The key problem with bothsidesism ain't that the truth ain't always in the middle, even though the truth ain't always (or even usually) in the middle. The key problem is that most questions don't fall along a single spectrum, let alone a single binary dimension. What I mean is that enigmatic, everyday, life-is-complicated-isn't-it thorns are usually far more complicated than "A or B" or even "somewhere on the trail connecting A and B." Just for a handy example, let's say A = "the world is spherical" and B = "the world is flat." The universe strongly resembles A rather than B, but when many people strongly believe B, there's usually something compelling about B other than, simply, "it's so wonderful to be wrong, isn't it?"

In this case, when you step outside and go for a walk, the ground is mostly flat. You could walk your whole life and keep the impression that, overall, the ground is flat, with some bumps and dips. People believed the world was flat because it was a compelling - and partly true - description. It was workable. People believed the sun went around the earth for much the same reason. Neither description is stupid or entirely inaccurate. They are good descriptions within a certain frame of reference.

Now, curiously, whether "the earth is flat" is a good, workable description doesn't have too much bearing on whether "the earth is spherical" is a good, workable description. Both have descriptive power up to some level of realism. "The earth is rock," likewise, has descriptive power up to some level of realism. That last has, of course, even less to do with whether "the earth is spherical" or "the earth is flat" mirrors reality, but we know from daily experience and education that all three can be decent approximations in practice. Earth is a "rocky planet" when compared to Jupiter (yet we ourselves are not rock, and neither are the oceans or the ozone layer). We park the car on level ground when the parking brake doesn't work. We look at a globe for sharper insight about the sizes of regions. Yet the earth is not entirely spherical, so that description is also false if we need to get binary at high resolution.

When A is "truer" than B, a scenario we regularly face, and still there is disagreement, it really helps tremendously to understand what's GOOD about B, and, additionally but perhaps quite differently, what's appealing about it to its proponents. I have no trouble seeing why people believed the sun orbited the earth. Whatsoever... None! It's the most understandable - and relatable - broadly erroneous belief in the world. And if all we can do is fault the belief and spite the believers, we are poor communicators indeed, and maybe sometimes not very good people.

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.

It's strange that people use hot chocolate as a sleep aid, given that chocolate contains multiple stimulants: caffeine, theobromine (powerful enough to kill dogs and cats at low doses), and PEA (amphetamine's closest relative naturally in our brains). For that matter, in college the single most effective remedy I knew for making myself focus and work when absolutely necessary was a packet of dark chocolate M&Ms. (I have ADHD, but I didn't have a prescription for that and am proud that I never once "borrowed" pills from friends, when many did who needed to far less.) The little glazed chocolate lentils would keep me up all night studying. It worked better than any amount of coffee. So it's a little peculiar that people use this as a bedtime soporific...

Well, maybe it isn't, actually.

Too bad my dark chocolate M&Ms trick would only work once. Afterwards, that emergency fallback wasn't a fallback for a while. (This was, not too surprisingly, a gigantic problem. ADHD is called a disorder for a reason.) If I tried in the next few days, I'd be crunching new bags all night, and I'd never get as focused, and wouldn't get half as much done with 6x as much M&M in me. To be candid, I probably wouldn't get a quarter as much done, even if I was panicking about my grade and fascinated by the subject.

Tolerance happens quickly. Brains are all about adapting. So is life. But you don't see people downing espresso as a nightcap (not often, anyway), let alone a pot of drip coffee. So... why hot chocolate?

See, there's something called a paradoxical effect. I'm sure you've experienced it. Maybe you drink a cup of coffee expecting it to sharpen you up, but instead, you start falling asleep, regretting the coffee. Did it just not work? Are you imagining that it made things much worse? This is most likely to happen when you have less than your usual amount - meaning whatever your system has adapted to over the last few days. I find adaptation can happen shockingly quickly, as in the chocolate example. If I drink a decaf coffee, that normally wakes me up. (Seem odd? First, I'm naturally very sensitive to caffeine; second, I rarely use it because it doesn't wait until my birthday to gift me lovely migraines; and third, decaf has caffeine; so yes, under those conditions it works exactly like normal coffee.) But if today I drink a normal coffee and tomorrow I retreat to decaf, it'll probably make me sleepier than no coffee. That's called the paradoxical effect. It happens with a variety of stimulants, and other medications as well: whatever your system is expecting the chemical to do, your system partly counteracts that; but if the dose is relatively low, your system's counteraction will be stronger than the effect of the chemical. Voila: coffee made you sleepy. Paradoxically. But very logically.

So - when you aren't used to caffeine, or chocolate, chocolate can be very powerful, actually. A large bar of dark chocolate has, depending on the size of course, more caffeine than any coffee drink. And don't forget its other active components. But milk chocolate - and especially chocolate milk, which usually doesn't have much chocolate - can easily fall into the range that's less than what you're used to. If you're used to sodas and coffees, a bit of chocolate milk might actually make you sleepy.

One of the things you learn from finishing creative stuff is that even though it isn't perfect, it's meaningful, and you can be happy with it. Even embarrassing or bad works, though you may or may not want to show them, have their own being and meaning. You can sense this distinctly and be happy in some little way with all your children, yet this isn't complacency. It's fuel. Do what you can at the time, finish a bad piece: initial discouragements aside, you'll want to make more, you'll have more ideas to try, and you'll have levelled up in finishing what you start.

Most people are not very good at handling evidence when things get complicated.

When you use methods that work better than theirs, it may rub them the wrong way. To them, it'll seem somehow gratuitous. Given that they don't notice the difference between their level of realism and reality, they don't see the need for going any further.

More troublingly still, to the biased, objectivity and neutrality may seem biased.

If you think you are not biased because you are on the right side of things morally, then you are biased for that very reason.

Taking an honorable position will not replace evidence and logic. The tricky bit is that people think it will, probably without quite realizing that this is what their attitude implies.

Trying to be more objective and balanced than others is not a recipe for popularity, though people who know you well will appreciate it, because they will frequently benefit from it.