Pinging Knight

For some reason, something a few days ago reminded me of a time in middle school where—I think Mr. Johnson was the teacher—I was instructed to research about some current-day issue of importance and write an essay about it. That was fine, but there was the additional requirement that I had to take a side in the essay, and I was to be firm about it. Quite a few essays in school seem to have that requirement; one has to take a side and aren't allowed to use such phrases that make your writing seem anything other than utter certainty. But it bothered me that time, because I knew I couldn't possibly do a good enough job in that short of a time to make a satisfactory informed opinion for that large of an issue. Mr. Johnson just said that sitting on the fence was bad to do. While I do think it is important to learn techniques to be persuasive—and perhaps being forced to take a side ensures better research due to a fear of looking like an utter idiot in the essay—it seems equally important to me to be able to look at two sides and admit that things are inconclusive. There may simply not be enough data, or both sides may seem equally as viable. Throughout school, they always seemed to encourage kids to take a stand even in these situations. It's a useful tool to pretend to take a side for the sake of playing devil's advocate and to explore an issue; but they never seemed to emphasize being careful to not jump to conclusions, unless the conclusion was blatantly incorrect. The exception was the realm of science, where precision and certainty have mostly been reduced to, well, a science. Another anecdote to share: In Mrs. Worthington's class, a Muslim came to speak with us about Islam. He had a spiel about how facts weren't always true; his examples consisted of a lot of statistics that seemed to imply a conclusion, which he would then proceed to discredit. I wanted to stop him and explain that the facts themselves were true (assuming the statistics were accurate), and merely the interpretation was incorrect. You shouldn't throw away facts just because they might be misleading. Take the facts into consideration, but also take into consideration of how much you don't know. Occam's Razor is incredibly inaccurate when facts are few. Still, an informed decision is infinitely better than one that is not. So long as they're not burning, some fences deserve to be sat upon for a while.