The Value of Grey ThinkingOne of the most common questions we receive, unsurprisingly, is along the linesof What one piece of advice would you recommend to become a better thinker?!e question is kind of cheating. !ere is, of course, no one thing, and if FarnamStreet is a testament to any idea, it’s that you must pull from many disciplines toachieve overall wisdom. (https://fs.blog/mental-models/) No truly great thinker issiloed in a small territory.But a common experience tends to occur as you rid yourself of ideology andnarrowness, as you venture deeper and deeper into unfamiliar territory; and it’sworth thinking about it ahead of time. It goes by many names, but a fair one mightbe Grey !inking.Thinking in GreyChildren love torturing their parents and teachers with the relentless Why? !e chainof whys can be endless — Why does the doggy pant? He’s hot. Why? I’m hot and Idon’t pant. Yes, but he has fur, and doesn’t sweat. Why does he have fur? To keep himwarm. Why don’t I have fur then? OK that’s enough.If you’re a parent, you’ve probably had this experience. It’s agitating in the moment,but it’s just a symptom of the child’s view of the world: Something to be explored.!eir views are not "xed yet.As we get older, we start to get rigid. We are forced to take tests with de"nite answers— A, B, C, or D? How well we do at these determines, to an extent, our position inlife. !e shortcomings of this system are well documented so we won’t rehash them.But a major symptom of this style of learning, combined with our natural proclivityto land on easily digestible answers, is that we start thinking in rigid categories: Waris good. War is bad. Capitalism is good. Capitalism is bad. America is Socialist.America is a Free Market System. We must support our troops. College is useless.College is indispensable. And so on. !ese slogans become substitutes for actual understanding, and it’s not asbenign as it seems. !e slogan isn’t just a shorthand: It replaces thinking for manypeople, because it’s hard to generate real understanding. As discussed in the Eager tobe Wrong (https://fs.blog/2016/05/eager-to-be-wrong/) piece, it’s a lot easier to landsomewhere simple and stay there. It requires less energy.But the fact is, the reality is all grey area. All of it. !ere are very few black and whiteanswers and no solutions without second-order consequences(https://fs.blog/2016/04/second-order-thinking/).!is fundamental truth is easy to grasp in theory and hard to use in practice, everyday. It takes a substantial deprogramming to realize that life is all grey, that all realitylies on a continuum. !is is why quantitative and scale-based(https://fs.blog/2015/12/the-e#ect-of-scale-on-values/) thinking is so important. Butmost don’t realize that quantitative thinking isn’t really about math; it’s about the ideathat !e dose makes the poison.!e dose/poison idea is the opposite of the slippery slope argument favored by theideologue. It starts with this, and then the whole thing goes to hell. Well, maybe, butnot necessarily and not usually. Nearly all things are OK in some dose but not OK inanother dose. !at is the way of the world, and why almost everything connected topractical reality must be quanti"ed, at least roughly.!is isn’t to say that some things shouldn’t be stamped on hard, and fast. Doingheroin even once is probably a bad idea. But make sure to use the right mental modelfor the right situation. We can re-frame our slogans above: War is awful but historyshows it to be occasionally necessary, and a very complex phenomenon. Capitalism isenormously productive but has many limitations. Some socialist institutions actuallywork well in a capitalist economy, but pure socialism hasn’t tended to work at all.College has its pluses and minuses; it works for some and not for others. Support forsoldiers may carry some conditions. And so on.If any of these ru$e your feathers, then good. !e "rst step towards thinking in 3D isrealizing that you carry many of your cherished positions too strongly. Most ofpractical reality lies outside the realm of mathematical certainty.Lyndon Johnson Lyndon Johnson!ere’s a wonderful series of books(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679729453/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0679729453&linkCode=as2&tag=farnamstreet-20&linkId=7X3V5P6TVYESS67C) on Lyndon Johnson, the 36thPresident of the United States. By all accounts, LBJ was not someone you’d like tomarry into your family. He was a relentless politician, a climber, a habitual liar, andtreated many people like dirt, including his wife Lady Bird. He also embroiled thecountry in Vietnam, for which many never forgave him.On the other hand, LBJ was a deep Southerner who cared deeply about the rights ofthe poor and the rights of people of color, at a time when few whites did, and evenfewer whites in power did. He used his political power to enact Civil Rightslegislation that seemingly no one else could get through, and with his Great Societyprograms, gave millions of poor and elderly people dignity, both of which webasically take for granted today, but were an enormous struggle to enact.LBJ was not popular in his time, though history has been a bit more friendly to him.But the question stands…was he a good guy? Do we admire him or can we barelycontain our hatred?To an ideologue, LBJ "ts into some category or another. He’s despicable, and hiscrimes cannot be made up for. His lies and his personal reputation make himunforgivable. Alternatively, by passing Civil Rights, maybe LBJ is something of a darkhero — a %awed, Batman-like "gure who we needed but couldn’t appreciate in histime.!e truth is, of course, in between. He’s all of these things. !e problem lies with us,the categorizers. We want to place him somewhere and move on. You may fairly, onbalance, think LBJ detracted more than he added. !at’s "ne. But that’s not whatmost people want to do — they want to put the black hat or the white hat on him.Villain or hero. READ NEXTSol Price on Becoming Your Customer’s Best FriendSol Price is a legend in the retail business. Price founded one of the !rst discountretailers, FedMart, in the 1950s, and then later the …!is is a special case of a broader mental phenomenon that we’re doing all the time."is music sucks! "is music is the best thing ever created! Yoga is for weirdos. Yoga isthe only way to achieve mental peace.It’s only once you can begin divorcing yourself from good-and-bad, black-and-white,category X&Y type thinking that your understanding of reality starts to "t togetherproperly. Putting things on a continuum, assessing the scale of their importance andquantifying their e#ects, understanding both the good and the bad, is the way to doit. Understanding the other side (https://fs.blog/2013/04/the-work-required-to-have-an-opinion/) of the argument better than your own, a theme we hammer on adnauseum, is the way to do it. Because truth always lies somewhere in between, andthe discomfort of being uncertain is preferable to the certainty of being wrong.It isn’t easy, but it’s not supposed to be.