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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 peo

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
  > Referencing the concept when defending your ignorance is not grey thinking. Who actually believes that they have all the answers? Everybody except truly deluded people make claims without having to put asterisks on everything they say. Imagine how burdensome it would be to qualify everything with confidence intervals all day long. Which is really the problem with this article: it's attacking a straw man. Nobody actually believes contrary. The only reason I can imagine they'd attack that particular straw man is to imply that they or their readers are of this class of people who engage in grey thinking, and therefore are somehow better. This is where the laziness/arrogance comes in in my opinion. Saying that things in the world are a "grey area" provides no useful information. It's the equivalent of saying: "something might happen, somewhere between multiple extremes." At best, it's a form of laziness. At worst, it shows lack of courage to attempt to explain something, even if it's wrong.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Professional intelligence analysts qualify everything with confidence intervals. When conducting formal business or technical communications we ought to follow their example. It would greatly reduce errors and misunderstandings.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
Quite the opposite. B/W is the easiest behavior and it's very common in children. It's well known that maturity and "grey thinking" go together.
- abernard1 7y ago
  > It's well known that maturity and "grey thinking" go together. Bunk. Science builds causal models, which are absolutely black and white. While there can be multiple competing models, nobody seriously goes: "well, it's a little of this, and a little of that, but I don't really want to get into specifics." True progress would be in the creation of a new model formed from elements of both, but it is absolutely certain. The predictive power of science relies solely on the belief that grey areas are a form of ignorance. Grey areas in the social "sciences" are also a form of ignorance, albeit an inevitable one. If there was a better model with predictive power, it wouldn't be grey. Even if everything were nice and predictable, models in the social sciences are inherently value-laden. In this case, over-acknowledging grey areas is also a way of avoiding taking a stand in polite company.

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
> Referencing the concept when defending your ignorance is not grey thinking. Who actually believes that they have all the answers? Everybody except truly deluded people make claims without having to put asterisks on everything they say. Imagine how burdensome it would be to qualify everything with confidence intervals all day long. Which is really the problem with this article: it's attacking a straw man. Nobody actually believes contrary. The only reason I can imagine they'd attack that particular straw man is to imply that they or their readers are of this class of people who engage in grey thinking, and therefore are somehow better. This is where the laziness/arrogance comes in in my opinion. Saying that things in the world are a "grey area" provides no useful information. It's the equivalent of saying: "something might happen, somewhere between multiple extremes." At best, it's a form of laziness. At worst, it shows lack of courage to attempt to explain something, even if it's wrong.
- nradov 7y ago
  Professional intelligence analysts qualify everything with confidence intervals. When conducting formal business or technical communications we ought to follow their example. It would greatly reduce errors and misunderstandings.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

Quite the opposite. B/W is the easiest behavior and it's very common in children. It's well known that maturity and "grey thinking" go together.

abernard1 7y ago
> It's well known that maturity and "grey thinking" go together. Bunk. Science builds causal models, which are absolutely black and white. While there can be multiple competing models, nobody seriously goes: "well, it's a little of this, and a little of that, but I don't really want to get into specifics." True progress would be in the creation of a new model formed from elements of both, but it is absolutely certain. The predictive power of science relies solely on the belief that grey areas are a form of ignorance. Grey areas in the social "sciences" are also a form of ignorance, albeit an inevitable one. If there was a better model with predictive power, it wouldn't be grey. Even if everything were nice and predictable, models in the social sciences are inherently value-laden. In this case, over-acknowledging grey areas is also a way of avoiding taking a stand in polite company.