I'm pretty leery of people's beliefs. Your beliefs tell me something about you, I guess - though maybe just where you come from. I'm not convinced they tell me anything at all about the world. The same for opinions. You hear someone's opinions, you get to know something about them - the person, I mean. Maybe. Does it tell you anything besides? I'm not sure opinions are worth a damn thing.

When people call me opinionated, that's funny. I hate opinions. That is, of course, an opinion. How ridiculous I can be! It's a feeling! But I like feelings when we admit they're feelings. Opinions are feelings in denial about what they are.

We think we're being truthful when we share our opinions point-blank. In a way, though, we're being dishonest. We're saying how we feel, and we're claiming that's the wider reality. An opinion, as I said, is a feeling in denial about what it is. And so an honest opinion - taken to only a slight extreme - is a bit of an oxymoron.

When people say they have very strong opinions on an issue, I tend to infer they have very weak opinions. A very firmly held opinion is an impediment to understanding.

Do you have very strong opinions that the capital of Spain is Madrid? Or do you simply know it to be true? Once you've verified that the capital of Spain is Madrid, would the strength of your opinion on the matter have any bearing on the situation? And if you firmly believed the capital of Spain was Barcelona, would that in any way be useful? The valiance of your belief in the face of conclusive contrary evidence would be like a bullet in the knee. It would bring no benefit. It would only hamper you.

When I seem opinionated, or anyone else, maybe ask yourself whether the relevant part of it is my feeling - or else the evidence I fall back on, and the quantity of doubt I've poured like acid all over the opinion, trying to burn it to oblivion. You might want to ask yourself whether that's an opinion someone maintains, or an opinion that isn't burned away, thanks to underlying reality maintaining it.

I'm human and obviously not perfect and we have all evolved to operate on belief, confidence, opinion, feeling. But I always recognize these are provisional. They're things I try - at least try - never to forget have been penciled in.

If the pencil marks keep showing that the capital of Spain is Madrid, in spite of all the erasing you've been doing, perhaps that's because the capital of Spain is Madrid. Is that the same as what most people call an opinion? Isn't it close to the opposite of a strongly held belief?

So yeah, you could call me opinionated. I'd call myself written in pencil and frequently erased, and all the more trustworthy for it, at least in certain ways.

The capital of Spain is Madrid entirely regardless of my level of passion. That doesn't mean I'm never passionate. Nor does that mean we can't change things - like the present capital of Spain.

But my feelings know what they are. Imagination knows what it is. Purpose knows it's nascent.

When a person has something to say, we often begin by casting around for why they feel they have to say that thing. At face value, this might be a good response: understanding is helpful. Too often, though, pinning someone to a motive for what they say is merely a convenient way to excuse ourselves from thinking about the content of the speech. After all, if we can detect someone's conflict of interest, then why bother contaminating ourselves with their bias by listening further?

Unfortunately, that calculation is poorly considered and widely lowers the quality of thought, both in individuals and in group discussions. It's so easy to conveniently excuse ourselves this way; pointing to someone else's bias, or even possible or plausible bias, becomes a tactic for overlooking our own, or remaining ignorant, or not parsing evidence and logic.

Even when you firmly believe that you see someone's bias, you really ought to put that belief to one side and consider what they say as if your best friend were saying it. And if we happen to be talking about your best friend already and you just aren't seeing eye to eye, pretend this best friend is, say, a student, and you're looking to compliment something - anything - they're getting right, to encourage them to keep trying.

You will notice this is shockingly unlike how almost everyone goes about it.

Sensitivity largely means treating others as fully human even when they're upset by something that doesn't or wouldn't upset you.

Key rule: you don't need to empathize with everyone all the time. Empathy is yours, and theirs. It isn't someone's to command.

There's a little twist, though. "I don't have any sympathy for..." is an apparently mean stance common among people who are not usually mean. It seems to translate to an irrationality: "Because I am not going to invest in feeling for you, I don't give a shit about you." (It really isn't either/or like that.) Personally, I recommend removing the phrase from your social field guide and finding other ways to talk and think in those situations.

You'll find it clarifying. You aren't required to feel sympathetic or empathetic, but you might want to ask yourself what "I don't have any sympathy for..." actually means, or establishes, in your world. Listen to your own tone. When I hear those words, they always seem to serve as a conduit of willful ignorance, an insistence on a mental block. It often seems to be an expression of contempt and a dismissal of an entire person; not "I'm not feeling empathy, here" but "this person deserves for no one to understand them." The phrase strikes me as a somewhat lazy rationalization for just plain misunderstanding.

Let's consider a parallel... Listen, swear words don't make you a bad person. Not at all. But if you find yourself swearing every other word and calling all manner of items "shit" ("Where did you move my shit?") or "stuff" or "things," you might want to put the kibosh on that temporarily and use the rest of your vocabulary. If you couldn't say "shit," "stuff," or "things," what would you say?

Likewise, if you couldn't proclaim that you have no sympathy (not so subtly implying no one should), what would you say? Ask yourself whether the question of sympathy or no sympathy might be a distraction from a more important question. Does a person need your sympathy or empathy before you will see them as a human being who makes sense to themselves? Are you relieved of the requirements of decency when you decide you don't feel sympathetic? Can you learn something useful from this scenario regardless of how you feel about a particular person or their role in it?

Sensitivity earns its keep when we don't understand, don't feel sympathetic, don't believe we'd say or do the same.