler.
- lanternslight 7y ago
  Does the value of grey thinking outweigh the cognitive cost is the question.
- deltron3030 7y ago
  Grey thinking isn't equally valuable, because in essence it means that you're trying to fill the void between your own environment and experience within it, and the collective experience, general knowledge and wisdom you've been exposed to. Some dots are easier to connect than others, and not every environment has the same amount of options available (dots you can connect to).
taneq 7y ago
We have a rule with our kids that we'll answer any question that they ask and articulate. "Why?" is always met with "Why what?" but if they can coherently say what they want to know we'll do our level best to explain it. Also, only a Sith deals in absolutes (generally).
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  >Also, only a Sith deals in absolutes (generally). Anyone uttering the phrase "only a Sith deals in absolutes" must therefore be a Sith. Dammit Obi-Wan. You fooled us all.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Adventure. Excitement. A Jedi craves them occasionally, I guess.
mrandish 7y ago
Paul Graham just posted a directly relevant blog today on the challenges of being a "moderate" in polarized times. http://paulgraham.com/mod.html http://paulgraham.com/mod.html
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
  Interesting link, but this line is just absurd: "In the 20th century, a lot of very smart people were Marxists — just no one who was smart about the subjects Marxism involves." I have no idea what Graham was thinking, or if he was thinking at all, when he wrote this line. There have been hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people all around the world who easily crossed the threshold of "smart" in fields like economics, social policy, government, psychology, game theory and many more - and they were Marxists too.
  - david927 7y ago
    I'll give Paul credit for trying to be a thinker in a time period where fewer make that effort. The problem that he faces is that he's an exemplar of the thinking of his location; he's the embodiment of the Silicon Valley mindset, which is both narrow and flawed. Like others in the valley, he has a habit of giving new labels to previously well-explored ideas and refusing to consider any economic model that isn't skewed towards the very wealthiest.
- foolinaround 7y ago
  the generalizations pg makes are too broad. > The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk. You don't get to pick and choose. Your opinions about taxation can be predicted from your opinions about same-sex marriage. Now,if a person were a conservative christian, them being a conservative would drive their position on taxation, while being christian would drive their position on gay marriage, however that alone would not make them an idealogue. I think the idealogue is one who has come to his position, without considering the opposite position, thereby discounting it completely.
cvolzer3 7y ago
“Grey Thinking” as a term does a poor job at conveying what I _think_ the author wants to say. And that is, (1) don’t make generic statements and (2) consider your perspective. When you boil a problem down to its specifics, you get back to black and white thinking. Using the article’s example, “War is awful but history shows it to be occasionally necessary, and a very complex phenomenon” still contains the black and white statement of “War is good when situation X occurs and bad when situation Y occurs.”
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > what I _think_ the author wants to say. And that is, (1) don’t make generic statements I don't know if that's what the author meant, but it is bad thinking. If you insist on no generalizations, you can't understand anything - the world is huge and awash with facts. Generalization is the process through which one can ignore irrelevant facts and focus on the important ones. An example: One might start out with the idea that men are stronger than women. This is not an unreasonable position to hold, but it certainly lacks some nuance. One could point out, for example, that some women are stronger than some men. Which is true. However, this counter example is pretty weak, because most men are stronger than most women, while very few women are stronger than most men. A more refined version of the original statement is: men have 2 std dev greater upper body strength than women, or in more approachable parlance: 95% of men have stronger upper bodies than the average woman. It is true that the positive tails of both distributions extend to infinity, so there will always be examples of women who are strong in relation to most men. But it is also true that you will almost never find a woman who is the strongest person (at a given task - strength is specific). At the end of the day, it is possible to craft true generic statements that capture enough nuance to be both useful and simple with a basic understanding of statistics.
