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.<p>A good read on this is “The Cognitive Distortions of Founders” by Michael Dearing <a href="https://link.medium.com/Ri20AKKuL2" rel="nofollow">https://link.medium.com/Ri20AKKuL2</a>.
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.<p>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.
There is a dark side to grey thinking:<p>Some people abandon black and white and replace it with a single shade of grey [1].<p>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.<p>___<p>1. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallac...</a>
> the reality is all grey area. All of it. There are very few black and white answers<p>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.<p>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.
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.
We have a rule with our kids that we'll answer any question that they ask <i>and articulate</i>. "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.<p>Also, only a Sith deals in absolutes (generally).
The trouble with Grey Thinking is that many people are <i>just</i> smart enough to convince themselves they are doing it, but not <i>honest</i> enough when reflecting on themselves to question whether they're making a genuine effort.
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.
Paul Graham just posted a directly relevant blog today on the challenges of being a "moderate" in polarized times.<p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/mod.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/mod.html</a>
So, uh, yes, most things in life are nuanced; I didn't realize anyone was suggesting otherwise.<p>That said, using an example based on two <i>extremely</i> 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?
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.<p>Or put another way, if you look at the dynamic behavior, there's plenty of structures around us that are <i>metastable</i>[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).<p>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.<p>--<p>[0] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability</a>
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.<p>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.<p>Converting a model into a decision is <i>not</i> 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.
“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.”
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).<p>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.
I call it keeping an open mind and try to be empathetic, but it does feel like sailing in the wind at times.<p>I think people in general tend to avoid that kind of uncertainty in their life.
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.
"I talk grey, I don't keep it white and black"<p><a href="https://rapbits.com/s/662" rel="nofollow">https://rapbits.com/s/662</a>
I think most "thinking" today is just sort of clickbaitish: <i>You are good person right? So you must do XYZ...</i>.<p>Often "that sucks" is perfectly good answer.
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.<p>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.
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?<p>Curious what the HackerNews community thinks.
A perhaps unpopular opinion: "grey thinking" is a particular type of laziness for people in the educated class.<p>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.<p>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.