The Correct Answer is Usually in the Middle.
On Finding Truth.
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To get it out of the way, this is not a discussion of politics, but it is a discussion about the way so many issues are discussed.
It feels like every day we are inundated with all kinds of takes especially with modern social media, and while a lot of the time you’d probably be best off just ignoring all of this noise, the reality of life for now is that not everyone has read my “Tackling Social Media” post and is therefore still consuming the takes — which means you need to face up to many people being fed bad takes.
Tackling Social Media.
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But, truth be told, it’s often difficult to tell what exactly is a good or bad take. People talk a lot about “misinformation”, but the issue is that so much of what humanity consumes these days cannot really have that term applied to it because it’s editorial. If someone is giving their opinion, they can certainly get the facts they build on wrong, but their opinion is just their opinion, and while we can sometimes compare things they suggest against real data and ground truth information, we often can’t.
And so, in these cases we are forced to rely on heuristics: imperfect strategies that usually give us good enough results. And one I think is often worth applying is ... the correct answer is usually in the middle.
Before I state my example, I want to make it clear what this being a heuristic means — it means this is a rule of thumb. For one, I am not saying the answer is always in the middle, and to be specific, the correct answer is not always geometrically in the middle; it’s just usually somewhere between the two contrasting lines of argument.
My whole inspiration for writing this blog post was something someone who I don’t know posted on LinkedIn (cringe, I know) about the Chinese High-Speed Train system. I love this example, because if you know me from my other life, I love public transportation, but this example in particular feels like something most people will have at least heard about — because y’know China has built a lot of high-speed rail!
I bring this up because when I was younger, and perhaps even today on some issues, I was often quickly convinced by people (who I didn’t know) of some statement on a topic which I wasn’t really familiar with, because they used dramatic language or were particularly bold. If someone made a strong (in language) argument that “privatized healthcare systems are the best!” for example, I might have believed it, and even gently repeated the points I heard to others. I was often pretty open to emotional appeals, recency bias, and just general social pressure too. The point is, I pretty quickly got into a “camp” on most issues like I think happens with a lot of people, and unfortunately these camps also often have a political dimension — even when there isn’t really anything traditionally partisan-political about the subject, so you end up having predictable views on every issue. I think to some degree this is also because people feel they need to have an opinion on every issue, which the media and news-driven social media landscape absolutely loves, because it creates demand for takes!
To better illustrate the problem and the type of issues I’m talking about, think about the question: “Is China’s High Speed Rail system a success?”, and then see the LinkedIn Post.
As you can see, the post (from a “Transport Leader” wearing a suit) mentions that while “Everyone praises China’s high-speed rail network. It is actually a financial, environmental, and transport disaster.”
I could have a field day breaking down concerning elements of this language — even just the use of “Everyone” — but what I want to do is step back. When you see something like this, what is your natural reaction? It seems a person in a position of authority strongly believes something, so it must be at least partly true right? I’m going to take some time to rebut the argument, but even I wouldn’t say no!
While I am familiar with this topic, and you might be too, it’s important to remember that when you’re determining the validity of various takes, you often won’t have that!
While I think the word “disaster” is hyperbolic, China has clearly built some lines that are not successful for political or strategic reasons, including ones that may as well be going to Inner Mongolia. It doesn’t take a transportation person to get that building an expensive piece of infrastructure to an extremely low population area is both a bad and wasteful idea, but also the kind of thing that countries, especially authoritarian ones, do regularly! There are also plenty of news stories about China building stations and property developments in the middle of nowhere — this isn’t groundbreaking stuff.
But for the counterpoint, China has legitimately built far more high-speed rail by itself than the rest of the world combined. That alone is an amazing feat, especially since other countries had a decades-long head start. Basic logic also suggests that if you’re doing something a lot, surely at least some of it is good. Below is a map of China’s rail system, with high speed lines in red and yellow.
