Comment by bakuninsbart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bakuninsbart | Hacker News Reader

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If you are trying to be a well-rounded person with well-founded opinions on different topics, it makes sense to believe that there are others like you who are further along the way.

Both of your examples have a very strong technical component, either understanding the underlying biology/epidemiology or understanding war theory and practice. It is indeed unlikely that someone is an expert in both.

But many important topics have far fewer, if any, objective truths attached to it. In the case of covid restrictions, opinions should obviously be founded on science, but science can only inform our moral choices, not make them for us. Is the damage done to developing minds worth locking down schools if it reduces the spread of covid? Can there be a state/societal mandate to force people to stay in their homes, or even to get vaccinated?

You can come to very different conclusions based on how your worldview is constructed, and I think the sign of a true intellectual is that they can coherently describe theirs, and make other intellectuals understand it, even if they are diametrically opposed to it.

> If you are trying to be a well-rounded person with well-founded opinions on different topics, it makes sense to believe that there are others like you who are further along the way.

Maybe that's the issue with me. The more I learn, over years, the more cautious I become about forming an opinion. It's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey. So if I see someone describing, with full confidence, that this is good and that is bad, without all that load of middle-tones, it just makes me feel that they either are not too smart or do not have good intentions.

> You can come to very different conclusions based on how your worldview is constructed, and I think the sign of a true intellectual is that they can coherently describe theirs, and make other intellectuals understand it, even if they are diametrically opposed to it.

I can see the appeal here. What I do not understand is, why would you approach that person as an authority?

> It's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey

Yes, it's much easier to paint the whole world one color than trying to paint it in two colors: you'd have to make distinctions and that's quite hard. But on the other hand, if two colors are not enough to paint the whole world, surely one color is even less enough?

Philosophical dithering; reduce any concept to micro black-and-white distinctions to create the perception of grayscale when viewed in whole

That might be an interesting experiment. Poll people on a large scale about dozens of minuscule moral issues that can be determined as GOOD or EVIL, then try to assemble more complex moral issues out of these building blocks. You could end up with some sort of statistical model of morality.

<< Maybe that's the issue with me. The more I learn, over years, the more cautious I become about forming an opinion.

Yep. Naturally, there is a weird social pressure to have an opinion now even if it ends up being just wrong later. Somehow just waiting is not acceptable. You need to take a stance and declare yourself as team A or team B ( or more ), which only adds to the further tribalization of our discourse.

The best phrasing of that I've seen is "you don't need to issue a statement on everything, you're not an embassy".

> it's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey

When I was a teen I saw the world as black and white.

When I got in college I knew they are all grey.

And now I understand there are different shades of grey. Most of time we have no enough information to tell, but sometimes it's worth to look closely to distinguish them.

It's not really English to have a 'well-founded' opinion..

Opinions are not based on knowledge or certainty.. they're opinions.

I miss when opinions were a thing you said to get the 'nothing' out and a probative suggestion that started conversations.

Locking opinion down to knowledge and certainty is essentially non-sensical in English.

The old saying was 'opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one'. Perfectly encapsulates how serious opinions are.... not at all serious, by design.

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