That's Your Opinion!

Look, if the smartest people in history and the public could have been this wrong about this many things, it's kind of humbling. That's what's at the heart of the scientific method. The ability to bend to the facts, to learn from mistakes, and change our minds when new information comes to light. Sit down before fact with an open mind. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you learn nothing. Don't push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction.Adm. H G Rickover USN We've all been there. There's some sort of disagreement, fussing and fighting. There's a conflict, and someone says, 'I'm entitled to my opinion,' or 'That's your opinion.' 'It's just a difference of opinion.' The funny part of all this is that some of the most savage arguments and controversies of the age are where there's no good supporting evidence either way. So the division happens based on, and stoked by, our entitlement to our opinions.In 2012, Australian philosopher Patrick Stokes wrote an amazing essay summarizing his research. It was titled'No, You're Not Entitled to Your Opinion.'What he believed was that you're only entitled to what you can argue for. There are certain phrases, boiled down to a few words, that tend to be discussion-enders, or at least the end of constructive discussions. 'I'm entitled to my opinion' is often claimed not so much as a defence of freedom of conscience, but as a way of sheltering a belief from criticism, and the differences can be subtle. 'I think the Atlantic is the better ocean' and 'I think the Atlantic is the bigger ocean' are two very different claims.This new argument trick did not just come around with Facebook. The word 'opinion' comes through Old French from a Latin word that means conjecture, belief, judgement, or just simply what one thinks. The English word has been around since the early 1300s, but it was about a sense of judgement made where the evidence does not produce certainty. The ancient Greeks had already developed a distinction between doxa, usually meaning opinion or belief, and episteme, meaning knowledge. Plato repeatedly asked about the meaning of knowledge and what separates knowledge from just believing something, even if the belief happens to be true. It seemed important to make the difference. Aristotle took the view that opinion, especially that held by knowledgeable people, was a good starting point for inquiry. His dialectic method subjected these opinion things to cross-examination. Some survived, others were discarded, but it's interesting that over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle already had a more sophisticated Facebook policy: your opinion gets you into the conversation, but it doesn't get you out of the argument. In John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he separated knowledge from probability and opinion. Again, he leaned on opinion being the acceptance of a proposition that was short of being certain. This means we hold the proposition, but we really don't know with certainty if it's true. He just argued that a rational person should examine the evidence for and against any proposition and admit it to be some probability of being correct. In 1644, John Milton is quoted as saying, 'Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.' He believed that a society genuinely interested in learning will produce lots of arguing, lots of writing, and lots of opinions, and that disagreement is not noise but is part of the machinery for creating knowledge. From a historic perspective, opinion isn't the problem. The problem is immunizing opinion against correction. By the time John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty, a great 19th-century defence of disagreement, things had pretty much settled. Mill said, 'He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.' His formulation was that if you can't state and answer the opposing case, you don't have particularly good grounds for preferring your own position. A truly rational position, in that case, would be just a suspension of judgement, and that's a pretty hostile reading of the modern 'I'm entitled to my opinion.' Let's get this straight: you are, as a constitutional matter, absolutely entitled to your opinion. Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter protects freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The UN Human Rights Committee's interpretation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says that the right to hold opinion admits no exception or restriction and explicitly includes the freedom to change one's opinion whenever one chooses.BUT… none of this is as glorious as it may seem. "I'm entitled to my opinion" means something fairly modest. It means that you cannot compel me to believe what you believe in a free society. I'm allowed to hold wrong, foolish, eccentric, poorly informed, and even contradictory beliefs. There's no tribunal of correct thoughts. What happens in practice, though, is that this comes up at the end of an argument when someone's opinion has been challenged, and it kind of is a magical incantation. "I'm entitled to my opinion" starts to mean: "I'm entitled to my opinion. Therefore, you can't criticize it. You can't ask me to justify it. You can't point out that my facts are wrong, and you can't regard my judgement differently just because I hold this opinion."Here's the thing: sure, you're entitled to your opinion. You're just not entitled to have it treated as equally informed, equally plausible, and equally respectable as every other opinion. You absolutely have the right to form your own opinion, but you have no corresponding right to have other people agree with you. 