Hills To Die On

Thinking about weak views strongly held versus strong views weakly held

Here is my strong view weakly held perception of this problem.

Although people would like to believe that most of their views are in the strongly held | strong view categories, the truth is very few people could claim more than a small fraction reside there. In the vast majority of cases I bet it is around 5%. And only maybe 10% in the most extreme cases of very thoughtful thinkers.

It would actually be virtuous to recognize and push towards more views being in the weak views weakly held position—there is so little we actually can possibly know.

Ideally, you would never have any views that are weak views strongly held. Perhaps only a small fraction due to cognitive biases and mistakes—with a cleansing dose of self reflection processing these out from time to time. Unfortunately, we’re all susceptible to a very large percentage in this category.

Some potential implications regarding this thought-experiment analysis:

• People should probably be more thoughtful than they are; thus, increasing the strength of their views somewhat.

• At the same time they should take more humility towards those views making most of the increase in strong views as well as most of the remaining weak views flow into the weakly held category.

• They should stop lying to themselves and others about the degree to which they can claim their views are strong (both in type and how held).

• It is easy to be emotionally pushed into an argument with someone whose view is weaker than yours but more strongly held.

• There tends to be a ratchet effect whereby interactions between people with unjustifiably strongly-held views push views into the more strongly held category including increasing the degree of how strongly held. This is generally not mitigated by how well these interactions can actually strength the views themselves.

Perhaps the most helpful measurement for how much one's views are in the weakly held category is how often one does/how willing one is to change their mind. The more often and willing, the more views are weakly held.

Perhaps the most helpful measurement of how correctly strong one's views are is to consider how much more one could know about what shapes and determines the view. The less to be known, the stronger the view rightfully is.

Ask yourself, "Do I know more about this than 90% of people? 99%? 99.9%?...” If you know more about something than 99.9% of all Americans, for example, there are still 330,000 people who know more than you do.

A helpful technique for improvement begins with asking oneself "what would make me change my mind on this?". The legitimately higher the threshold, the stronger the view and the stronger the view can be held. Moving the threshold higher means moving more views into the weak and weakly held positions.

Yes, this is all conjecture, but it is conjecture I have formed strongly and yet hold weakly still.