I Have Too Many Thoughts to Have an Opinion

“Hey man, what’s your opinion on this whole AI replacing jobs thing?”

“Opinion? I have too many thoughts to have an opinion.”

That sounds like a strange answer.

Maybe even a bit evasive.

But there are a lot of subjects where that’s genuinely how I feel.

I have thoughts about them. Lots of thoughts.

Some support one side. Some support the other. Some don’t support either side. Some are questions I haven’t resolved yet. Sometimes I can hold two thoughts that seem to conflict with each other and still believe there is some truth in both of them.

I don’t think every collection of thoughts needs to be immediately compressed into an opinion.

Sometimes I want to leave them sitting beside each other for a while.

I can think one thing is probably true while also recognizing another fact that complicates it. I can understand why someone believes something without agreeing with their conclusion. I can see a legitimate problem while remaining unconvinced by the proposed solution.

Eventually those thoughts might consolidate into an opinion.

But sometimes they don’t.

At least not yet.

We usually assume that the more we think about something, the stronger our opinion should become. If we’ve spent enough time reading about a subject, talking about it, questioning it, and trying to understand it, eventually we should know what we think.

But I’ve found that the opposite sometimes happens.

The more I think about a complicated subject, the more difficult it becomes to compress everything I think into a clean opinion.

I can see why one side believes what it believes.

Then I can see why the other side objects.

Then I notice a consequence neither side seems to be talking about.

Then I realize one of the arguments depends on an assumption that may not even be true.

Then I find another piece of information that strengthens one part of the argument while weakening another.

Eventually someone asks:

“So what do you think?”

And sometimes the most accurate answer I have is:

I have a lot of thoughts.

I’m just not sure I have an opinion.

Thoughts and Opinions Aren’t the Same Thing

I don’t think a thought and an opinion are the same thing.

A thought is a component.

It can be a fact, a question, an observation, a concern, an argument, a counterargument, a possibility, a contradiction, or something I haven’t figured out how to interpret yet.

And my thoughts don’t have to agree with one another.

I can think a policy is trying to solve a legitimate problem while also thinking the proposed solution could create serious unintended consequences.

I can think the people supporting something have a fair argument while also believing the people opposing it have identified problems that shouldn’t be ignored.

I can think something is probably true while recognizing that the evidence isn’t strong enough for me to be particularly confident.

Those thoughts can all exist at the same time.

An opinion is different.

An opinion is what happens after those thoughts have been gathered, challenged, compared, weighted, and eventually consolidated into some kind of position.

At least, that’s how I think it’s supposed to work.

Information creates thoughts.

Thoughts create questions.

Questions lead to more information.

Some thoughts survive scrutiny. Others don’t.

Some become more convincing as you learn more. Others start falling apart.

Eventually, if everything leans strongly enough in one direction, you form an opinion.

And even then, I think most opinions should come with an invisible sentence attached:

Based on what I currently know, this is where I land.

That’s very different from:

I have discovered the final truth.

We’ve Reversed the Process

A lot of public discourse seems to work in the opposite direction.

Instead of:

Information → Thought → Opinion

we often get:

Influence → Opinion → Supporting Thoughts

The opinion arrives first.

Maybe it came from a political party.

Maybe it came from a news source.

Maybe it came from a podcast, a friend, a professional community, an influencer, an institution, or simply the group of people someone spends most of their time around.

Sometimes the source is obvious.

Sometimes I don’t think we even realize where our opinion came from.

We just have one.

Then something interesting happens.

Once the conclusion already exists, thinking becomes less about figuring out what we believe and more about defending what we already believe.

Instead of asking:

“What should I conclude from everything I know?”

we start asking:

“What supports my conclusion?”

Information that agrees with us becomes evidence.

Information that disagrees with us becomes suspicious.

A strong argument from our side feels persuasive.

A strong argument from the other side somehow has a flaw we need to find.

Contradictions aren’t things to investigate anymore. They’re things to explain away.

We’ve turned opinions and assumptions into things that can distort what we see—from the output of thinking into the starting point of thinking.

And once that happens, thought becomes remarkably good at serving whatever conclusion was already there.

More Knowledge Can Create Less Certainty

There’s a strange thing that happens when you learn more about complicated subjects.

At the beginning, things often look relatively simple.

There’s a problem.

There’s an obvious cause.

There’s an obvious solution.

Then you keep going.

You learn about the trade-offs.

You discover second-order effects.

You find exceptions.

You realize different people are operating under different incentives.

