2. The Imbalance Of Opinion And Strategy

(14) News in our times is no longer carried by traders and adventurers. It travels at the speed of light across the globe. We form opinions about people we have never met, in faraway places, because stories are told, videos uploaded, and fragments shared, until they reach the places where we go to gather news.

We whistle songs from artists on other continents, and we have opinions about the politics of states we could barely find on a map. We form views about what this head of state is up to, about who is guilty in a famous case long before any legal process has played out, and about the private relationships of people we will never meet.

Opinion has extended its reach far beyond the village.

Nearly everyone seems to have an opinion on nearly everything.

(15) For most of human history, opinions were formed in settings where proximity, repetition, and feedback were abundant. You met and interacted with the people you judged. You lived with the consequences of your judgments. If an opinion was badly misattached, reality corrected it quickly.

(16) The conditions we now find ourselves in are very different. Requests for opinion arrive through information channels we are connected to around the clock. They arrive without shared context, without any realistic path to action or verification, and without knowledge of the actors, the local rules, the history, or the environment.

The space of possibilities is large and unstable, yet belief is encouraged to attach early and firmly.

This is a structural mismatch.

(17) Consider how easily we come to “know” who is guilty in a criminal case unfolding far away. Fragments of information circulate, interpretations accumulate, and long before evidence is weighed in a formal process, belief has already attached. The space of possibilities collapses prematurely. Later corrections, if they come at all, feel like revisions rather than clarifications.

Something similar happens in politics. We hold strong views on policies enacted in systems we cannot influence, among populations we do not know, under constraints we do not experience. Opinion forms, but without participation or responsibility. No action follows, except further expression.

Even in moral matters, we are invited to judge people we will never meet, for actions we only know through filtered narratives. The question is posed as if it admitted of a clear answer, and belief attaches accordingly. But the underlying possibilities remain opaque, and feedback is absent.

In all these cases, opinion does not fail because it is irrational. It fails because it is applied outside the conditions under which it works well.

(18) The cost of this mismatch is not primarily that opinions are wrong. It is that they are empty and without value.

Cognitively, attention is spent on judgments that cannot inform action. Emotionally, this produces fatigue, indignation, and a sense of constant urgency without resolution. Socially, it leads to boundary violations: being burdened with judgments one cannot act on, and being judged by people with no stake in the outcome.

There is also an epistemic cost. When belief attaches strongly in situations with little feedback, confidence grows without correction. Disagreement escalates, not because evidence accumulates, but because belief has already settled without evidence. That is what we are trained to do and get used to.

(19) Opinion, in these settings, becomes expressive rather than orienting. It signals alignment, identity, or moral position, but it no longer helps navigate the world. What is expressed is not guidance for action, but affiliation in the absence of agency.

In this role, opinion does not coordinate behavior or improve understanding. It circulates without feedback, hardens without correction, and accumulates without consequence. Worse, this dynamic is increasingly exploited.

In the second century BCE, Carneades, head of the Academic school, visited Rome as part of an Athenian embassy. On one day, he delivered a powerful speech in praise of justice. The audience was convinced. On the next day, he argued with equal force that justice had no natural foundation at all, but was merely convention and expedience. The audience was again convinced.

Carneades revealed that belief can be made to attach strongly in opposite directions, provided assent remains insulated from consequence. Belief attaches easily where nothing is at stake.

The reaction was not neutral. Cato the Elder, alarmed by the display, reportedly urged the Senate to send the philosophers home as quickly as possible. His concern was not that Carneades had disproved justice, but that he had shown how easily conviction could be manufactured without consequence. A population trained to admire rhetorical force over practical constraint, Cato feared, would become ungovernable.

What Carneades exposed episodically has since been stabilized: assent without consequence has become easy to produce, and hard to escape.

(20) At the same time, strategy has not disappeared. It continues to operate in domains where premature opinion has consequences: engineering, medicine, finance, security, exploration. There, possibilities remain open, belief stays provisional, and actions are chosen for robustness rather than correctness.

Probability theory can be understood as a refinement of strategy. It keeps possibilities open while attaching graded expectations to them. Where its preconditions are met, this is extremely powerful. Where they are not, numbers can merely simulate control.

(21) The result is an imbalance. Opinion has expanded into domains where strategy would be required, while strategy has retreated into domains where public expression is limited.

This imbalance is not stable. It creates pressure: on individuals, who are asked to judge without agency; and on public discourse, which becomes saturated with acted certainty but poor in coordination.

Understanding this imbalance does not require nostalgia, nor does it require assigning blame. Opinion is now routinely applied far into domains where strategy would be better suited, and that this comes at a cost. How did a pattern this mismatched become ordinary without being deliberately chosen?