How to Have an Opinion That's Actually Yours

Quick: what's your opinion on the latest political controversy? The new film everyone's discussing? The restaurant that opened last month? You have opinions on these things. But ask yourself honestly: where did those opinions come from?

If you're like most people, the answer is uncomfortable. Your opinion on the controversy came from the first takes you saw in your feed. Your opinion on the film came from reviews you half-read before deciding whether to watch it. Your opinion on the restaurant came from a friend who got their opinion from Yelp ratings. The chain of influence rarely traces back to direct experience or independent thought.

This has always been true to some degree. We're social creatures, and adopting the views of our group is efficient. But something has shifted. The machinery of opinion-formation has become so sophisticated that having an authentic preference is becoming genuinely difficult.

The Preference Pipeline

Here's how it works: an algorithm notices you engaged with something. Not because you liked it, necessarily. You scrolled past it slowly, or you argued against it, or you felt annoyed and clicked to see more. The algorithm doesn't care about your sentiment. It cares about your attention. It shows you more of whatever captured it.

Over time, your sense of what's important, what's normal, what's worth caring about gets shaped by what the algorithm surfaces. You don't choose these topics. They're chosen for you, based on what will keep you engaged. Your opinions form in response to prompts you didn't select. This is algorithmic curation, and it affects almost everyone online.

The troubling part isn't that you're influenced. Influence is unavoidable. It's that you can't tell you're being influenced. The algorithm's selections feel like reality. The topics that appear feel like the topics that matter. The views you absorb feel like conclusions you reached yourself.

Tell me more about authentic preferences

The Test

Here's a diagnostic: for any opinion you hold, can you explain why you disagree with the best version of the opposing view?

Not the straw man. Not the version that sounds stupid. The version that smart, thoughtful people actually believe, with all their best arguments. Can you articulate that, and then explain why you still disagree?

If you can't, there's a good chance your opinion isn't really yours. It's a position you absorbed because it was the one you encountered, or because everyone you respect seems to hold it, or because the other side was presented to you only in its weakest form.

This is especially true for any opinion that comes with a tribal marker. If believing X makes you part of group Y, and not believing X makes you an outsider, your belief in X is probably doing more social work than epistemic work. You might believe it anyway, but you should be suspicious. Group identity and belief are more entangled than we like to admit.

The Problem With Being Contrarian

The tempting response is: I'll just disagree with whatever's popular. If everyone believes X, I'll believe not-X. This way I can't be manipulated.

This doesn't work. Contrarianism is just another form of other-directedness. You're still letting the mainstream determine your position. You've just inverted the sign. You're not thinking independently. You're reacting predictably.

And contrarianism has its own social rewards. Being the person who disagrees can be an identity, a way of feeling special, a claim to intellectual superiority. You can be just as trapped by the need to disagree as by the need to agree.

What Actually Works

I don't have a complete answer, but here's what seems to help:

Slow down opinion formation. When you encounter a new topic, resist the urge to form an immediate view. Notice the pressure to have an opinion, usually within seconds of exposure. That pressure is what the system exploits. Don't form views on things you haven't thought about. "I don't know enough to have an opinion" is a valid position, and increasingly a rare one.

Seek out sources you distrust. Not random sources. Smart people who disagree with you. Read their actual arguments, not summaries by people who agree with you. You don't have to be convinced. But you should at least understand the view well enough to explain it charitably.

Notice when you're uncomfortable. If encountering an argument makes you feel defensive, that's information. Defensiveness usually means the argument is threatening to something you believe. That doesn't mean the argument is right. But it means you should examine it more carefully, not dismiss it more quickly.

Cultivate direct experience. For things you can experience directly, do so before forming opinions. Watch the film before reading reviews. Try the restaurant before checking ratings. Visit the place before reading about it. Direct experience is the antidote to second-hand opinion. There's something irreplaceable about forming views from your own encounter with reality.

Be willing to not care. You don't need an opinion on everything. Most controversies are not worth your attention. Most debates are between positions that are both wrong, or both partially right, or simply not important. Refusing to engage is sometimes the most authentic response.

Why It Matters

You might wonder why this matters. If my opinions are shaped by algorithms and social pressure, so what? Everyone's are. At least I fit in. At least I know what to say at parties.

The problem is that opinions aren't just positions. They're how you see the world. They determine what you notice and what you ignore, what you pursue and what you avoid, who you trust and who you dismiss. Outsourcing your opinions means outsourcing your perception. And perception shapes action. Action shapes life.

A life lived on borrowed opinions is, in some meaningful sense, not your life. It's a life shaped by whoever controls the algorithms, whoever dominates your social environment, whoever got to you first. That's not necessarily a bad life. But it's a life you're not fully authoring.

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I don't know what you should think about any particular issue. I'm not even sure what I think about most of them. But I know that whatever we think, it should be because we thought it, not because it was thought for us and installed without our noticing.

In an age when influence is invisible and preference is engineered, simply knowing your own mind has become an act of resistance.