You learn that the numbers everyone is arguing about can sometimes be measured three different ways.

You discover that two apparently opposing arguments can both contain some truth.

You notice that solving one problem might create another one.

You realize some of the things you thought were facts are actually assumptions.

Eventually the clean picture you started with gets messy.

You understand more than you did before.

But you’re less certain.

Sometimes more knowledge can create less certainty.

The person who knows almost nothing about a subject might only see three variables.

The person who has spent years around it might see thirty.

From the outside, the first person can sound much more confident.

That doesn’t mean they understand it better.

It might just mean they haven’t encountered enough complexity yet to become uncertain.

There are obviously areas where more knowledge should create more certainty.

If I measure a board and it’s 47 inches long, I don’t need to spend the rest of the afternoon considering alternative philosophical interpretations of the tape measure.

But human systems aren’t pieces of lumber.

Politics, economics, business, culture, war, education, technology, ethics, and human behaviour are filled with interacting variables.

The more complicated the system, the narrower the claims we should probably be completely certain about.

“I Don’t Know” Has More Than One Meaning

There are at least two very different ways someone can arrive at:

“I don’t know.”

The first is straightforward.

They haven’t thought about it.

They don’t know enough.

They haven’t looked at the evidence.

They haven’t tried to understand the competing arguments.

They simply don’t know.

But there’s another path to exactly the same sentence.

Someone has thought about it.

A lot.

They’ve looked at the competing arguments.

They understand where the disagreement comes from.

They can see legitimate points on several sides.

They know which assumptions would need to be true for one conclusion to win, and they aren’t confident those assumptions actually are true.

So they say:

“I don’t know.”

From the outside, those two people sound identical.

One doesn’t know because they haven’t thought enough.

The other doesn’t know because they’ve thought enough to understand why the answer isn’t simple.

I’ve become much more comfortable leaving certain questions there.

Unresolved.

I don’t need to manufacture an opinion just because someone asks me for one.

A thought can stay a thought.

A question can stay a question.

A contradiction can remain unresolved.

Maybe more information eventually moves the balance enough for me to form a position.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Forcing a conclusion doesn’t make the conclusion better.

Holding Conflicting Thoughts

I think part of this is becoming comfortable holding conflicting thoughts at the same time.

We’re often pushed toward a kind of intellectual neatness where everything we believe is supposed to line up perfectly.

If I believe A, then surely I must also believe B, C, and D.

If I support one argument, I must reject everything said by the people on the other side.

But reality doesn’t organize itself around our preferred ideological categories.

You can believe a government program does something valuable and still think parts of it are wasteful.

You can believe a business made the right decision and still think they handled it badly.

You can believe technology will eliminate certain jobs while also believing it will create entirely new categories of work.

You can believe someone is mostly right while thinking one of their strongest arguments is wrong.

You can even have two thoughts that appear to pull in opposite directions and decide that neither one needs to disappear yet.

There’s a tendency to treat contradiction as something that has to be eliminated immediately.

Sometimes it does.

If two claims truly cannot coexist, eventually something has to give.

But sometimes what looks like contradiction is really complexity.

Two things can be true at once.

And forcing one of them out because it makes our opinion cleaner doesn’t make our understanding more accurate.

It just makes it cleaner.

The Problem Isn’t Having Opinions

None of this is an argument against opinions.

We need opinions.

We need judgments.

At some point, thinking has to produce decisions.

You can’t investigate every question forever before acting.

In business, you eventually have to make the call.

In life, you eventually have to choose.

In politics, people eventually have to vote.

The problem begins when a conclusion becomes closure.

There’s a difference between conviction and certainty.

Conviction says:

Based on everything I currently know, I strongly believe this.

Certainty says:

I know this is true, so anything that seriously challenges it must be wrong.

Conviction can coexist with another question.

Certainty has a much harder time with one.

An opinion should be a current position, not a permanent destination.

That doesn’t mean every belief should be weak.

There are things we should believe strongly.

There are conclusions supported by overwhelming evidence.

But even a strong conclusion should remain connected to the process that created it.

If better information appears, the conclusion should still be capable of moving.

Otherwise we’re no longer protecting the reasoning.

We’re protecting the conclusion.

Surety Brings Ruin

I’ve used the phrase before:

Surety brings ruin.

I don’t mean confidence is bad.

I don’t mean we should walk through life endlessly questioning everything we know.

I mean there’s something dangerous about excessive surety because surety tells us the investigation is finished.

Once something feels completely settled, curiosity starts disappearing.

