“Hate is a strong word”, my mother used to say.
The irony of my choice of post title isn’t lost on me. Here I am writing about the dangers of reducing the world to simplistic opposites, and I’ve deliberately given this post a title that does exactly that. There were gentler alternatives. “I dislike binary thinking” would have been more accurate, but considerably less clickable.
Perhaps that’s part of the problem.
I have three or four different posts sitting in my drafts folder and, on reflection, they all amount to the same thing. They circle around the same idea from different directions before arriving at the same destination: the tendency to treat our own opinions as truth and every alternative as false.
This black-and-white view of the world has always bothered me, but it’s taken several abandoned drafts to realise that binary thinking isn’t really the problem. It’s the symptom. The underlying problem is a loss of intellectual humility.
Confidence tells us we have the answer. Humility reminds us we may not have the right question.
In context
We all know that context matters. A hammer is brilliant for knocking in nails and absolutely useless for making a cup of tea, but for some reason, when it comes to opinions, people love declaring one thing as universally right and everything else as wrong.
“This is the best camera.”
“That operating system is rubbish.”
These statements ignore the simple fact that people have different goals, different experiences and different ways of working. What’s perfect for one person can be completely inappropriate for someone else.
It feels almost embarrassingly obvious just writing that. You may well be thinking, “Well, yes, obviously.”
If so, please bear with me.
Because although most of us would happily agree that context matters, we don’t always behave as though it does.
Certainty, please
I think a lot of it comes down to how our brains crave certainty.
The world is complicated. Most worthwhile questions don’t have clean answers. They’re full of trade-offs, competing priorities and incomplete information. That’s mentally exhausting, so our brains naturally reach for shortcuts. It’s much easier to reduce everything to a simple choice: good or bad, right or wrong, us or them.
I catch myself doing this far more often than I’d like.
The strange thing is that this approach isn’t about ideas at all.
It’s about identity.
People don’t defend cameras. They defend their choice of camera.
What fascinates me is that this doesn’t stop at cameras or operating systems. It creeps into almost everything. The productivity app we use becomes the right productivity app. The diet that worked for us becomes the correct diet. The political party we voted for becomes part of who we are. At some point we’re no longer evaluating ideas; we’re protecting a version of ourselves. It’s hardly surprising that criticism of the thing starts to feel uncomfortably like criticism of us.
Once you’ve invested time, money or effort into something, changing your mind can feel surprisingly expensive. If I’ve spent years learning one tool or following one approach, admitting that another way might be just as valid can feel like admitting I’ve been wrong all along.
So instead of saying, “This works really well for me,” we end up saying, “This is the only sensible way to do it.”
But that’s a very different statement.
The better question
I’ve started to think that the problem isn’t that we ask the wrong questions.
It’s that we stop asking questions altogether.
When someone asks, “Which is best?”, the conversation often becomes a competition. Somebody has to win. Somebody has to lose.
Perhaps the more interesting question is…
Best for what?
I’ve found that a surprising number of arguments dissolve the moment someone phrases their question this way, removing the absolutes and asking for context to be included in the thinking which invariably ends up with the answer “It depends”.
A mirrorless camera might be better for travelling, while a DSLR is better for wildlife photography.
A notebook isn’t competing with an iPad.
A campervan isn’t competing with a five-star hotel.
A Hitchcock film isn’t trying to do what a Wes Anderson film does.
None of these examples diminish the alternative. They’re simply solving different problems for different people.
I’ve started to think that “It depends” isn’t a cop-out at all. It’s often the most honest answer available.
Reality is messy, so most worthwhile questions involve trade-offs. But because we don’t like uncertainty, we feel uncomfortable in those discussions, and I don’t think discomfort is evidence that we’re thinking badly or wrongly.
Rather, I think discomfort is often evidence that we’re finally thinking carefully.
Curiosity over certainty
As these various draft posts slowly collapsed into one, I realised I needed to be careful.
It’s very easy to accuse other people of binary thinking while quietly indulging in a bit of it yourself.
coughs Says the guy who deliberately used the word “hate” in the title.
I’d like to pretend I’m above all of this, but I’m not, and I don’t think any of us really are. Social media definitely isn’t.
Just as outrage spreads faster than nuance, certainty travels further than curiosity. Whilst social media didn’t invent that tendency, it rewards it magnificently. “X beats Y” is easier to consume than “Well… it depends,” and certainty has become a remarkably effective way of attracting attention.
That’s what bothers me most about binary thinking, the way it closes doors before curiosity has had a chance to walk through them.
After all, once you’ve decided something is simply “good” or “bad”, there’s nothing left to discover. Curiosity disappears and you stop asking why someone made a different choice because you’ve already decided they were wrong. The conversation stops being about understanding why they did what they did and starts becoming about winning.
And that’s a shame, because curiosity requires something far rarer than certainty. It requires the willingness to believe that your understanding might be incomplete. That’s harder than it sounds.
We tend to treat changing our minds as a sign of weakness when it might actually be one of the clearest signs that we’re still learning. There shouldn’t be any shame in discovering that someone else has a better idea, or simply a different experience. I’d be far more suspicious of someone who has all the answers than someone who occasionally says, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Intellectual humility
As I rebuild my blogroll, I’ve realised I’m unconsciously seeking out writers who possess that quality.
They’re rarely the loudest voices.
They don’t tell me that one tool is objectively better than another, or that there’s only one sensible way to approach a problem. Instead, they explain where something shines, where it falls short and, most importantly, who it’s for.
They seem genuinely interested in understanding before judging, and that’s the kind of writing I want to read, and, more importantly, the kind of thinking I’d like to practise.
Perhaps my mother was right. Hate is too strong a word.
It’s not the binary thinking I hate. It’s what we lose when we surrender to it.
We lose curiosity.
We lose nuance.
Most importantly, we lose the chance to discover that someone else’s answer wasn’t wrong at all — just shaped by a different experience.
As I continue rebuilding my blogroll, I’m trying to notice my own reactions. Whenever I feel myself slipping into “they’re wrong”, I’ve started asking two questions instead.
Best for what?
What am I missing?
It reminds me that my understanding of the world is inevitably incomplete because it is shaped by my own experiences.
I’ve come to think that intellectual humility isn’t doubting everything you believe. It’s recognising that every opinion you hold was formed from a limited set of experiences. Someone else has lived a different life, seen different evidence, solved different problems. Why wouldn’t they reach different conclusions, find different ways of doing things?
Perhaps intellectual humility isn’t about thinking less of our own opinions. It’s about holding them lightly enough that there’s always room for another perspective.
That’s the real opposite of binary thinking.
Not nuance.
Humility.
What are your thoughts?