they're good at hiding that they have those opinions I think the answer to this question is that most people simply don't have opinions on the vast majority o

they're good at hiding that they have those opinions I think the answer to this question is that most people simply don't have opinions on the vast majority of subjects, and that "having an opinion" is largely an identity marker of the intellectually-minded – and not a basic quality that everyone has. So it's not so much that such people are good at hiding their unorthodox opinions, but that they haven't really thought about it in the first place. PG's other essay, "Keep Your Identity Small" is a good solution to this tendency of intellectually-minded people to want to have an opinion on everything.