This is Not My Opinion

The hundreds to thousands of words of a typical essay are enough to develop one’s thoughts substantially. The length of an essay doesn’t make it quite as extensive as a full-length research paper, but makes it far along the curve of diminishing returns. Compared to most other forms of online communication, at least, writing an essay gives a topic a very thorough treatment.

It’s an effective way of thinking. Writing an essay requires you to reason through dozens of arguments, meticulously examine all the permutations and implications, and condense them into a communicable text. For countless times, I’ve changed my opinion or rebuilt my lines of reasoning while writing – and not just while doing it for Estharians, but also when revising a newspaper article or preparing a robotics grant proposal.

Sometimes I may run into something that doesn’t sound right: an assumption that I have never challenged before, or an assertion that I made without thinking. No worries though, it’s just a loose thread. But as I tug at it, examining its implications, the whole piece comes apart. Everything has been resting on it and hours of work have gone to waste. I open a new document on my word processor, unsure of what to think.

Maybe I should leave everything as it is, and hope nobody catches the error. But my work is a representation of myself and my ideas, and it would be untrue to myself to neglect an error like that. Besides, what if it was published? What if our team’s sponsor read it? So, I start over.

After a few hours, a new argument emerges, and I have changed my stance accordingly. I know that if I keep writing and keep thinking, my ideas will still change. They’ll successively become better approximations of the truth, behaving as dampened sine waves bouncing back and forth with each revision while approaching – but never reaching – an asymptote. And as much as I’d like to believe, I know that it’s unlikely that I will continue to have they will remain the same in ten or twenty years.

But maybe that’s a good thing. In the words of Feynman, “I can live with doubt and uncertainty. I think it is much more interesting than to have answers that might be wrong.” And while I know I could do better, but I’m not just a perfectionist – I’m on a deadline.

So this is Esthar, but don’t take it too seriously. It’s never going to be a perfect representation of my ideas. It’s not my opinion, although it might come quite close.