"I feel like I'm not the sort of person who's allowed to have opinions about the important issues like AI risk."
"What's the bad thing that might happen if you expressed your opinion?"
"It would be wrong in some way I hadn't foreseen, and people would think less of me."
"Do you think less of other people who have wrong opinions?"
"Not if they change their minds when confronted with the evidence."
"Would you do that?"
"Yeah."
"Do you think other people think less of those who do that?"
"No."
"Well, if it's alright for other people to make mistakes, what makes YOU so special?"
A lot of my otherwise very smart and thoughtful friends seem to have a mental block around thinking on certain topics, because they're the sort of topics Important People have Important Opinions around. There seem to be two very different reasons for this sort of block:
- Being wrong feels bad.
- They might lose the respect of others.
Be wrong
If you don't have an opinion, you can hold onto the fantasy that someday, once you figure the thing out, you'll end up having a right opinion. But if you put yourself out there with an opinion that's unmistakably your own, you don't have that excuse anymore.
This is related to the desire to pass tests. The smart kids go through school and are taught - explicitly or tacitly - that as long as they get good grades they're doing OK, and if they try at all they can get good grades. So when they bump up against a problem that might actually be hard, there's a strong impulse to look away, to redirect to something else. So they do.
You have to understand that this system is not real, it's just a game. In real life you have to be straight-up wrong sometimes. So you may as well get it over with.
If you expect to be wrong when you guess, then you're already wrong, and paying the price for it. As Eugene Gendlin said:
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
What you would be mistaken about, you're already mistaken about. Owning up to it doesn't make you any more mistaken. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
"You're already "wrong" in the sense that your anticipations aren't perfectly aligned with reality. You just haven't put yourself in a situation where you've openly tried to guess the teacher's password. But if you want more power over the world, you need to focus your uncertainty - and this only reliably makes you righter if you repeatedly test your beliefs. Which means sometimes being wrong, and noticing. (And then, of course, changing your mind.)
Being wrong is how you learn - by testing hypotheses.
In secret
Getting used to being wrong - forming the boldest hypotheses your current beliefs can truly justify so that you can correct your model based on the data - is painful and I don't have a good solution to getting over it except to tough it out. But there's a part of the problem we can separate out, which is - the pain of being wrong publicly.
When I attended a Toastmasters club, one of the things I liked a lot about giving speeches there was that the stakes were low in terms of the content. If I were giving a presentation at work, I had to worry about my generic presentation skills, but also whether the way I was presenting it was a good match for my audience, and also whether the idea I was pitching was a good strategic move for the company or my career, and also whether the information I was presenting was accurate. At Toastmasters, all the content-related stakes were gone. No one with the power to promote or fire me was present. Everyone was on my side, and the group was all about helping each other get better. So all I had to think about was the form of my speech.
Once I'd learned some general presentations at Toastmasters, it became easier to give talks where I did care about the content and there were real-world consequences to the quality of the talk. I'd gotten practice on the form of public speaking separately - so now I could relax about that, and just focus on getting the content right.
Similarly, expressing opinions publicly can be stressful because of the work of generating likely hypotheses, and revealing to yourself that you are farther behind in understanding things than you thought - but also because of the perceived social consequences of sounding stupid. You can at least isolate the last factor, by starting out thinking things through in secret. This works by separating epistemic uncertainty from social confidence. (This is closely related to the dichotomy between social and objective respect.)
Of course, as soon as you can stand to do this in public, that's better - you'll learn faster, you'll get help. But if you're not there yet, this is a step along the way. If the choice is between having private opinions and having none, have private opinions. (Also related: If we can't lie to others, we will lie to ourselves.)
Read and discuss a book on a topic you want to have opinions about, with one trusted friend. Start a secret blog - or just take notes. Practice having opinions at all, that you can be wrong about, before you worry about being accountable for your opinions. One step at a time.
Before you're publicly right, consider being secretly wrong. Better to be secretly wrong, than secretly not even wrong.
(Cross-posted at my personal blog.)
That makes a lot of sense - I have a lot of unfinished drafts, but I think my "morning pages" workspace is just my brain. I often find myself rehearsing little speeches about various topics, refining them, saying stuff in my head and then assessing whether it's right. This isn't something I talk about a lot, or something that would have occurred to me as relevant when advising someone who's trying to get better at writing, but I effectively get huge amounts of practice "writing" that people who don't do this don't get.
I suspect this is a big source of variation from person to person in writing/communication ability, that "morning pages" is sort of a hack for. If you don't automatically verbalize a bunch of your thoughts before they're ready to share, making time to do so (e.g. "morning pages") can help close the practice gap.
(A friend has reported an analogous "superpower" where they tend to automatically imagine future scenarios such as how an interpersonal interaction might go, which lets them rapidly iterate on plans using "inner simulator" before taking the comparatively expensive step of trying one out in practice. (ETA: The commonality here is that we both have mental processes that seem to automatically, effortlessly, as background processes, precalculate a lot of stuff in ways that just doesn't happen for other people unless they make a deliberate effort. This leads to other people seeming inexplicably bad at a thing, when the truth is we just unknowingly put a lot more work into it.))
My recommendation is that once you get past the idle verbalization (if you're me) or morning pages stage, making clearer more specific claims is something that you can also do in private until you're ready to do it in public.
I also do the 'saying stuff in my head' thing a lot and it is definitely a useful form of writing practice - my main one, in fact, as I'm relatively new to actually writing things down frequently.
I find it's mainly good for practice at the sentence/paragraph level, though, at least at my level of discipline. I tend to end up with fragments that sound good locally, but drift around pretty aimlessly at the global level. Trying to write something down makes me notice that. It's helped me realise that I have a lot to to work on when it comes to focus and structure.