Koshkin 7y ago
AMC's The Walking Dead series presents many good examples of grey thinking (and the struggles that lead to it).
Ozzie_osman 7y ago
I agree with the article in general, but that said, I do think a lot of successful people are successful because they are highly opinionated in black-and-white ways. Coming across people like this in life can be frustrating whether they tend to be right or wrong. I've definitely known and worked with a few people who were black-and-white thinkers and abstracted away and ignored a lot of second order effects that could negate their opinion, but had such good intuition that they tended to be right anyway. A good read on this is “The Cognitive Distortions of Founders” by Michael Dearing https://link.medium.com/Ri20AKKuL2 https://link.medium.com/Ri20AKKuL2.
- wwarner 7y ago
  Yes, the article ought to mention the downside of grey thinking. The way forward is found by closing the gap between ambiguity and certainty. "All progress depends on the unreasonable man".
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  The "dose" argument in the article is also rather unconvincing, and the examples used show this. I suppose this is a topic where I know something (capitalism and socialism). The author writes: > Capitalism is enormously productive but has many limitations. Some socialist institutions actually work well in a capitalist economy, but pure socialism hasn’t tended to work at all. But this is actually a counter-example. Most socialists (and certainly all of the originators and main theorists) would contend that socialism represents a pure qualitative break with capitalism, that socialism is at odds with capitalism in many ways (law of value, commodity production, class society) and that to speak of implementing "socialist policies" is worse than meaningless, it is a misunderstanding. They have some good reasons to say that socialism represents such a qualitative break with capitalism. So from my point of view, you can start out thinking "gray" (most people uninformed on the scholarly work on the difference between capitalism and socialism take the point of view of the article) but when you look further, you actually see that it's black and white. This example, at least, undermined the author's point. "Quantitative scale-based thinking" means that quality rarely enters the mix (except, perplexingly, in the example that "trying heroin once is bad"). Quantitative thinking is not always a perfect fit, because (1) it assumes the object under investigation is quantifiable, (2) it assumes the object is mathematically and formal-logically comparable, (3) quantitative models often simplify beyond how a qualitative model would (as an example, Samuelson's "commodity 1" and "commodity 2", or the presumption that inputs=outputs in Steedman). Qualitative and quantitative thinking are both important, and the preference for quantitative over qualitative has become increasingly common; as a famous German economist once pointed out (in the criticism of Bentham's utilitarianism), quality logically preceeds quantity. If you don't know what you're talking about, its measurement will be a lot more difficult. This is the same argument levelled at Ricardo (the confusion of form, substance and magnitude into one monstrous mess).
zallarak 7y ago
Interesting because to me, “Grey Thinking” is the norm in governments. That’s how they get away with being so wasteful.
- nradov 7y ago
  So wasteful compared to what?
zwieback 7y ago
Not only is reality grey it's also multi-dimensional, there are usually many simultaneous axes on which we have to find where we stand. That's what makes it so difficult and people just snap on to a position instead.
throwaway72873 7y ago
I think most "thinking" today is just sort of clickbaitish: You are good person right? So you must do XYZ.... Often "that sucks" is perfectly good answer.
programmertote 7y ago
