The Value of Grey Thinking

The Value of Grey Thinking
One of the most common questions we receive, unsurprisingly, is along the lines
of 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 Farnam
Street is a testament to any idea, it’s that you must pull from many disciplines to
achieve overall wisdom. (https://fs.blog/mental-models/) No truly great thinker is
siloed in a small territory.
But a common experience tends to occur as you rid yourself of ideology and
narrowness, as you venture deeper and deeper into unfamiliar territory; and it’s
worth thinking about it ahead of time. It goes by many names, but a fair one might
be Grey !inking.
Thinking in Grey
Children love torturing their parents and teachers with the relentless Why? !e chain
of whys can be endless — Why does the doggy pant? He’s hot. Why? I’m hot and I
don’t pant. Yes, but he has fur, and doesn’t sweat. Why does he have fur? To keep him
warm. 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 in
life. !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 proclivity
to land on easily digestible answers, is that we start thinking in rigid categories: War
is 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 as
benign as it seems. !e slogan isn’t just a shorthand: It replaces thinking for many
people, because it’s hard to generate real understanding. As discussed in the Eager to
be Wrong (https://fs.blog/2016/05/eager-to-be-wrong/) piece, it’s a lot easier to land
somewhere 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 white
answers 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, every
day. It takes a substantial deprogramming to realize that life is all grey, that all reality
lies 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. But
most don’t realize that quantitative thinking isn’t really about math; it’s about the idea
that !e dose makes the poison.
!e dose/poison idea is the opposite of the slippery slope argument favored by the
ideologue. It starts with this, and then the whole thing goes to hell. Well, maybe, but
not necessarily and not usually. Nearly all things are OK in some dose but not OK in
another dose. !at is the way of the world, and why almost everything connected to
practical reality must be quanti"ed, at least roughly.
!is isn’t to say that some things shouldn’t be stamped on hard, and fast. Doing
heroin even once is probably a bad idea. But make sure to use the right mental model
for the right situation. We can re-frame our slogans above: War is awful but history
shows it to be occasionally necessary, and a very complex phenomenon. Capitalism is
enormously productive but has many limitations. Some socialist institutions actually
work 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 for
soldiers may carry some conditions. And so on.
If any of these ru$e your feathers, then good. !e "rst step towards thinking in 3D is
realizing that you carry many of your cherished positions too strongly. Most of
practical 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 36th
President of the United States. By all accounts, LBJ was not someone you’d like to
marry into your family. He was a relentless politician, a climber, a habitual liar, and
treated many people like dirt, including his wife Lady Bird. He also embroiled the
country in Vietnam, for which many never forgave him.
On the other hand, LBJ was a deep Southerner who cared deeply about the rights of
the poor and the rights of people of color, at a time when few whites did, and even
fewer whites in power did. He used his political power to enact Civil Rights
legislation that seemingly no one else could get through, and with his Great Society
programs, gave millions of poor and elderly people dignity, both of which we
basically 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 barely
contain our hatred?
To an ideologue, LBJ "ts into some category or another. He’s despicable, and his
crimes cannot be made up for. His lies and his personal reputation make him
unforgivable. Alternatively, by passing Civil Rights, maybe LBJ is something of a dark
hero — a %awed, Batman-like "gure who we needed but couldn’t appreciate in his
time.
!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, on
balance, think LBJ detracted more than he added. !at’s "ne. But that’s not what
most people want to do — they want to put the black hat or the white hat on him.
Villain or hero.

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!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 is
the 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 together
properly. Putting things on a continuum, assessing the scale of their importance and
quantifying their e#ects, understanding both the good and the bad, is the way to do
it. 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 ad
nauseum, is the way to do it. Because truth always lies somewhere in between, and
the discomfort of being uncertain is preferable to the certainty of being wrong.
It isn’t easy, but it’s not supposed to be.