Why We Have Different Opinions?

Everybody has an opinion, and sometimes it will differ with one another. But why?

This question began as I started work at my last internship remotely. Without seeing my co-worker face-to-face for over four months, I have to improve my writing skills so I can convey my idea as clearly as possible. Of course, that includes how to handle different opinions and how to explain my idea in a simple yet concise form.

It’s not easy to convey why your idea better than your co-worker if you don’t fully understand their ideas first (after all, we try to solve problem here, not pushing someone’s agenda). That’s why a question pop out in my brain: Why we have different opinion? Why did another person see their ideas are better than ours?

Sounds philosophical but surprisingly really practical one.

This is not about becoming a jackass person who would question everything for the sake of philosophical understanding. This is (in my case of course) about how certain words should be included in the email that will be sent to thousands of customer. Totally practical.

Premises & Deduction

Let’s start with premises first (I know, I know. Sounds too mathematical, but bear with me please).

Premises:

• There’s always an objective truth that we can agree on. Truth means that at particular time and place, there are clear goals on how to assess which opinion (or idea, I use it in this article interchangeably) is better than the other.
• Experiences and context are simply information. What we meant by “In my experiences…” or “In that case…”, we just simply stated a piece of information that would be valuable for any person involved in their decision making.
• We can achieving the same conclusion with same amount of information on our hand. To get more closer to the objective truth, we need more reliable information. With the same level of information, reaching the same conclusion will be much easier. E.g.: If we want to go to Surabaya, with some information that the car is low on gas and Surabaya is still far from here, you wouldn’t mind if we go to the gas station first before we continue our journey.

Using those premises, we can deduct the differences among us are come from:

• We have different definitions of something that we talked about.

We have different definition of “Z”

One of the questions that I had used so many times during my remote work is “What do you mean by that?”. Sounds silly, but it will illuminate where’s the differences between me and my co-worker. It’s pretty clear that if we don’t have the same definition of something, the discussion about it will be just shooting in the dark. It’ll be going nowhere.

E.g.: “When you say ‘Let’s go to Surabaya’, you mean to Tunjungan Plaza or just stay in Pasar Turi station?”, “What do you mean by end of the month? Next Friday of this week or literally the last day of the month?”

(For bigger context and if you want this will go to more philosophical, I found out that the scientific method is the most robust way to define something. When it comes to nature, we don’t just use our reason for figuring out something, but to test it out in a robust way (empiricism). Hail science!)

• We have different set of information with each other.

At this time, using our premises, if we already set the same definition about something, the differences among us are of course caused by some kind of information that one of the people involved know, and another one didn’t.

Find the missing “X” between you and your co-worker

By that assumption, we’ll gain more benefit if we just ask “Why you assume that?” to get more information and “Let me be clear, so you mean that…” to state that you get a good understanding about what you missing (the X in the pictures). Then, as my habit, I’ll state in the clearest way possible that they lack something in their equation (in this case, they miss the “X”) and why with that new piece of information they’ll just reach the same conclusion as me. This will lead to a great discussion on why their piece of information will be more valuable than mine, and it’ll lead to a fruitful discussion.

Epilogue

This is a very nerd thing to view differences, but just like I said in the previous paragraph, I came to this question as a practical necessity– how to understand why we have different opinions and work from there to reach a better conclusion.

Side Note

Surprisingly, I’m also using this kind of mental model to understand more sophisticated stuff like differences in many economics schools and jumping to the edge (where they have differences). Take it from example Keynesian vs Austrian school of economics. You’ll have a very heated debate between them if you discuss about inflation. They have a totally different definition about it!

In “real science” (I use Karl Popper’s term here) like physics and chemistry, you can’t have different “schools” because that’ll be silly. You’ll never heard such thing like Newton school of physics vs Albert Einstein school of physics. Meanwhile, in social sciences like economics, the game is easier to be “rigged”. I guess more on this in the next article.