I used to be an opinionated person in college. I went to a fairly liberal college and drank their cool aid. Then I graduated, grew older and saw a lot more nuances in life. These experiences turned me to appreciate more about grey thinking. Sure there are some cases in which we can draw a fine line between black and white zones (like rape). But most things (problems) in the world have some shade of grey to it. For example, when it comes to events we read in the news (esp. the ones published by western-based media) about other regions have heavy bias that born out of both western values and limited (very, very often one sided) info they obtained from the people they hang out with. Even reputable publications like NYTimes and BBC, have obvious biases if you have been to the places they are reporting about. That's why I stopped believing everything I see on mainstream media and start to ignore it mostly for almost a decade now. I also avoid social media (Facebook and to an extent Reddit) because what we see there mostly represent people's fleeting reactions and emotions to things that really doesn't matter to my life for the most part. Doing that really makes my mind free of a lot of bad karma.
- coffeecat 7y ago
  > Sure there are some cases in which we can draw a fine line between black and white zones (like rape). This is the quintessence of gray area. Sure, we have violent rape versus mutually consensual, mutually enjoyable sex as black and white examples of rape and not-rape. What about mutually consensual sex where there's some kind of power imbalance? She reluctantly says yes, and doesn't seem to be enjoying it? She initially says yes, then she says stop a few minutes into it and he doesn't stop until the fourth time she says it? The gray area here is virtually endless.
AcerbicZero 7y ago
So, uh, yes, most things in life are nuanced; I didn't realize anyone was suggesting otherwise. That said, using an example based on two extremely coarse summaries of a complicated and nuanced politician, then trying to sum it up with "and reality is somewhere in the middle" isn't particularly useful or accurate. Are we so low on content that we need these "water is wet" articles?
- whokal 7y ago
  Why is water wet? ;-)
gmuslera 7y ago
I don't like to think in grey. But I try to see when I'm watching at me instead of at reality (i.e. "something is tasty" is about me, and the whole subjective category), accept that reality is complex and you have a limited view of it (and may be things that you don't know that you don't know). You can still make your own choices, but leave the door open to accept that there are different valid views of the problems and yours may not be between them.
samirillian 7y ago
This reads more like the power of not thinking much at all. Capitalism has good parts and bad parts is not a thought. Which parts are bad which parts are good and why. It's as if you saw kant taking a walk at the same time every day and thought that thinking consisted in taking regular walks. It's not the fact that he took walks that matters, it's the things he thought on those walks. It's not just brainlessly saying "a little of column a a little of column b," it's what you have to say about column a or b in particular that matters. What's being described here is much more like avoiding splitting which is for your emotional well-being but which has little to do with the actual quality of your thoughts.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
RE slippery slopes, I think we need to talk about the "slippery slope fallacy fallacy" at some point. Slippery slope argument isn't invalid when there's actual slippery slope involved. Or put another way, if you look at the dynamic behavior, there's plenty of structures around us that are metastable[0]. You can push and push on them, and they'll settle back roughly where they were - up until you cross a threshold, after which everything goes downhill very fast (and, at least in physics, releases a lot of energy in the process). For instance, tragedies of the commons are such systems in real life. One or few actors abusing the commons a little bit can be tolerable. But the more actors discover that this behavior is tolerated, the more still start to do the same, and at some point a threshold is crossed and everyone starts doing it, the commons gets exhausted, and everyone is worse off. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability
iazid 7y ago
Thanks for this website! I read a few other articles, thought I'd be bored quick but ended thinking "it's already the end?". Seems like they're putting into words many principles I found out for myself, a pleasure to read. Wish I could afford the sub.
zuhayeer 7y ago
"I talk grey, I don't keep it white and black" https://rapbits.com/s/662 https://rapbits.com/s/662

