The search for truth:
	People spend their time arguing
	But never knowing

I always roll my eyes (well, figuratively, at least) when people
actually think that getting a bunch of people with dead-set opposing
views on something into a room for a debate is a good idea.

There are three main categories you can put the participants (and,
often, the audience, if there's a distinction) into:

 * People who hold an opinion, and are comfortable within it; they
   will defend their opinion, and will not readily change it, even if
   presented with strong evidence to the contrary
 * People who are unsure what the right answer is, yet hold the
   expectation that there is a right answer, and by listening to
   people from the former set, they will be able to pick one of the
   viewpoints on offer as being the correct one
 * People like me (but more on that later)

The thing that makes me sad is not so much the former set of people;
although, in the worst cases, they are blinded by the strength of
their convictions and will defend an incorrect idea until they die,
and ram it down the throats of anyone they can, thereby spreading
their wrongness; at least they can only improve from that situation,
and there is the hope that, as they take part in more vehement
debates, their confidence will slowly slip and they will come to be
more open-minded.

What saddens me is the second set of people. Right now, they have
uncertainty. But the problem is that they think that's a bad
thing. They have this feeling within them that not knowing the right
answer is *bad* - so bad that knowing the wrong answer is better than
not knowing an answer at all. They sincerely hope to look at the range
of options and come to a decision, like somebody deciding which fridge
to buy; they'll compare the looks, the shelf arrangements, the size,
the features - and pick one, because they *have* to pick *one*.

And so their fear of uncertainty will drive them to pick a position,
and then they'll gleefully throw themselves into it, rebelling against
the Terrible Uncertainty by replacing it with Confidence That They Are
Right.

This, I think, is a great loss.

I'm quite happy being uncertain about something. By all means, I want
to reduce that uncertainty by collecting evidence and through logical
argument from the available evidence, but the thought of trying to
reduce uncertainty by *picking an idea I like the sound of* is
horrible. Uncertainty is not a situation of powerless, where you are
unable to decide how to react to a situation because you do not know
exactly what is happening in the situation; instead, uncertainty is
understanding the *limits* of what you *can* know about a situation,
and thereby being able to respond to that situation in a way that
seems best given the range of possible explanations of the situation.

Of course, often you need to choose one option from a list - after
all, you can only buy one fridge (unless you have a wastefully large
house and want to spend a wasteful amount of money). And so in
situations like those, you have to pick the option which seems most
likely to be "best". But you do so in the full knowledge that you're
making a guess, rather than in absolute knowledge of correctness - and
hedge your bets.