As a response to the assertion that this system is a “transport failure”, I could simply identify you the numerous pairs of cities which are both near each other and connected by high-speed rail: There are dozens of pairs on this map. Even if the station locations were horrible, and the lines were slow (the station locations are generally fine and the lines are fast — the fastest in the world), a lot of these big Chinese cities have populations over 10 million, even a bad high-speed train would get a lot of use and therefore not be a transport failure, and that’s the weakest potential argument!
The stronger argument is this. China has many of the world’s largest cities and a lot of just regular big cities hooked up together with world-leading high-speed train services — which, thanks to the highest speeds in the world, and even high-speed sleeper trains, are competitive on even longer distances than usual (as well as because of issues with domestic air travel in China). Cities often have multiple high-speed train stations, as well as subway systems that let you get from the station to your final destination (China already has the three largest subway systems in the world, and lots of still large but smaller networks). Because of this, ridership is already about ten times higher than the Shinkansen (bullet train) system in Japan. Now, China does have like ten times the population of Japan, but the Japanese bullet train system is exceptionally good and performs at the top of high-speed rail systems, so China basically managing to do that well on a much larger scale is crazy (usually you pick the low-hanging fruit and things get harder afterwards with things like network planning).
This post from great Chinese urban rail writer “JRUrbaneNetwork” discusses just taking a high-speed train from Hong Kong to Beijing for a holiday — that would not be like taking a train from New York to Boston, or London to Paris, but like New York to Dallas or London to Tallinn!
So to summarize, while the Chinese high-speed rail system is imperfect, it is also not disastrous. We could argue about specifically how much of these elements apply, but it seems that it is increasingly improbable that the system lands at one extreme or another!
For most points of policy or argument, my experience has been that this is the situation. When you find an argument and people highlight two opposing viewpoints, usually both have some weaker and stronger arguments, and things balance fairly well.
Of course, if you're looking at an issue and you only find one argument to anchor you, you will almost certainly get a tilted view — and the same is true if you have one person making measured arguments and another making extreme ones, but then I would argue the person making the extreme arguments isn't really taking a mainstream approach.
While I want to emphasize once again that this is just a heuristic, I do think it's worth asking why it generally works quite well.
When debating a subject, while your argument can be amplified by flowery language and hyperbole facts do matter, you can only stray so far and infer and editorialize so much. If you’re too non-factual, you are no longer mainstream, and same if you’re overly hyperbolic, then you’re basically propaganda. Basically, when making an argument tilted in either direction on a particular subject, you're ultimately probably still mostly going to have to base things around facts and reality, lest people don't take you seriously at all (of course, there are such people who don't care much for facts or reality, but I think we can assume that they aren't reading this post!).
So why is it that people choose to take a side on so many issues when so many require more nuance and the like?
Well, there are obviously good reasons. If for example, you are very concerned about climate change, you might be thinking about impacts to yourself that other people may not feel or be considering. I think saying “climate change is going to have some serious impacts, but humanity will most likely be all right” is a pretty reasonable take on climate. But you don't know what any individual person might personally feel they have at stake, okay on aggregate does not mean okay for every person! And it can also be the case that people just consistently believe that the facts are not accurately representing reality, which you could definitely say is an issue with climate change where it seems like many projections of its impacts are under projections! Another issue where you might see a similar problem is with population decline, where it seems like a lot of projections have been too optimistic.
There are of course a lot of bad reasons why people feel the need to take a side. For one, it's nice when the narrative is simpler — dealing with the ebb and flow of every individual point of argument is a lot more tiring. It's exciting and I think leans into a base human desire to sort of pick a team and stick with it. Nuance is just drawn out and boring.
But nuance is a reasonable approach, because people generally are also reasonable, and so we think things for a mix of good and bad reasons. If you look at a full argument over an issue, it's generally the case that there are some pros and cons, some of which are higher quality than others. While this post isn't about trying to find the precise truth, you would go about finding that by determining just how strong each individual argument in each direction is, which would then give you a pretty good sense for where on the spectrum the truth lies.