House of Eratosthenes

Some people meet, fall in love and get married right away. Others can spend hours in the sock aisle at the department store, weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of wool argyles instead of cotton striped.

Seeing the world as black and white, in which choices seem clear, or shades of gray can affect people’s path in life, from jobs and relationships to which political candidate they vote for, researchers say. People who often have conflicting feelings about situations—the shades-of-gray thinkers—have more of what psychologists call ambivalence, while those who tend toward unequivocal views have less ambivalence.

High ambivalence may be useful in some situations, and low ambivalence in others, researchers say. And although people don’t fall neatly into one camp or the other, in general, individuals who tend toward ambivalence do so fairly consistently across different areas of their lives.

For decades psychologists largely ignored ambivalence because they didn’t think it was meaningful. The way researchers studied attitudes—by asking participants where they fell on a scale ranging from positive to negative—also made it difficult to tease apart who held conflicting opinions from those who were neutral, according to Mark Zanna, a University of Waterloo professor who studies ambivalence. (Similarly, psychologists long believed it wasn’t necessary to examine men and women separately when studying the way people think.)

I’m thinking, overall, it’s a “thumbs-up” — although that odious phrase “researchers say” is sprinkled throughout a little bit too thickly for my liking.

But I generally approve of what the researchers are saying: This ability to see things in shades of gray, is more of a predilection. People who can do it, are hard pressed when called upon to do the opposite, like a right-handed person suddenly challenged with writing left-handed. The practice isn’t there, the skills are lackluster at best, and the confidence is missing.

There are some specialized tasks in which you would want the person working it to be a shade-of-gray-er. Usually when “researchers say” things about this in other studies, they come to the conclusion that all tasks are like this…even running things. Which is a huge mistake. No, you don’t want leaders to think in shades of gray. Obviously, if that’s the way it’s going to be, their subordinates will not act on anything with any confidence because the boss is going to change his mind. So the entire organization becomes a by-the-numbers bureaucracy. People responsible for getting things done, make it a point to do things without any real passion, and to preserve plausible deniability at all times. The next casualty after accountability, is reason. No, what I did doesn’t make any sense, but them’s the rules. At the time I did it, that’s the way we were doing it. My ass is covered.

I’ve seen a few Gordian knots cut through. When it happened, someone made a decision…and there was clarity at last. They made the decision by seeing something in black-and-white. That’s how the world goes ’round, really. “Here…we’re going to do THIS…and, right-or-wrong, this is the decision we have made, we’re married to it, our fortunes will rise or fall on it.” It’s the simple concept of commitment, and generally, it very seldom does any damage worse than the alternative, which is indecision.

“Here…we’re going to do THIS…and, right-or-wrong, this is the decision we have made, we’re married to it, our fortunes will rise or fall on it.”

That right there is the essence of leadership. Gen George S Patton said much the same thing – that an imperfect plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

Our modern politicians could learn a thing or two from him about what it means to lead. I tend to see things a lot more black-and-white than left-wingers do, or even many of my fellow conservatives, and I am drawn to decisive leaders, even those who are wrong periodically.
- cylarz | 10/06/2010 @ 17:28
Sometimes when I’m trying to distill an image down to its essence, usually for the purpose of an icon or logo, I want it to be in plain black and white.

Screening doesn’t count… I want distinct shapes of dark area, and light area.

I do see the image in shades of gray, but boiling it down to a simple form that still gets the idea across means you have to pick. I take the color image and turn it to 256 grays, and then play with the contrast until enough of the shape I want is dark enough (or light enough) to come out to be a contiguous and recognizable shape before I go reduce the color pallette again to black and white.

In other words, thinking in shades of gray is useful, but when a decision must be made, one has to decide … is this mostly good, or mostly bad?

Decisions like going to war, for instance, are always criticizible…. because there is *always* a very significant bad side to going to war. This makes it easy to be “against”.

I have a bumpersticker I keep thinking about having made that would say –

“Unfortunately, sometimes war actually *is* the answer.”
- philmon | 10/07/2010 @ 09:09

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Gee, I Don’t Know if I Like This or NotWednesday, October 6th, 2010

Gee, I Don’t Know if I Like This or Not
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010