The Value of Grey Thinking (2016)
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A good read on this is “The Cognitive Distortions of Founders” by Michael Dearing https://link.medium.com/Ri20AKKuL2.
> 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).
No, not at all. In fact, I support local co-ops. My (and Marx's) only contention is that it is not sufficient to call this "socialism" or "socialism within capitalism", or "a socialist part of capitalism" because socialism is by definition the ending of the specific historical production of commodities and class society. A co-op is an admirable thing to run, but it's not "socialism".
For some reason this makes me think of Hegel and dialectical (subjects I have limited understanding of).
I also agree that quantitative reasoning has usurped qualitative reasoning and this might be due to quantitative reasoning actually being easier. If you define a scale with which to measure then it is really just a matter of defining how you score something, gathering the inputs and turning a crank to get to an answer. IMO, choosing the scale (and maybe to a less extent the scoring mechanism) seems to be the truly difficult part of the puzzle.
I would submit there isn't one. Furthermore any objective "facts" useful for such a metric have some basis on one theory or interpretation or another.
The article says:
> This is why quantitative and scale-based thinking is so important. But most don’t realize that quantitative thinking isn’t really about math; it’s about the idea that The dose makes the poison.
To adopt their words in response to your comment, what exactly is the numerical "dose" between qualitatively different systems? Could one have identical numerical "doses" in different combinations of those systems? It's a useless, reductionist, and counterproductive way of thinking in my opinion.
Well, isn't this exactly what people try to do when comparing these systems? Number of deaths, number of people in poverty, number of products on the shelves in stores?
> Between Buddhism and Christianity?
You can count the number of atrocities perpetrated by each. The number of scandals involving their priests. The total number of adherents.
> what exactly is the numerical "dose" between qualitatively different systems?
That is the whole point of my post. Defining how to turn a qualitative measure into a quantitate measure is the real and only trick. I chose some arbitrary ones in response to your examples. You may choose different ones. Maybe you choose to measure capitalism and socialism based on some psychological happiness score defined as responses to some survey. Maybe you measure it by GDP. Choosing your measure is the real power.
Not necessarily. Qualitative models have been increasingly adopted, and most arguments from the socialist side of the debate concede that capitalism has greatly improved quantitatively measured standards of living, it is responsible for a huge range of products, and that 20th c. socialism lead to many deaths. Qualitative criticisms are the most popular today in political economy, namely, the work of Sen, Roemer, Vrousalis and others on qualitative (with some quantitative basis) concepts of "exploitation", "domination", "alienation", and "fetishism". Nevertheless, quantitative arguments are also abound, in particular debate over what classifies as "poverty", and the transformation of values to prices of production (usually formulated mathematically). The road to defining axiomitically concepts like "exploitation" still has "a million miles to go" (Veneziani and Yoshihara).
This area of criticism, in my opinion (and the opinion of Honkanen[0]), needs more quantitative reasoning, and qualitative thinking cannot simply brush aside the use of statistics, which is relevant in many (but not all) instances.
[0] Honkanen P. (2020) The Transformation Problem and Value-Form: Methodological Comments. In: Silver M. (eds) Confronting Capitalism in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
All that shows, IMO of course, is there is some common ground between capitalists and socialists when defining some objective quantitative measures. In a sense, we first agree on the rules of some game (i.e. the quantitative indicators of our qualitative desires) and then we turn the crank of the mathematical machine to see what scores the best.
> qualitative thinking cannot simply brush aside the use of statistics, which is relevant in many (but not all) instances.
I agree on this but in a subtle way. Analogies are the worst but I'm going to do it anyway. It's like a boat that has both a rudder and an engine. In this analogy the rudder is qualitative reasoning and the engine is quantitative reasoning. We use qualitative reasoning to "pick a direction" and quantitative reasoning to "move towards the goal". I sometimes think both sides are missing the fact we need both. A rudder without an engine doesn't get anywhere and an engine without a rudder moves aimlessly.
My original argument was that the engine at this point is pretty well known: logic, science, math and computation. However, choosing good qualitative measures and then choosing good methods to convert them into quantitive measures is really difficult. You mentioned that quantifying "domination" or "exploitation" is tricky. I believe that choosing "domination" as your qualitative measure (before you even try to quantify it) is the really difficult thing. So often we go into quantitative mode with very little consideration why we chose the qualitative measures we are using.
It makes me think of Habermas and his work on communicative rationality (another topic I'm very weak on). I'm not sure that is the right tool but I think we need a set of agreed upon tools other than quantitative reasoning to help us solve disagreements on qualitative measures.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/commun...
https://www.quora.com/What-has-killed-more-people-communism-...
