Opinionated people can be really annoying. Wherever they go, they try convincing you of their ideas. If you have an opinionated uncle, the Christmas dinner might be ruined by a bitter argument. I’ve certainly had bad experiences with a dinner-table conversations turning into feuds. For this reason, I used to try having fewer opinions. I somehow assumed this meant being more open-minded and mature. Well, no.

Welcoming opinions #

Actually, there are plenty of benefits of actively trying to form more opinions. Even about topics you don’t know particularly well. If you learn with a view towards arguing, then you’ll pay closer attention to the material. I think this has to do with anchoring. If you pick a stance, even at random, you’ll be more emotionally invested. Holden Karnofsky summarised it neatly in Learning by Writing:

By doing this [trying to have a hypothesis and rearticulating it whenever it changes], I try to continually focus my reading on the goal of forming a bottom-line view, rather than just “gathering information.” I think this makes my investigations more focused and directed, and the results easier to retain. I consider this approach to be probably the single biggest difference-maker between “reading a ton about lots of things, but retaining little” and “efficiently developing a set of views on key topics and retaining the reasoning behind them.”

Moreover, chatting with people with strong opinions can also be fun. Say you’re at a cocktail party. Small talk can be quite tiring, at least after a couple of hours. In this situation, I’ll gladly talk to people trying to persuade me of their ideas. Or say you’re hosting friends for dinner, and a friend explains her take on a topic you all like.

Back in school, we were encouraged to form more opinions. Teachers made us write argumentative essays about topics we hardly knew anything about. They know that most 14 year-olds don’t care the slightest about whether fathers should be given two additional weeks of paternity leave, or if the capital income tax should be raised by 1%. But I don’t think it was only meant as an exercise in communicating effectively. It felt as if teachers were saying “Go out there in the big wild world, and look for opinions!”

Chasing opinions #

So why doesn’t everyone have, like, a lot opinions?

I think many people, whether they recognise it or not, resort to some kind of agnosticism for fear of being wrong. However, recognising you’re wrong just means you’re updating your beliefs. It’s not that big of a deal. Also, many people think they aren’t entitled to hold an opinion since they aren’t “qualified”. This is true for areas in which there’s a clear distinction between experts and non-experts. But I have a hunch that we sometimes use this as an excuse for not looking into certain issues. For example, as highlighted in Superforecasting, normal people can form well-informed predictions on certain issues with a bit of practise. Anyway, I think there’s a middle ground here: if you don’t know all the technical details, just adjust your confidence levels.

It’s worth emphasising that forming opinions can be very difficult and time-consuming. For example, predicting technological progress is notoriously hard. It requires you to do your homework, researching which factors influence scientific advancements and so on. This goes against the idea of opinions coming to us “naturally”, as if by chance. Yet, this isn’t a good reason not to actively seek out opinions. Sometimes, we have to make our minds up in order to take action.

As long as one has some “epistemic etiquette” - being prepared to change your beliefs in the light of new evidence, and not taking everything so personally - having more opinions seems like a good thing. I’m currently trying to build the habit of always having a working hypothesis whenever I learn something new. Having more opinions makes you feel more like part of the world, rather than as a bystander.