153 points by UrbanPiper 7y ago

A lot of the commenters are linking grey thinking to indecisiveness, but I think these are separate dimensions. The ability to think in a more nuanced way does not prevent you from making a decision. One can be aware of a problem not being reducible to a single T-or-not-T while still being able to reach a decision. The reflex to do this reduction while trying to reach a decision is itself a symptom of infection with black-and-white thinking, in my opinion. Converting a model into a decision is not the same as projecting all components of a model onto orthogonal dimensions (that is, black-and-whiting). Rather, black-and-whiting refers to doing this projection at each step, dropping information and shoehorning conclusions into either being true or false.

givinguflac 7y ago

In my experience there are those who are so set in their views that the mere suggestion of grey thinking infuriates them. Thank you for posting this, it's helpful to have a definition for what I'd like to think I've adopted as my way of thinking.

mrsmee89 7y ago
I had the exact same reaction.

mrsmee89 7y ago

In spirit of this article, I wonder why grey thinking is so uncommon. I get it’s hard but it feels like it’s only hard because it’s uncommon. When did removing nuance become such a common way of upbringing? What’s the driving force behind removing nuance? Curious what the HackerNews community thinks.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ssivark 7y ago
The most plausible overarching factor is being flooded with so much information that one is perennially stuck in triage mode. And in triage mode, you need quick decision making, which leads to adopting black and white thinking. Another reinforcing factor is the zeitgeist that fetishizes attitudes like “getting things done” and “velocity of decision making” — where you’re essentially deliberately trying to place yourself in triage mode. Black and white thinking enables one to proceed quickly because there are no grey areas where I’ve needs to stop and think; greyness/uncertainty is seen as a cognitive tax. The common theme underlying all these is a perceived scarcity of time (busyness). For those not used to thinking, it’s easier to be lost in action rather than lost in thought. Time spent thinking is consciously perceived (therefore conscious of wasting) compared to time spent acting. It is interesting to ponder whether this drive to busyness (note the similarity with business) stems from the “Protestant work ethic”, but I’m out of my depth and I don’t have a definite answer ;-) (refer Weber’s classic “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”)
username90 7y ago
> In spirit of this article, I wonder why grey thinking is so uncommon. It isn't, it is just that grey thinkers are all unique so don't easily unite behind a banner. Even worse, a grey thinker can often not recognize another grey thinker since their shades are so different that they look black/white to each other.

phn 7y ago

I call it keeping an open mind and try to be empathetic, but it does feel like sailing in the wind at times. I think people in general tend to avoid that kind of uncertainty in their life.

cjslep 7y ago

The trouble with Grey Thinking is that many people are just smart enough to convince themselves they are doing it, but not honest enough when reflecting on themselves to question whether they're making a genuine effort.

nordsieck 7y ago

There is a dark side to grey thinking: Some people abandon black and white and replace it with a single shade of grey [1]. In order to have effective grey thinking, I think you need at least a basic understanding of statistics. This is also a great defense against others who seek to bamboozle you. ___ 1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallac...

throwno 7y ago
Exactly. Once you start to allow grey thinking next thing you know some fascist is suggesting that orangeman may not be that bad and that is something we can't have.
- incompleteness 7y ago
  Ironic for these to be the only grey letters in the comment section. "A slippery slope; and so it all began..."
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    I suspect the grey text is due to the use of the "orange man = bad" phrasing, popular on /r/thedonald as a way to trivialize the argument of any critic of Trump. Ironically, dismissing any criticism of Trump as simply this knee-jerk reaction, the people using this phrase quite often make the same mistake they are trying to accuse others of.
  - foolinaround 7y ago
    the other aspect that i just realized as I thought about this is that in evaluating Trump in grey thinking -- one may have him as light grey or dark grey... but this depends merely on the prioritization of the factors that is assigned. People who are benefited to an extent by Trump's impact/policies/actions have him at a light grey. The next thing it leads to is a demonization of the group in light grey by the group in dark grey - instead of white and black. why not the groups just agree to disagree and move on?
7y ago

abernard1 7y ago

A perhaps unpopular opinion: "grey thinking" is a particular type of laziness for people in the educated class. In my experience, it's much more common for people to wave away fundamental problems with their worldview by saying "it's a grey area" than it is for people with strong (and "incorrect") views to admit that their model is incomplete. The obvious failure of grey thinking is that there are clear, objective differences in results in the real world when white/black thinking is applied. If we were to take a 1980s Hong Kong "Capitalism is magic and the answer to all our problems!" and compare it to a 2010s Venezuela "Socialism is magic and the answer to all our problems!", it's very hard to square away the grey and say that one of those models wasn't fundamentally true in a practical sense.

notduncansmith 7y ago
> it's much more common for people to wave away fundamental problems with their worldview I think this applies equally to black-and-white thinking. Intellectual laziness can dress itself up in many ways. The Meaningness blog[0] sums this up well: > Confused stances[1] are attitudes to meaningness that refuse to acknowledge nebulosity. One strategy is to fixate meanings, attempting to deny their nebulosity by trying to make them solid, eternal, and unambiguous. Another is to deny meaningfulness altogether, or to say that it is not important, or cannot be known. [0] https://meaningness.com/nebulosity https://meaningness.com/nebulosity [1] https://meaningness.com/fixation-and-denial https://meaningness.com/fixation-and-denial
username90 7y ago
Referencing the concept when defending your ignorance is not grey thinking. Grey thinking is obviously good, ignoring the merits of the other side is just wasteful and ignoring the demerits of your own side is dangerous. It is just that every good advice will get misused by people who don't understand it. There is no piece of advice that can help such people, they will just turn it around and use it to defend their current way of thinking. Teach them about logical fallacies and they will use it to "poke holes" in perfectly fine arguments, etc.
- abernard1 7y ago