And the death count for "socialism" usually includes Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and Nazi Germany, all of which were primarily nationalist governments - in the same way that North Korea is actually a very old-fashioned hereditary absolute monarchy decorated with Stalinist branding.
The closest economies to real socialism are the high-taxation, high-spending Scandinavian social democracies, which score higher than the US on educational attainment, business opportunity, life-expectancy, and educational attainment - but don't do nearly as well at generating billionaires.
The real foundation of social democracy is aggressive wealth redistribution and broad democratic access to policy - not state control. In reality capitalism is far more controlled than social democracy because it operates as a plutocracy that privileges a small demographic. This demographic has exclusive control over policy through lobbying, "funding" of representatives, and the creation and propagation of economic (i.e. "moral") narratives that benefit them - irrespective of party labels.
Against this background, the fact that academics may be debating what exploitation means is very much a side issue.
Close, but I would say that socialists don't see it as close enough. Sweden holds a strong form of liberal egalitarianism, as propounded by Rawls in his less 'socialist' writings. But even then, the socialism is beyond its horizon. There is a 'property-owning democracy', and no egalitarian distribution. The capitalist parts of Rawls, without the public ownership of MoP socialist stuff.
The championing of liberal egalitarianism as "good enough" leaves other questions unanswered. Is social democracy still exploitative? Dominating? Alienating? Environmentally damaging? Inefficient? Those questions hold for any form of capitalism, defined as a society in which capital's self-valorization is predominant, and where there is wage labour.
So the question is what kind of argument would justify not only going beyond old school 20th c. death capitalism, but social democratic capitalism, too. Only if you look into whether (1) capitalist societies are exploitative (2) there is a normative reason to do away with it, and the same with alienation, domination and environmental concerns - then there is a good reason for socialism.
Yes, but these would be statistics (subjectively determined and presupposing a set of values I might add) to determine whether one or another ideas were better than one another, and in what way.
The grey thinking in this article is just one big ideological blender. It implies that if we had A X Capitalism and (1-A) X Socialism, maybe that would be a sensical or desirable outcome. It does not say in any way how that is a coherent thing, either for those two specific models, or for models in general.
The depends on the question. You can compare Buddhism and Christianity in many ways, each with their own score. Are you saying 'which one is better for humanity'? Or 'which one will make my stoner friends think I'm rad?'?
if you were to compare which one has done more good/bad for humanity, than the score would be how much good or bad each one has done for humanity. You may say Buddhism improves the lives of it's adherents about twice as much as christianity on average. But Christianity has 20x as many adherents. But but Christianity is responsible for 10000x more deaths... etc. Then you just need to decide on the value of 'improving a persons life X amount' compared to 'killing X number of people' and do the math.
Of course, you typically don't get to the level of assigning numerical values to human life when forming your opinions most of the time. That's just the explanation of how these things are quantitatively 'scored' to try and answer your question - in practice it's a much more guesstimation-based system.
That's the kind of black and white thinking we need to do away with. "Purity" is fun for theorists to talk about but in practice we basically never want pure systems.
Anyhow, how can capitalism and socialism coexists? Well, it already does! Every democracy which levies taxes to run shared services is partly socialist, since these means of production are jointly owned. You can even see the taxes as a way for the people to extract profits from every venture, for example in Sweden the state spends around 50% of GDP so it already owns 50% of everything even if the papers says otherwise, you can't come and say that something which can extract 50% of all value from something doesn't really own it! And every country where you can start, run and profit from companies are partly capitalist. Hence all western nations are partly socialist and partly capitalist. They are on different parts of this spectrum.
For example, most roads are socialist, you don't have to pay to drive on them even though they cost a lot of money. Very few argue that we need less socialist roads and more capitalist roads with toll booths.
No (well, "no" from the point of view of scholars of socialism, whose opinion as experts on the topic matters more). Taxes are not "socialist", because "socialism" does not mean a safety net within capitalism. Means of production, as they are spoken of by philosophers, cannot be said to be "jointly owned"[0].
>Sweden the state spends around 50% of GDP so it already owns 50% of everything even if the papers says otherwise, you can't come and say that something which can extract 50% of all value from something doesn't really own it!
These do not count as productive capacity, but as help for workers, even if they were monetary equivalents (quantitatively), they are not qualitatively the same thing. In fact, one of the problems in the theory of exploitation is the question of whether someone who earns a very high income can be said to be "exploited". The compensation, it is held, is not (or less) relevant than the share of productive resources.