Contradictory information becomes irritating.

Questions start sounding like challenges.

Changing your mind starts feeling like weakness.

And eventually the belief can become attached to identity.

“I believe this” quietly becomes:

“I am the kind of person who believes this.”

That’s a much harder belief to change.

Now new information isn’t merely challenging an idea.

It’s challenging you.

And this is where intelligence can actually make the problem worse.

A smart person can be very good at finding reasons their existing position is correct.

They can build better arguments.

Find better examples.

Spot weaknesses in opposing views.

Explain away contradictions more convincingly.

Intelligence doesn’t guarantee that thought remains an investigation.

It can also make someone a much better lawyer for a conclusion they decided on years ago.

How an Opinion Becomes Dogma

I think there’s a progression that can happen:

Thought → Opinion → Conviction → Certainty → Identity → Dogma

At the beginning, the idea is being examined.

Then a conclusion forms.

The conclusion gets stronger.

Eventually doubt begins to feel unnecessary.

Then the belief becomes connected to who the person is.

Finally, the belief becomes insulated from reconsideration.

At the beginning of that progression, thought controls the opinion.

At the end, the opinion controls thought.

Everything that comes in gets sorted.

Supports me.

Attacks me.

Helps our side.

Helps their side.

Worth repeating.

Needs dismissing.

Thought hasn’t disappeared.

There may still be an enormous amount of thinking happening.

But its purpose has changed.

The person is no longer primarily trying to understand reality.

They’re trying to maintain consistency with an existing conclusion.

Surety becomes dangerous not simply because certainty can be wrong.

Certainty can destroy the mechanism that would allow us to discover that we’re wrong.

Social Media Doesn’t Help

Our information environment encourages almost the exact opposite behaviour.

Something happens at 10:00.

By 10:07, everyone needs a take.

You’re supposed to know who’s right, who’s wrong, what caused it, what it means, who should be blamed, and what should happen next.

Preferably before lunch.

“I need more information” doesn’t travel particularly well.

Certainty does.

Outrage does.

A clean position does.

A complicated explanation containing fourteen competing considerations and three unresolved questions isn’t particularly efficient content.

So we compress.

We turn complicated thoughts into clean opinions because clean opinions are easier to communicate.

Then we publish them.

Now we’ve publicly committed ourselves.

Tomorrow, new information comes out.

But changing our mind means admitting yesterday’s confident declaration was incomplete or wrong.

That’s socially uncomfortable.

So instead of allowing tomorrow’s information to change yesterday’s opinion, we start interpreting tomorrow’s information through yesterday’s opinion.

Early opinion creates pressure for future consistency.

And enough pressure for consistency can eventually become dogma.

Maybe Opinions Need Confidence Levels

One thing I’ve been trying to do more is think about opinions as having confidence levels.

Not everything needs to be:

I believe this.

Or:

I don’t believe this.

There’s a lot of room between those two places.

I slightly lean this way.

I strongly lean this way.

I think the evidence is compelling.

I’m highly confident.

I’m uncertain.

I don’t know enough yet.

I see strong arguments on both sides.

I can’t reconcile some of the competing considerations.

Sometimes I don’t have an opinion at all.

That seems like a more accurate representation of how thinking actually works.

It also makes changing your mind less dramatic.

Moving from 60 percent confidence to 70 percent confidence isn’t an ideological conversion.

Neither is moving from 70 percent back to 55.

You’re updating how much weight you give the information as new thoughts enter the system.

That seems healthier than pretending every conclusion needs to be carved into stone.

Keep Thinking After You Conclude

I still want opinions.

I still want convictions.

I still want to be able to make decisions and say:

“This is what I think.”

I just don’t want the conclusion to become more important than the thinking that produced it.

The process should continue.

Information.

Thoughts.

Questions.

Contradictions.

More information.

Weighing.

A conclusion.

Then more information.

More thought.

Maybe revision.

Maybe stronger conviction.

Maybe no change at all.

The goal isn’t permanent uncertainty.

It’s keeping the machinery running.

So when I say:

I have too many thoughts to have an opinion.

I’m not trying to avoid taking a position.

Sometimes I simply haven’t found an honest way to compress everything I think into one yet.

I’d rather leave a question open than close it just for the comfort of having an answer.

Thoughts should produce opinions.

But opinions should never be allowed to end thought.

Because once an opinion becomes invulnerable to thought, it isn’t really a conclusion anymore.

It’s dogma.

And surety brings ruin.