stareatgoats 7y ago

> the reality is all grey area. All of it. There are very few black and white answers The inherent contradiction in this quote needed to be highlighted. In fact "grey thinking" is superior to black and white thinking in many cases, just not all. In some cases the answer is just simply yes or no, and no buts. As to why grey thinking is so hard I think the article leaves out a major reason: grey thinking is more demanding. We will as humans by necessity always try and simplify things as far as it is possible, in order to save mental resources. Sometimes it is good enough, many (most?) times it leads astray, or at least gives an impression of simplicity that isn't really there.

username90 7y ago
In my view black and white are just shades of grey so it should never have better results. I'd say that the only benefits of black and white thinking are that it takes less effort and that it is easier to find like minded individuals when your thinking is simpler.
lanternslight 7y ago
Does the value of grey thinking outweigh the cognitive cost is the question.
deltron3030 7y ago
Grey thinking isn't equally valuable, because in essence it means that you're trying to fill the void between your own environment and experience within it, and the collective experience, general knowledge and wisdom you've been exposed to. Some dots are easier to connect than others, and not every environment has the same amount of options available (dots you can connect to).

taneq 7y ago

We have a rule with our kids that we'll answer any question that they ask and articulate. "Why?" is always met with "Why what?" but if they can coherently say what they want to know we'll do our level best to explain it. Also, only a Sith deals in absolutes (generally).

alasdair_ 7y ago
>Also, only a Sith deals in absolutes (generally). Anyone uttering the phrase "only a Sith deals in absolutes" must therefore be a Sith. Dammit Obi-Wan. You fooled us all.
- taneq 7y ago
  Adventure. Excitement. A Jedi craves them occasionally, I guess.

mrandish 7y ago

Paul Graham just posted a directly relevant blog today on the challenges of being a "moderate" in polarized times. http://paulgraham.com/mod.html http://paulgraham.com/mod.html

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
Interesting link, but this line is just absurd: "In the 20th century, a lot of very smart people were Marxists — just no one who was smart about the subjects Marxism involves." I have no idea what Graham was thinking, or if he was thinking at all, when he wrote this line. There have been hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people all around the world who easily crossed the threshold of "smart" in fields like economics, social policy, government, psychology, game theory and many more - and they were Marxists too.
- david927 7y ago
  I'll give Paul credit for trying to be a thinker in a time period where fewer make that effort. The problem that he faces is that he's an exemplar of the thinking of his location; he's the embodiment of the Silicon Valley mindset, which is both narrow and flawed. Like others in the valley, he has a habit of giving new labels to previously well-explored ideas and refusing to consider any economic model that isn't skewed towards the very wealthiest.
foolinaround 7y ago
the generalizations pg makes are too broad. > The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk. You don't get to pick and choose. Your opinions about taxation can be predicted from your opinions about same-sex marriage. Now,if a person were a conservative christian, them being a conservative would drive their position on taxation, while being christian would drive their position on gay marriage, however that alone would not make them an idealogue. I think the idealogue is one who has come to his position, without considering the opposite position, thereby discounting it completely.

cvolzer3 7y ago

“Grey Thinking” as a term does a poor job at conveying what I _think_ the author wants to say. And that is, (1) don’t make generic statements and (2) consider your perspective. When you boil a problem down to its specifics, you get back to black and white thinking. Using the article’s example, “War is awful but history shows it to be occasionally necessary, and a very complex phenomenon” still contains the black and white statement of “War is good when situation X occurs and bad when situation Y occurs.”

