In general, I apply theoretical frameworks to the way I think about ideas, rather than just letting myself conclude after pure observation and pure thinking about them.
So instead of settling on an opinion that appears to me to be most true, I have a tendency to prefer to take an average of what others believe, and an average of the data, and an average of my intuition, and some arguments from my own observation, and to settle in on a flexibly moderate perspective on the matter.
While this certainly means that I’m going to be biased toward moderation, and then will miss the urgency of the occasionally in-fact-radical truth, it also tends to prevent my being radically wrong, and crucially, it allows me to adopt updated views more easily.
This is the answer to a problem I caused myself when I wrote a newsletter long ago, which a friend pointed out was somewhat contradictory to my moderate perspective. In that newsletter, I described the logical problem we sometimes have of thinking the actual truth is an average of two arguments.
For example, imagine someone telling you the sky is red, and another telling you the sky is blue. Since you can’t see the sky, the question is, is it more value to presume the sky is purple, an average of the two? No. In some cases, it’s more likely to assume that one of the observers is wrong and the other is right and that the sky is either red or blue. It’s not inherently true that a position is better if it’s the middle of two disagreeing positions, is the point.
Sometimes, one argument is good and one is bad, and one is true and one is false; by including the bad or false argument you may simply be wrecking your understanding of reality.
So the problem that gives rise to is: why do I settle on being moderate then?
And the reason is, I think that in context of the modern world, the critique i gave above of moderation is less reliable, because there is such uncertainty and so much information. I think that in spite of accidentally believing the sky is purple, when zooming out a bit, a purple sky person will gain a more closely approximation of how reality actually is by averaging all arguments than by taking extreme positions on all arguments. The extreme positions will make them extremely correct or extremely incorrect on all their ideas, while a moderate position will leave me l somewhat wrong on every thing.
I think the moderate philosophy applied across ALL matters, is likely to make me about as wrong or less wrong in aggregate than extreme philosophies applied across all matters, and additionally, the moderate position leaves me more intellectually free and ready to shift my view as new information comes forward, enabling me to get less and less wrong over time where I’m most wrong. In contrast, the work someone must do to undo their most extreme philosophies that turn out to be wrong is so great they may not even be able to do it.
Not holding extreme philosophies means I won’t build my life around them, won’t end up in prison for protesting them, won’t teach my children to embrace them, won’t meet my spouse at a convention about them — in other words, I won’t build structures around ideas that are extreme that prevent me from easily shifting away from them as more information rises.
So, I don’t apply a tendency toward averaging to a moderate position in order to get to exact truth but in order to hold an average understanding that is at least as good or better than I could otherwise have, while maintaining a flexible perspective on all matters.
Ultimately this stance betrays my preference for flexibility and continual learning, and my fascination with continuing to update my understanding, and downplays the importance of holding tightly to specific perspectives, all of which is much in keeping with my personality and preferences. How convenient!
And now, to answer that question about the color of the sky, a photo my dad sent to the family text thread a couple weeks ago of the eastern (yes eastern) sky during a sunset in Utah.