>For example, most roads are socialist, you don't have to pay to drive on them even though they cost a lot of money.
Socialism isn't about "fairness" or getting something back from the state[1]. Rather, it's about "class society". I don't mean to argue for or against socialism, but it's important to get the views right. Social safety nets are a social democratic measure within capitalist society. They are "social" but not socialist. Taxes existed in Marx's time (in some cases, higher than what we have now) - nevertheless, Marx called for the establishment of "socialism". Simple redistribution is not the socialist paradigm, except in rare incarnations.
[0] One of the conditions outlined by Roemer, as quoted in SEP: "If S were to withdraw from the society, endowed with its per capita share of society’s alienable property (that is, produced and nonproduced goods), and with its own labor and skills, then S would be better off (in terms of income and leisure) than it is at the present allocation."
[1] "What is "a fair distribution"?
Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions, or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise out of economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about "fair" distribution?" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875)
Note the question is not "Are we entirely socialist?" but "are we partly socialist?". Yes, we are partly socialist. No, there are still things that are not jointly owned so we are not fully socialist. Hence the grey thinking instead of saying "We are not fully socialist so none of that matters!".
I already explained how and why to say "partly socialist" is false reasoning, because it assumes that "socialism" is some kind of sliding scale. Scholars of socialism do not consider it as such, socialism is defined to be diametrically opposed to capitalism, in the ways I have already mentioned. It is just like saying "Capital is partly a book." - no. It either is a book, or it isn't a book.
The most naive and uninformed idea of socialism, which is not in line with what any socialist considers it to be, is merely "the government providing things". That's not what is meant when we say "socialism", and redefining words contrary to expert opinion and tradition is no substitute.
This is my wife. She’s never undecided and has incredible intuition. I’m a gray thinker to the point of paralysis. When something comes up that we need to sort out, i feed factors and we walk the decision tree until we’re both happy. Works well lol
Counting a spoiled American kid childhood, 30 years of being spoon fed options that marketing felt fit the curve best wore thin.
I’ve become incredibly DIY and avoid socializing because it’s more of the same. Making music at home, learning, creating. I make tons of choices in those contexts all the time, building a new emotional vibe each time.
Picking a sushi joint for the thousandth time is just mind numbingly banal in comparison. And so I seem to have become “indecisive” to others, when internally I just don’t give a shit to go out for sushi again.
Another thing that a decade of painstakingly quantified decision making has taught me is that the metric details often don't actually matter that much and rarely lead you to a satisfying choice. My most recent example is the purchase of a Bosch dishwasher. I did quite a bit of looking and landed on one of the higher end series that did very well across the board in reviews. I hate it. The dishes come out with this weird sweaty feel to them, the racks suck, and the user interface is beyond horrendous (something that a week stay in a rental property confirmed is common to all Bosch appliances).
So I'm slowly working my way out of it, but I'm almost 50. Wish I would have had better constitution about this out of the gate.
So I started using a shortcut. Instead of following the arguments, I observe the arguments themselves. Am I trying to justify a yes or a no?
Saves a lot of time. Just do what in your gut you’ve already decided to do anyway.
No - not so that chance shall decide the affair, while you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping.
- Piet Hein
You may be indecisive because you truly don't know enough about the options and need to do your research to make an informed decision. Don't overdo it, just do enough. How much is enough is not easy to say in general.
I think there is something metaphysical about it; the 'grey' is the ether and the black and white is the materiality that comes out of it literally from force of will.
You can only create something by making a choice, choosing a path, 'making the quantum observation' which dissolves the ambiguity.
Too often we think of the 'solutions' as a form of 'clarity' ... when reality, 'clarity' might be just the force (or clarity) of vision more than anything.
Consider three rules of branding: consistency, authenticity, simplicity. The message resonates when it is consistently and repeatedly applied in a simple way, and there is some kind of 'truthiness' (i.e. authenticity) to it. Sometimes I think of a product roadmap, and all the crazy internal and external politics of it all, as a form of branding. It's a 'decision' (i.e. either black or white) reiterated among individuals such that they can resonate their various talents around it, pushing it into fruition.
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.
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.
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.
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1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallac...
Right -- which is related to thinking in percentages (I almost wanted to say thinking in probabilities, but it's not quite that... it's more fundamental.)
For instance, the age-old question of nature vs nurture. In debates, the answer always into 100% one or the other which makes for a good fight to watch, but in real life we know it's both, and with differing percentages in each situation.