nordsieck 7y ago
> what I _think_ the author wants to say. And that is, (1) don’t make generic statements I don't know if that's what the author meant, but it is bad thinking. If you insist on no generalizations, you can't understand anything - the world is huge and awash with facts. Generalization is the process through which one can ignore irrelevant facts and focus on the important ones. An example: One might start out with the idea that men are stronger than women. This is not an unreasonable position to hold, but it certainly lacks some nuance. One could point out, for example, that some women are stronger than some men. Which is true. However, this counter example is pretty weak, because most men are stronger than most women, while very few women are stronger than most men. A more refined version of the original statement is: men have 2 std dev greater upper body strength than women, or in more approachable parlance: 95% of men have stronger upper bodies than the average woman. It is true that the positive tails of both distributions extend to infinity, so there will always be examples of women who are strong in relation to most men. But it is also true that you will almost never find a woman who is the strongest person (at a given task - strength is specific). At the end of the day, it is possible to craft true generic statements that capture enough nuance to be both useful and simple with a basic understanding of statistics.

Koshkin 7y ago

AMC's The Walking Dead series presents many good examples of grey thinking (and the struggles that lead to it).

Ozzie_osman 7y ago

I agree with the article in general, but that said, I do think a lot of successful people are successful because they are highly opinionated in black-and-white ways. Coming across people like this in life can be frustrating whether they tend to be right or wrong. I've definitely known and worked with a few people who were black-and-white thinkers and abstracted away and ignored a lot of second order effects that could negate their opinion, but had such good intuition that they tended to be right anyway. A good read on this is “The Cognitive Distortions of Founders” by Michael Dearing https://link.medium.com/Ri20AKKuL2 https://link.medium.com/Ri20AKKuL2.

wwarner 7y ago
Yes, the article ought to mention the downside of grey thinking. The way forward is found by closing the gap between ambiguity and certainty. "All progress depends on the unreasonable man".
claudiawerner 7y ago
The "dose" argument in the article is also rather unconvincing, and the examples used show this. I suppose this is a topic where I know something (capitalism and socialism). The author writes: > Capitalism is enormously productive but has many limitations. Some socialist institutions actually work well in a capitalist economy, but pure socialism hasn’t tended to work at all. But this is actually a counter-example. Most socialists (and certainly all of the originators and main theorists) would contend that socialism represents a pure qualitative break with capitalism, that socialism is at odds with capitalism in many ways (law of value, commodity production, class society) and that to speak of implementing "socialist policies" is worse than meaningless, it is a misunderstanding. They have some good reasons to say that socialism represents such a qualitative break with capitalism. So from my point of view, you can start out thinking "gray" (most people uninformed on the scholarly work on the difference between capitalism and socialism take the point of view of the article) but when you look further, you actually see that it's black and white. This example, at least, undermined the author's point. "Quantitative scale-based thinking" means that quality rarely enters the mix (except, perplexingly, in the example that "trying heroin once is bad"). Quantitative thinking is not always a perfect fit, because (1) it assumes the object under investigation is quantifiable, (2) it assumes the object is mathematically and formal-logically comparable, (3) quantitative models often simplify beyond how a qualitative model would (as an example, Samuelson's "commodity 1" and "commodity 2", or the presumption that inputs=outputs in Steedman). Qualitative and quantitative thinking are both important, and the preference for quantitative over qualitative has become increasingly common; as a famous German economist once pointed out (in the criticism of Bentham's utilitarianism), quality logically preceeds quantity. If you don't know what you're talking about, its measurement will be a lot more difficult. This is the same argument levelled at Ricardo (the confusion of form, substance and magnitude into one monstrous mess).

zallarak 7y ago

Interesting because to me, “Grey Thinking” is the norm in governments. That’s how they get away with being so wasteful.

nradov 7y ago
So wasteful compared to what?

zwieback 7y ago

Not only is reality grey it's also multi-dimensional, there are usually many simultaneous axes on which we have to find where we stand. That's what makes it so difficult and people just snap on to a position instead.