'You are entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.' Saying "I'm entitled to my opinion" closes the door of argument just at the exact point when the conversation might finally be interesting, because the next questions might be: Why do you think that? What evidence would change your mind? How confident are you that you're right? That's the kind of conversation that gets somewhere. Here's the list of books that I pulled off my shelf when I was thinking about this essay. - Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke - The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef - Think Again by Adam Grant - How to Think by Alan Jacobs - How to Change Minds: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney - How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan ( this one is actually about the modern renaissance in the use of psychedelics to open your mind, change your mind, and solve some of the problems of the mind) The first one was this book called Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. She was a professional poker player, and her idea is pretty simple: life is like poker, and so you should stop judging your ideas and your decisions only by their outcomes and think in terms of bets. How confident are you? 50/50, 80%, 95%. Thinking in Bets turns belief into probability. I think it really helps loosen our grip on our beliefs and enables us to update them intentionally as people challenge us, or we find new facts or information, or if the situation changes. It also changes the way you think about things based on just the simple coin flip of whether they succeeded or failed A group of researchers at thePew Research Centre set out to determine if the public could distinguish between facts and opinion in the news.They studied a group of over 5,000 adults. They presented each with five factual statements and five opinion statements. Only 26% could correctly identify all five factual statements. In this study, a factual statement was defined by its capacity to be proved or disproved by objective evidence. Note that it's not required that the factual statement be true. A factual statement can be true or false regardless of whether it's accurate or inaccurate. So, the study group could choose this classification even if they thought it was wrong, if the statement could be proved or disproved based on objective evidence. An opinion statement is a claim based on values and beliefs and could not definitively be proved or disproved based on objective evidence. It turned out the main factor indicating how and why people got answers wrong was identity group. People were heavily influenced by which side of an argument they were on. For example, members of a political party were far more likely to label opinion statements as factual when they appealed more to their political side. Ultimately, it's not just about whether we think a statement is true. We can also be influenced by what kind of statement we think it is, based on the group to which we perceive ourselves to belong Love, taste, loyalty, commitment, belonging. Most of what we really care about in the big picture and in the regular day can't be fact-checked I think sometimes we get too wound up about claiming to hold facts and being rational and logical, when actually that's a smaller part of our thinking and our lives than you would imagine. We're not as often as we imagine discussing whether a claim is true. We're talking about our identity, our loyalty, our faith, our tastes, our interests, our commitments, our attachments. Those are all legitimate things, and an enormous part of our lives operates that way. Love, loyalty, aesthetic judgement, religious belief, belonging to a place, and even most of our moral intuitions don't lend themselves to laboratory experiments, but we probably should be able to identify and name them honestly. Here's a taxonomy to help clean up how we think about the things we think. (A note to readers on AI: I've been following along with the AI scans now available on Substack. This next section and the other places in this essay where there is a list, a hierarchy, or bullet points attracts the ire of the AI scan. I personally like writing this way, just like I like: em dashes, triplets, and long sentences. I don't want to take any of them out just because it triggers the percentages on the AI scan. All I can say is this is not AI-written or AI-assisted, but I think the machine sees it in the style that AI writes. I don't know. I apologize for that. I guess it'll be interesting to see where all this AI business goes.) -A factis a claim about reality that can be, at least in principle, scientifically tested or checked against evidence, can be looked up, and multiple sources can be identified. We can check facts. Here's Alex's list of things that are often presented as facts but are verifiably untrue. And Alex has done the verifying. -A beliefis just something that you hold to be true. It might be well founded, and it might be badly founded. It's yours. It could be shared with a group, or it could be contrary to everybody. You can have beliefs that put you right in the dead centre of the public point of view, or you can believe something that almost nobody would agree with you on. -An opinionis a judgement or a preference, an interpretation, some sort of evaluation, where reasonable people can differ, even after agreeing on the facts. One way it differs from facts and belief is that it should inspire a reasonable person to hold it with less certainty. -A convictionis a belief held with unusual certainty, often because it connects to values or identity, or forms part of a creed or even religion. -A faithcommitment is something you do not claim is a fact. it is held beyond the question of certainty and beyond the prying questions of investigation Or even discussion. It's not open to empirical proof. Your faith commitment is a foundation stone that you should be able to identify because much of your worldview is built on it. It's easy to imagine this is part of Christian or religious dogma, but be assured, amongst our first principles, we hold more articles of faith than most would imagine. Articles of faith are sometimes hard to imagine or admit because they're so big. We assume, as an article of faith, that the external world really exists. We imagine that other people have minds and are sentient in the same way we are. We rest on a belief our memories are