It’s okay to have an opinion on things you don’t know a lot about. But it’s stupid to hold on to that opinion if you learn it is based on something that is wrong.
I must be one of the lucky ones where I have not come across anyone pressure me to give my opinion on a given topic.
That guy looks like he is figuring out how to do high fives.
How about normalizing being informed?
But that means I would have to shut the fuck up
Whelp, there goes social media…
I think I’ll sit this one out
Um, no.
There is no such thing as “properly informed”.
Just understand an opinion isn’t truth or fact. Form and reform them at will and often.
Normalize not having an opinion regardless. You can be knowledgable about some topic and not have a stance you want to ‘defend’ anyway. Make ‘opinionated’ a bad word as ‘terrorist’.
s l o p
Normalise hating ai slop
I guess I can’t have any opinions then.
I would genuinely have a lot more respect for someone who admits to not knowing anything and asks a lot of questions, than some blowhard who thinks they know everything about even one topic.
“I’m smart enough to know just how stupid I am.”
I also wish to learn.
I got a hell of a lot smarter when I learned to be vulnerable in this way. I was a “gifted kid” in school and had built most of my identity around being smart, so it was a lot of work, but hugely worth it
I’m a fan of strong opinions weakly held. You should always have an opinion and it’s ok for it to be wrong if you’re willing to change it as you learn.
In my experience it’s extremely liberating to withhold judgement sometimes, especially when it’s not needed.
It’s kind of a prerequisite for growing up into roles of responsibility.
You simply don’t get far in terms of business, climbing career ladders, being thought of as reliable and being someone trusted if you react without thinking. I mean, yah there are companies run by morons who conflate loud stupidity for confidence, but largely most of the time if you make yourself available to handle responsibility by proving you won’t attack someone’s character or dismiss someone out of hand or act annoyingly confident about things you don’t know anything about, you will become the “go to” person to handle things.
Just being someone who asks other people a lot of questions makes you likeable and people will choose to want to be around you because they rather tell you about themselves or things they know than be lectured.
What makes the opinion strong, then?
You take a stance fully, like “McDonald’s is the best food ever” the weakly held part is changing when you try literally any other food.
That seems like hubris and foolishness. Like, if you know you have limited experience with food saying the one you’ve tried is the best of all seems unlikely to be true. Maybe this is a bad example?
That sounds like a hassle, and leads to being wrong most of the time, doesn’t it? Most often the answer to any question is some form of “it depends”…
Yes you’ll be wrong a lot, but that’s not a bad thing. The constant process of using existing knowledge to form an opinion and then updating as you get more information leads to being wrong less often. It’s also basically the scientific method.
evidence based logic and reasoning.
Then why would hold it “weakly”? I’m not sure I understand the concept…
new evidence
New logic too?
if applicable.
I’m always a little torn on this. Generally, I absolutely agree, and I admire people who say “I don’t think I know the full story so I’m not sure”. And I try to preface my own uninformed opinions with said uninformedness. But there’s two ways to misinterpret this.
There’s people who think only “experts” should have opinions and nobody else is allowed to have one, a dangerously elitist view. Don’t get me wrong, we shoukd absolutely listen to the “experts”, but we should still form opinions. This view can be used to silence other opinions, especially from those who have lesser access to education.
The other perversion of this is that it can be used as an excuse not to care. Especially in Germany I’ve heard this as an excuse, after October 7th many people claimed it was wrong to even have an opinion on Israel/Palestine since you would have to have lived there to really understand, since it was all so complex and difficult. Anybody who had a clear opinion on it wclearly had no idea. However this rhetoric just enables the status quo (i.e. giving weapons to Israel), and prevents meaningful exchange of ideas.
It’s simple: you are allowed to have opinions on things you are not very well informed about. Even if it’s wrong. What matters is being open to changing your opinion when presented with information you did not have.
Also the OP stance is specially ridiculous when applied to things that fall under the social “sciences”, since so much of it is just actual opinions that get passed of as facts through the power of citing other opinions.
This is the way
I agree with this. Along with being open to changing your opinion is understanding that in topics you aren’t an expert in, you don’t even know how much you don’t understand.
