|
|
|
|
|
|
by cvolzer3
2360 days ago
|
|
|
“Grey Thinking” as a term does a poor job at conveying what I _think_ the author wants to say. And that is, (1) don’t make generic statements and (2) consider your perspective. When you boil a problem down to its specifics, you get back to black and white thinking. Using the article’s example, “War is awful but history shows it to be occasionally necessary, and a very complex phenomenon” still contains the black and white statement of “War is good when situation X occurs and bad when situation Y occurs.” |
|
|
I don't know if that's what the author meant, but it is bad thinking.
If you insist on no generalizations, you can't understand anything - the world is huge and awash with facts. Generalization is the process through which one can ignore irrelevant facts and focus on the important ones.
An example:
One might start out with the idea that men are stronger than women. This is not an unreasonable position to hold, but it certainly lacks some nuance.
One could point out, for example, that some women are stronger than some men. Which is true. However, this counter example is pretty weak, because most men are stronger than most women, while very few women are stronger than most men.
A more refined version of the original statement is: men have 2 std dev greater upper body strength than women, or in more approachable parlance: 95% of men have stronger upper bodies than the average woman.
It is true that the positive tails of both distributions extend to infinity, so there will always be examples of women who are strong in relation to most men. But it is also true that you will almost never find a woman who is the strongest person (at a given task - strength is specific).
At the end of the day, it is possible to craft true generic statements that capture enough nuance to be both useful and simple with a basic understanding of statistics.