The Importance of Understanding Gray Area

I have a frequent debate with a person at work, who shall remain nameless, about whether or not an expression of a percentage chance of an outcome has any validity. That is, his opinion is that it has no value for someone to opine that they believe an event has a certain percentage chance of occurring; in his mind, this is a non-statement, and the only valid expression of this form is a binary opinion: yes or no. In contrast, I think it's perfectly valid to say you think an event has a percentage chance of happening; that is, I think that statement has meaning.

(You may think his opinion is absurd, as I do, or that my opinion is absurd; I'm not going to debate the merits of either per se. Rather, I'm going to write about why I think the ability to understand my perspective is important, in the broader sense.)

The main reason he holds this opinion, I believe, is that you cannot "guess check" an opinion on an outcome which is expressed as a percentage chance. That is, it makes it impossible to claim someone was right or wrong; they can still assert they were correct in their judgement of relative chance, no matter the eventual outcome. This is what leads to his conclusion that it's a non-statement: if you cannot later check the validity of the prediction, then in his mind, the prediction has no value whatsoever.

Obviously, I think that's dumb and wrong. As a simple counter-example, I use weather predictions to plan activities, despite the fact that they are typically expressed as percentage chances, and I think the percentage-based predictions still have lots of value. Moreover, I think a binary prediction in most similar contexts would have vastly less value than a probabilistic one: I'm far more interested in the chance of rain, for example, than the ability to potentially ridicule the weather person for being wrong on a binary prediction.

However, in the broader sense, I think this is also somewhat indicative of a societal issue at large. Specifically, there's a trend in society to place everything into binary buckets: police are good or bad, you're either a Republican or a Democrat, "silence is violence", etc. This bifurcation of opinion on societal issues is not good for the country, and in all likelihood, does not represent the typical opinions of most American people, if not pressed for a binary view on a topic. Most people have nuanced views on topics, and the grouping of those views into binary groups tends to sacrifice most of the nuance of opinion.

Side-note: It's entirely possible that the forceful bifurcation of viewpoints in the US is a result, at least in part, of purposeful societal attacks by foreign powers, in an efforts to destabilize the country by creating internal strife. There is lots of evidence of this type of activity on social media, for example, especially with respect to politics. To the extent that these efforts have been purposeful, I'd say they have been very effective to-date.

I think people should be careful when grouping themselves and others into pre-defined, often binary groups. It's not remotely correct, for example, to assert that if someone is not vocally and visibly calling for defunding of the police, that they support the police using violence against innocent civilians. In a similar vein, if someone isn't chanting "Black Lives Matter" along with the rest of an angry mob, that doesn't mean they are a de facto racist white supremacist. Believe it or not, there are gray areas, nuanced opinions, and reasonable reasons for people to not be in the binary groups, just as there is value to expressing that you think something has a percentage chance of coming to pass.

That's my opinion, anyway.