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re: Some things are black and white
Greg — (archived)

Some issues are black and white, some can only be discerned in shades of grey. Usually you can't tell which is which beforehand. Betting the enemy thinks in black and white is just a belief system, it has nothing to do with logic. It's like getting an analog signal and sampling it at 2 bits, you lose an enormous amount of the information or signal. This ignoring the nuance and thinking of the world as good versus evil is the same thing, it throws out enormous amounts of information because it is too grey to be in the black or white classification.
Once that's done it is possible to think in terms of the black and white issues quite logically but the answers are usually wrong because the axioms have been manipulated. Throwing out all the shades of grey information is an act of faith that they are unimportant. Sometimes they are and sometimes they are the most important. It's like getting all the articles you read and erasing every second paragraph in each to make it simpler to work with.
That's what extremists do, they toss out all the shades of grey information that doesn't fit in with their preconceptions. They also toss out all the shades of grey information that relates to their ideological opposite. The result is more satisfying because it makes it easier to manipulate the information in a logical form but the answers historically are usually wrong. Then people complain they can't be wrong because they followed logic and reason so carefully, and the whole ideology loses contact with reality.

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