Wading into a slightly more controversial category -- gender pay gaps. Is the pay gap for the same position 100% consistently due to gender? (Twitter will have you believe "yes" but the answer is more complex). Most of us know that pay gaps are due to a series of factors of which structural discrimination based on gender is only one (a significant one, and one that needs to be rectified). But there are other factors like job performance, compensation negotiation skills, visibility of work (results don't always speak for themselves, there's often a need to sell), all factors occurring in different percentages in individuals/groups. Understanding these other factors and the proportions to which they occur and help in devising practical interventions to address them in order to have sustainable equity over the long term.
If we can only switch our mindset from binary categories to multinomial ones, and assign percentages to the contributions of each, we can make moves toward finding solutions instead of just being angry at each other, which doesn't really lead to lasting change.
Let's say pay gap is 5% "anti-black racism" when it comes to a black man being paid in software development. Pay gap is also 40% job performance, 20% visibility, 15% negotiations, 10% unknown, 5% underpaying due to being black.
What happens if visibility is 10% antiblackness, due to a manager have just a small amount of bias when delegating visible work? Does this increase the 5% antiblackness by the 10% of 40% (to like 5.4%?)
EDIT: I'm not trying to be socially just in this analysis, so we can also replace being black with being openly conservative for example, or being from a different college, or not liking the same sport or same beer as one's peers. Pretty much anything can fit into this, I'm just trying to analyze this viewpoint.
y ~ x_1 + x_2 + ... + x_1 * x_2 + x_2 * x_3 ...
etc. where you have interaction terms like x_1 * x_2 (say x_1 = being part of a non-dominant-culture, x_2 = gender) and so on. Then you can see stacking issues show up, e.g. if you're a woman you're -40% and if you're a woman of color you're -45% etc. (numbers are made up of course).
It's possible to get into more rigorous modeling methods like Bayesian networks (DAGs) and hierarchical regression models (where the coefficients are dependent) but I think the added rigor/refinement in most cases is unnecessary because it often washes out due to the inherent uncertainty in the data and in most cases does not add value to the goal at hand: that is to understand the major contributors to an issue in order to design an intervention.
If more folks could bring themselves to think in simple percentages, we would have moved the needle toward that goal.
For instance we know that fields dominated by women typically pay less than fields dominated by men. It's a factor in the pay gap overall.
Now, we could say that women chose those fields and those fields are just less desirable to the market and all that jazz.
However, there is something else that has been noted. When a field becomes dominated by women, the average pay decreases and when a field becomes dominated by men, the average pay increases. So the average pay of a field is also influenced by the group that dominates it.
Women aren't getting paid less because they take jobs like teaching and nursing. Teaching and nursing pay less because women dominate those fields.
So there are always factors upon factors upon factors and nothing exists in a vacuum. Visibility, negotiation, perceived job performance, and even the unknown are all influenced by the person being black.
I think thinking in percentages is a good first-order approximation/heuristic to most problems. There's so much uncertainty in our data anyway so even just conceptually breaking down the issue to percentages of contribution would already substantially help us think more clearly with the goal being to identify the top contributing factors to address.
Corollary 1: you can simplify your model of reality by dropping some of the weaker effects, and replacing a host of them by a simple constant. You can even just look at the single most important factor and ignore the rest when making estimates.
Corollary 2: You should always remember that your simplified model is simplified, and realize how much it is simplified. You should expect complexity of detail, and be ready to let go of the neat and simple view if you want a more correct view.
Adding Grey is good, unless you only think in Grey because that is only 1 color, and 1 color is less than 2.
We should all think in at least 3 colors. Which requires a basic understanding of statistics.
But what about thinking in colors that are actual colors? Like... at least the primaries. What type of education would be required to throw in some Blue or maybe Red?
"Black and white" can just as easily be "blue and red" thinking. Any binary choice works. "Gray" is just supposed to represent seeing things in a more analog fashion. You could replace it with "purple".
The problem arises when all you do is point out the gradients rather than make a decision based on the information given.
So the idea isn't to "introduce more colors" but to finally make a decision. "Yes, this is grey. But it's a really, really, really dark grey. It's mostly black with a tiny bit of white."
A good live example is gambling. You're often forced to make decisions based on incomplete information where every decision has some upside and some downside. You can't sit there hemming and hawing.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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?
;-)
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.
--
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.
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.
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 think people in general tend to avoid that kind of uncertainty in their life.
Often "that sucks" is perfectly good answer.
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.
Curious what the HackerNews community thinks.
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”)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.