Nuance

I was discussing this with a colleague of mine the other day : the world seems more complicated today than yesterday, changes are happening at a faster pace than before, in direction harder to predict, volatility is clearly here.

I’ll let other debate about whose fault is it because today I want to talk about the process in which people forge their opinion about those changes.

I’ve seen too much instance where the conclusion is generally one-sided : it’s good or it’s bad.
The introduction of the “cancel” culture of the 2020s created a somewhat norm about any subject that, you as a human, must constantly “vote” on the current thing happening :

You heard about X doing Y, what do you think of it ? It’s dumb/bad/smart/nice right ?

You may happen to know the subject a bit but overall just a scratch, yet you must express an opinion on it.
Depending on the expected answer of the person asking, you get to go either in “they agree with me” or “they don’t agree with me” group of that person.

Historically this make sense : human’s brain are pattern matching all the time, the faster they match you in a pattern, the faster they can stop thinking about it. Socially, this helps quickly finding peers that you can trust, which is a powerful evolving pressure.

Yet I believe we should fight this trait : opinions are by nature complex and none is superior to the others, each one involve tradeoffs and the weight of each tradeoff obviously depend on you.

An example that I like to use to illustrate this : should we make a law to ban using oil to create energy ?

• on one hand : yes we should, oil create problems that impact us all : climate change, health issues etc.
• but on the other hand : which chain reaction does it start ? What about poorer peoples that still rely on it for basic living standard ? Going to work for example : poorer people need that to earn money to eat, if we increase by 5% (theoretically), that’s 5% less that they will not spend on basic need which can create an existential threat for them.

Obviously there are counterarguments and other arguments that we can use here, however i tend to see people wanting more upsides with fewer downsides, thinking about their point of view.

To be clear “whataboutism” (i.e. for every problem, saying what about X or Y problem), that we also rise in the 2020s, is clearly also a problem in those debates.

To conclude, it appears to me that we need more nuance when approaching complex issues :

• understanding why said issues exists
• defining possible solutions
• exploring chain reaction of each solution

Accepting tradeoffs is the most important thing to remember, otherwise nothing will change and change is what makes us move forward.