Last year, I had a conversation with one of my students about opinions. I later learned that my student considered this conversation memorable and edifying. I suppose it was. As I have written on the home page, one of my goals in maintaining this blog is to share interesting ideas from my everyday conversation. Please understand that my student is a young person who approached me as a teacher, so I felt it appropriate to treat the situation as a teachable moment. I hope you enjoy yourself and learn something.

---

The conversation began with my student asking me a question: who do I think deserves to win a university-admissions discrimination lawsuit making its way through the headlines? 

The lawsuit in question regarded affirmative action policies at Harvard University. At the time, the discrimination lawsuit was in the headlines and also a topic of conversation for my student. The particulars of the lawsuit do not matter to this post because I rejected the question. Here is a summary or interpretation of what I said:

Opinionation vs. Expert Opinion

I think you should stop asking people you know (including me) for their opinions on who should win this lawsuit. Indeed, I think that asking for others’ personal opinions on most “newsworthy” topics is not a good use of your time. The people you are asking (people with whom you are personally acquainted) do not have any ability to influence a situation reported in the headlines. Their opinions about the news offer you no special information or insight. The conversation about “who deserves to win this lawsuit” is a distraction from what is really taking place in the courts, the legal issues that are at stake, and a reasonable prediction of what the result will be.

You are asking me for my personal opinion on this lawsuit, which makes me think that you think my personal thoughts on the lawsuit somehow matter or could teach you something. But just asking for my opinion is substituting your noble pursuit of knowledge with something frivolous.

One of the terrible flaws of American democratic culture^[1]We are both American. is that every last person wants to offer an opinion on every and any topic in the news—it doesn’t matter if the topic affects them or if they even understand it. And this “opinionation” (a word I am coining here to mean “dispensing opinions”) is offered up as though it is an insight.

I’m not talking about professional or expert opinions. Although an expert appraisal of a situation is usually called an “opinion,” this is not the kind of opinion-forming you should avoid. An expert opinion is an evaluation formed from knowledge and experience far beyond what an average person possesses. To learn how an expert thinks about a topic and what an expert considers important is an excellent way for you to learn. I encourage you to read up on attorneys’ predictions of what the result of the lawsuit will be, focusing on the reasons they give to support their predictions. An attorney’s legal opinion about the likely outcome of a lawsuit is not the attorney’s political belief about how the law should work.

Opinionation is a Distraction

A while ago, we talked about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. When you treat opinionation as a substitute for learning, that is like the prisoners in Plato’s cave treating the shadows as reality. Our culture’s acceptance of opinionation allows average people to treat a simplistic, even ignorant reaction to the news as an accurate and informative analysis. Like the prisoners reacting to tales of the world beyond the cave, average people are often disturbed by (and accordingly, reject) a serious effort to understand a topic and know the truth of it.

Understanding is difficult, and truth is not necessarily simple. Opinionation is comforting. Sharing opinions makes us feel like we can talk to each other as though we understand the world. We reassure each other that we understand.

So, my student, let’s examine your life and your interest in this lawsuit. What ability do you have to get information and facts about this lawsuit that so interests you? What can you learn from conversing with people you know?

Virtually everyone you are able to speak with knows nothing substantial about college affirmative action policies, let alone the policy at Harvard in particular. You don’t personally know very many people who understand how a discrimination lawsuit works, or what legal issues are at stake. And if you looked to the news itself, you’d probably fare no better.

Amateur opinions about who “deserves” to win a newsworthy lawsuit are not predictions of how the law might be fairly applied to the facts of the case. That would require the people dispensing opinions to have some kind of legal education and expertise in the area of law in dispute. So, almost necessarily, an amateur legal opinion is just a person’s subjective beliefs about how the law should work applied to a crude understanding of the facts as reported in the news. How is that helpful to you? How is that informative?

Although I do have an opinion about who deserves to win the lawsuit, I will not tell you. You are so interested in and curious about this important topic, and that’s a wonderful thing. I want to fan the flames of your interest. I want to help you understand just how complicated and interesting this topic really is. I want you to learn how much you don’t know. The learning process will begin if you first come to appreciate that joining a conversation of opinionation is a poor substitute for real learning. If I just tell you my opinion of who deserves to win, that might satisfy your desire to know, learn, or understand the topic…extinguishing the flame of curiosity.

If you think opinion somehow matters, you should learn as much as you can and then try to form your own opinion. However, I predict that you will find it difficult to form strong opinions about a complicated topic after you’ve actually studied it.

 What if We Were Discussing a Restaurant?

Let’s say that in the news there was a lawsuit against a fast-food restaurant alleging something wrong with the hamburgers. Let’s say you want to know more. What might you need to know to understand the hamburgers lawsuit?

Well, you’d want to know more about fast food in general and the restaurant involved in the lawsuit. You’d want to know more about hamburgers (where they come from, how they are made and prepared, and so on). You should find out about safety and health standards applicable to fast food and hamburgers. And you should look into how lawsuits of that kind work, such as what sort of evidence would be needed to decide the case one way or the other.

The last @#$% thing you’d need to know…

….is each of your friends‘ intuitions about whether there is something legally wrong with the burgers (or whether there should be something legally wrong with the burgers even if there is not).

Priorities

You only have so much time to be alive on the earth and think about a given topic. If you are willing let your desire to discuss everyone’s subjective opinions on who “deserves” to win dominate your intellectual interest in the hamburgers lawsuit, then just admit to yourself that you are not intellectually curious about the lawsuit. You don’t want to know about the lawsuit. The lawsuit is just an occasion for you and your friends, the news media, and everyone else to opinionate about something.

That’s what’s really going on, isn’t it? People just want to say their opinions. They don’t care about learning anything, or even finding out what’s true. They use news developments, or really any conversation topic at all, as an occasion (that is, an excuse) to do what they always want to do: say their opinions.

You’re too smart. Don’t get sucked into this mania.

Don’t let yourself feel as though finding out everyone’s opinions is the exciting part about discovering a new topic. Don’t let yourself be tricked into thinking that reading about and corralling all the opinions into your mind somehow counts as understanding.

If there were a lawsuit against a restaurant regarding their hamburgers, virtually every person you know would have nothing useful to tell you. And even if they did have some helpful or specialized knowledge, their opinion of who deserves to win the lawsuit is the least useful thought they have to offer.

Pay Attention to What Matters

So there’s a lawsuit against Harvard University regarding to their admissions process.  Virtually everyone you know has almost nothing useful to tell you because they are not particularly informed about the topic. Their opinions are based on rumor, intuition, and sheer belief. If you’re interested in the topic, why should you care about that nonsense? Even if their opinions are based on some useful information, you should ask them for the information they know and then form your own opinion. Others’ opinions are just a distraction.

Think of people opinionating as though…

…as though you are trying to watch a movie, and everyone in the room keeps talking to you and distracting you from hearing what’s even going on with the movie.

As long as you are interested in opinionation, and especially if you are more interested in opinionation than actually learning about a topic, you will fill your mind with useless shadows. There is a true world of fact that exists beyond the realm of opinions. The realm of truth is accessible to you if you learn to tune out the chatter.

Focus on what you really want to learn.