It seems to me that a significant amount of opinions disseminated today are what I would consider as extreme, or at the very least, not moderate. More often than not, a person will focus almost entirely on either the positive or negative aspects of something, with very little attention paid to the opposite side. A much talked about manifestation of this is the increasing polarization of views in political news reporting, but I think it goes beyond that into most aspects of opinionated information. There are some exceptions of course, Wikipedia being a major one, but moderate (or neutral) viewpoints are rare, and definitely not the norm. Why is that?

One simple reason is that perhaps most things objectively tend to be extremely one-sided, so moderate opinions are, probabilistically speaking, further from the truth. If this were the case, then it would pretty satisfactorily explain the phenomenon, but I find it difficult to justify. Most events are not explained by a single, simple cause, and almost nothing has a single, pure property (of good or bad), unconditionally¹. In fact, for many issues, there will be people occupying the opposite ends of the opinion spectrum (i.e., the polarized camps), with neither group appearing to be closer to the objective truth.

Maybe then, that most opinions held by people tend toward the extreme. There does seem to be some ground for this, especially given the emergence of filter bubbles in people’s online activities in recent years, creating more and more polarizing views. However, this does not fully explain the phenomenon. Many older books and other writings contain extreme opinions that far predate the Internet. Have people always been more extreme than moderate?

One key realization is the selection bias inherent here with this observation. We mostly only hear the opinions of people who have bothered to broadcast their opinions. In the olden days that meant giving a speech or printing a book. More recently, though the effort required for publicizing opinions has gone down dramatically, it still involves at least writing out the opinions in a somewhat articulated manner. This brings me to the point in the title of this post: I think in general, people who hold relatively moderate opinions are less motivated to broadcast their view points.

It seems reasonable to me that higher extremeness of an opinion held by a person correlates with higher levels of motivation to broadcast that opinion. Passion for a topic typically increases as a person’s viewpoint steers away from the center, and correspondingly decreases as the viewpoint becomes more neutral. Perhaps this is because properly seeing both sides of an issue increases uncertainty and doubt about the issue. I have observed this in myself directly, where I would start out excited to write about something, then after some further research, find out that my original opinion is flawed, and lose interest in writing about it altogether.

This is not to say that moderates have no motivation to talk about their opinions, but rather that the people with more extreme opinions are so passionate that they tend to drown out the moderates by number and effort. This is what I call the curse of the moderate. It’s the reason that there are no moderate activists or revolutionaries, at least not successful ones.

More generally, I think that perhaps this curse makes more moderate people less suitable to be leaders or visionaries. These roles almost always require some extreme opinion (e.g. a radically different vision for the future, and the belief that it is possible to achieve it), and demand the enthusiasm to recruit others into believing that opinion to help disseminate it in the world. People can hold views of differing levels of extremeness about different things of course, but it’s not always easy for a moderate to adopt very one-sided opinions, at least in my experience.