Do you have an opinion? Think...and speak up!
"Is it really necessary to have an opinion in every issue?" Thus spake my friend when commenting on the "World's Shortest Political Quiz" I'd sent her. "Well, yes!" was my answer to her and I associated people without opinions to ones leading desultory lives. But her next question, "how committed are we to the view that we take?" got me thinking. Do we just have opinions to seem intelligent, regurgitating what we read in daily op-eds or hear at talks, or do we really spend time analyzing those statements and forming our own opinion (which may end up being the same as what we heard)? Are opinions formed without sufficient thought just voices clamoring for attention? Is it better not to have an opinion at all rather than parroting someone else's?
My guess would be that mimicking other's opinions may be the first step in learning to form an opinion. It at least gives you the chance to think about an issue. Sort of like doing a literature survey on a research topic. You survey may be largely based on other people's works, but you do spend some time learning about the other systems, analyzing them, and maybe critiquing them. But reading the literature is the first step. So to form an opinion, there is the assumption that some thought has gone into the proccess and the more thought that has gone in, the more informed the opinion is bound to be.
For all the claims of demoratizing reporting and voicing public opinion, blogs to me seemed like just another fad for people desperate to show they lead interesting lives. A Bridget Jones' Diary on every desktop. But of late, I'd begun to subscribe to a few blogs that were interesting and I would not have had the chance to gather information there through my usual news haunts. Which got me thinking again; are blogs the new way of disseminating information, moving from a Push style to a Pull style (a la pub-sub systems)? I've had the habit of forwarding articles I find interesting to a circle of friends. I sometimes wonder if they found it useful or irritating. Are blogs the politically correct way of sharing information in this age? Giving people the chance to either look at it or ignore it, without being afraid of stepping on toes? And maybe, just maybe, someone out there in the vast www may find the same articles I forward of interest to them too. And this blog is a naturally corollary of that train of thought.
Which brings me to an interesting post I saw in a NYT op-ed by William Saffire on how the 'Net is changing the mores of society "A change of address: The demise of 'dear'".
Enjoy!
2 comments:
A very good analysis, but am not sure I agree to your concept of opinions and that of the research options scientists percive. An ideal scientist would have an hypothesis, but never an opinion about anything! An opinion would preclude his judgement, bring about a bias to the very research he was doing. He must hypothize something, perform experimental validation and if it fails -reject the hypothesis. He should not go by what he thinks would be the next best explanation because of his belief in a particular philosophy or idea! An ideal example would be that of evolutionary biologists. Not wanting to let go of Darwins natural selection theory -they attributed everything to selection. The result was something even Darwin lamented about towards the latter half of his life,for his theory was that selection was on of the causatives(again it was a tested postive hypothesis , not his opinion)for variation but that was not the be all and end of all everything!
So my final statement, you may have an opinion or a belief, but never let that bias the reasrch or work you do!
Ah, but a hypothesis is a form of opinion based on theoretical/past knowledge. Whether this opinion will stand the test of experimentation is the proof, and the task performed by a good scientist.
Which goes to show how unimportant "opinions" have become due to the easy with which they are doled out without putting adequate thought into them :)
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