throwaway72873 7y ago

I think most "thinking" today is just sort of clickbaitish: You are good person right? So you must do XYZ.... Often "that sucks" is perfectly good answer.

programmertote 7y ago

I used to be an opinionated person in college. I went to a fairly liberal college and drank their cool aid. Then I graduated, grew older and saw a lot more nuances in life. These experiences turned me to appreciate more about grey thinking. Sure there are some cases in which we can draw a fine line between black and white zones (like rape). But most things (problems) in the world have some shade of grey to it. For example, when it comes to events we read in the news (esp. the ones published by western-based media) about other regions have heavy bias that born out of both western values and limited (very, very often one sided) info they obtained from the people they hang out with. Even reputable publications like NYTimes and BBC, have obvious biases if you have been to the places they are reporting about. That's why I stopped believing everything I see on mainstream media and start to ignore it mostly for almost a decade now. I also avoid social media (Facebook and to an extent Reddit) because what we see there mostly represent people's fleeting reactions and emotions to things that really doesn't matter to my life for the most part. Doing that really makes my mind free of a lot of bad karma.

coffeecat 7y ago
> Sure there are some cases in which we can draw a fine line between black and white zones (like rape). This is the quintessence of gray area. Sure, we have violent rape versus mutually consensual, mutually enjoyable sex as black and white examples of rape and not-rape. What about mutually consensual sex where there's some kind of power imbalance? She reluctantly says yes, and doesn't seem to be enjoying it? She initially says yes, then she says stop a few minutes into it and he doesn't stop until the fourth time she says it? The gray area here is virtually endless.

AcerbicZero 7y ago

So, uh, yes, most things in life are nuanced; I didn't realize anyone was suggesting otherwise. That said, using an example based on two extremely coarse summaries of a complicated and nuanced politician, then trying to sum it up with "and reality is somewhere in the middle" isn't particularly useful or accurate. Are we so low on content that we need these "water is wet" articles?

whokal 7y ago
Why is water wet? ;-)

gmuslera 7y ago

I don't like to think in grey. But I try to see when I'm watching at me instead of at reality (i.e. "something is tasty" is about me, and the whole subjective category), accept that reality is complex and you have a limited view of it (and may be things that you don't know that you don't know). You can still make your own choices, but leave the door open to accept that there are different valid views of the problems and yours may not be between them.

samirillian 7y ago

This reads more like the power of not thinking much at all. Capitalism has good parts and bad parts is not a thought. Which parts are bad which parts are good and why. It's as if you saw kant taking a walk at the same time every day and thought that thinking consisted in taking regular walks. It's not the fact that he took walks that matters, it's the things he thought on those walks. It's not just brainlessly saying "a little of column a a little of column b," it's what you have to say about column a or b in particular that matters. What's being described here is much more like avoiding splitting which is for your emotional well-being but which has little to do with the actual quality of your thoughts.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

RE slippery slopes, I think we need to talk about the "slippery slope fallacy fallacy" at some point. Slippery slope argument isn't invalid when there's actual slippery slope involved. Or put another way, if you look at the dynamic behavior, there's plenty of structures around us that are metastable[0]. You can push and push on them, and they'll settle back roughly where they were - up until you cross a threshold, after which everything goes downhill very fast (and, at least in physics, releases a lot of energy in the process). For instance, tragedies of the commons are such systems in real life. One or few actors abusing the commons a little bit can be tolerable. But the more actors discover that this behavior is tolerated, the more still start to do the same, and at some point a threshold is crossed and everyone starts doing it, the commons gets exhausted, and everyone is worse off. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability

iazid 7y ago

Thanks for this website! I read a few other articles, thought I'd be bored quick but ended thinking "it's already the end?". Seems like they're putting into words many principles I found out for myself, a pleasure to read. Wish I could afford the sub.

zuhayeer 7y ago

"I talk grey, I don't keep it white and black" https://rapbits.com/s/662 https://rapbits.com/s/662