broadly an accurate remembrance of the past. We assume that tomorrow will be similar enough to yesterday that induction works. Many of us believe we have free will. We say all human beings possess equal moral worth. We say every life is sacred, but the certainty of these statements doesn't come from any sort of test or proof. The same is true of fairness. We insist that all cases should be treated alike, that promises should be kept, that any cruelty or violence requires justification, and that innocent people shouldn't be hurt, but this is not physics. These are articles of faith and premises that form the foundation stones of our civilisation: things that we believe we must behave as if they are true, as if they are facts. Politics is loaded with articles of faith. Democracy rests at least in part on faith that ordinary citizens deserve some say in governing themselves and have the capacity to be responsible for that office. Western liberal societies, at least, have the conviction that freedom of speech is valuable, even when people use it badly, and none of these things can be simply proved. Economics has its articles of faith. Money is an obvious one. We've gotten so used to seeing $20 bills that we believe money is a real thing, even as cryptocurrency reminds us that it's really just an agreement of beliefs, shared beliefs, and even gold itself derived its value from shared belief, not from an actual fact. Property rights and contracts, credit and corporations - they're all institutionalized acts of shared collective belief.But it's in our personal life where maybe faith plays the biggest role — kind of the centre of it all. We live in the romantic era, where we share the belief and behave as though love is a real thing and it's worthwhile despite its risks. When asked about my beliefs, I tend to trot out this notion that history tends towards progress, that we live in the best times ever so far, and that things are getting better all the time. I believe that people are basically good and that the world is a good place to be. I'm taught again and again by the internet that not everyone shares those beliefs, and try as I might to support them, I have to face the fact that I'm holding them as an article of faith. The article of faith isn't just a belief without reasons. It's a belief that is intentionally and consciously held beyond reasons. Arguing is a learned skill with its own rules, standard moves, errors, and tricks. It doesn't matter whether you're arguing with yourself, with your family, with other people or teams, or if you're arguing with the world. Argument still works the same. I think that's why this business about opinion is important. The very first thing to know about argument is: what kind of argument are you in? Oftentimes, the simplest way to find out is just to ask. It's always surprising to me if, asked, 'Are there any facts, changed conditions, or new information that could change your mind?' many people will simply answer no. It would be easy to imagine that you can then win the argument, but that's not what happens. What happens is they just reveal to you what kind of argument you're in. It's not a rational or logical argument. It is ultimately opinions, and these kinds of arguments happen all the time, and we don't get the least bit wound up about them. If I said, 'My favourite colour is orange,' you would presuppose that there are no conditions under which I would change my mind. You wouldn't argue with me about it. You might tell me your favourite colour, but then we wouldn't argue about it. We wouldn't fuss or fight. We know these are just our opinions, and we could go along happily with you liking blue and me liking orange, and neither thinking the less of the other. I'm not going home telling my wife that you've been irrational all day about what the best colour is. It's only when the stakes get raised because our beliefs and opinions connect with our identity or the groups to which we belong, the politics or problems of the day, or sex, power, money, control, that things can get more complicated. The important thing is simply that we not lose track of where we are and to not lose the thread of the argument.I could listen to Dan Cohen explain how arguments work every week and be better for it. I've been watching this video on YouTube since it was first posted My grandmother had a little saying for everything. She sat somewhere between Dale Carnegie and the front pew of the church for a really long time, and she liked to say,'We fight to win, we argue to win over.' So where does this all leave us? We have the constitutional right to our opinions, but we don't have the corresponding constitutional right that everyone should agree with us. What are opinions for? I think, to sum it up, opinions are like the opening stakes, the ante, if I have that metaphor correct, to get into the game of any argument. If you're sincerely arguing, discussing, or conversing about anything with anybody, you should be prepared to lose those stakes. Each of us should be prepared for the notion that new information might become available, that facts might change, and that opinions held with something less than perfect certainty may need to be given up in the course of an argument or any encounter with the real world as it actually is. It's not that we shouldn't have strong opinions, and it's not that we should keep our opinions to ourselves, and it's not about claiming we have the right to those opinions. We clearly do. It's about making sure we understand what, among all the things we believe, are opinions, and making sure we've opened ourselves up enough so that those opinions are answerable to the world. The Bee is a reader-supported publication. To help build the hive, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Beeexists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we're often given. I don't see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That's what the Bee is for. Leave a comment Thanks for reading The Bee! This post is public so feel free to share it. Share Subscribe now