How I form my own judgement (and try not to confuse it with having an opinion)

I have opinions about many things.

Probably too many.

Some are grounded in years of experience. Others come from having read quite a lot about a subject. Some grow out of personal experience and others, if I’m honest, from having heard something convincing five minutes earlier.

The problem is that, once they come out of our mouths, they can all sound exactly the same.

They shouldn’t.

Over the years, I’ve increasingly tried to distinguish between having an opinion and developing sound judgement.

I don’t always succeed.

But it feels like an increasingly important distinction.

Opinions are cheap

We have never had access to so much information.

And, paradoxically, it has never been so easy to have an opinion without knowing very much.

We read a headline.

Listen to a podcast.

Watch a two-minute video.

Someone shares a chart.

We ask ChatGPT.

And a few minutes later, we can have a reasonably convincing conversation about almost anything.

That’s extraordinary.

And a little dangerous.

Because our ability to construct an answer has grown much faster than our ability to develop sound judgement.

Not knowing something used to produce silence.

Now it produces a search.

And increasingly, it produces an answer generated in seconds.

An opinion is a conclusion. Judgement is the path that gets you there

For me, this is probably the fundamental difference.

An opinion says:

I think this is true.

Sound judgement should also be able to answer:

Why do I believe it?
What information am I using?
What information might I be overlooking?
Under what circumstances would I stop believing it?

And that is where, for me, sound judgement and critical thinking meet.

Critical thinking isn’t about distrusting everything or disagreeing as a matter of principle. It means not accepting an answer — including our own — without being willing to examine how we arrived at it.

Perhaps that’s why I see judgement less as a collection of certainties and more as a way of thinking: asking questions, comparing evidence, doubting when doubt is warranted, and being willing to correct ourselves.

That changes things considerably.

Because two people can reach exactly the same conclusion, one for solid reasons and the other by chance.

The result may be the same.

The process isn’t.

And in the long run, the process matters far more than being right once.

My judgement almost never comes from a single source

When something really matters to me, I try not to decide what I think after hearing only one version.

Not because every opinion is equally valuable.

It isn’t.

But because I need to understand the problem well enough before simplifying it.

Over the years, almost without noticing, I’ve ended up following a kind of sequence.

1. First, I try to understand

It sounds obvious, but we don’t always do it.

We have a remarkable tendency to decide whether we agree with something while it is still being explained to us.

I try to do the opposite.

First, I want to know:

What is happening?

What do we know?

What don’t we know?

Which part is fact and which part is interpretation?

Who has real experience with this?

Is there data?

Where does it come from?

Only then do I try to decide what I think.

2. I deliberately look for something that challenges my first instinct

I find this particularly important.

Because finding arguments that confirm what we already think is incredibly easy.

Google can do it.

Social media can do it.

And AI can do it extraordinarily well too.

If you ask:

Why is X a bad idea?

you will probably get excellent arguments against X.

If five minutes later you ask:

Why is X a good idea?

you will probably get excellent arguments in favour of it.

The problem isn’t necessarily the tool.

It’s what we are asking it to confirm.

So when something matters to me, I also try to ask the uncomfortable question:

What would have to be true for me to be wrong?

It guarantees nothing.

But it forces a window open.

3. I try to separate experience from evidence

Experience matters enormously.

But there’s a trap.

What happened to me is real.

That doesn’t make it universal.

I can have worked in an industry for twenty years and still sometimes confuse:

“This has happened to me many times”

with:

“This is always how it works.”

Experience helps us recognise patterns.

Evidence helps us check whether those patterns exist outside our own story.

I need both.

4. I try to understand the incentives

There’s a question I find increasingly useful:

What does each person gain by defending this position?

Not as a way of invalidating it.

Having an interest in something doesn’t automatically make an argument false.

But knowing those interests helps us interpret it.

A company talking about its product.

A politician talking about a policy.

A property owner talking about the housing market.

A professional defending the tool they work with.

Me talking about SEO.

Any of us may be right.

But none of us speaks from a vacuum.

Understanding where someone is speaking from is part of understanding what they are saying.

5. I let it sit

This may be the step least compatible with the Internet.

Not replying immediately.

Not deciding immediately.

Not publishing immediately.

Sleeping on it.

Going for a walk.

Doing something else.

Coming back to the problem.

I’ve changed my mind more often after a few quiet hours than after fifty messages in an argument.

Some ideas need information.

Others simply need time to settle.

“I don’t know” is a position too

This is probably one of the things I’m trying hardest to learn.

To say:

I don’t have enough information to have an opinion.

It doesn’t sound particularly impressive.

It doesn’t generate many likes.

It rarely wins arguments.

But it can be a far more intellectually honest answer than improvising certainty.

There are subjects on which I have a fairly well-formed position.

Others where I have an intuition.

Others I’m still learning about.

And others where, quite simply, I don’t know enough.

The problem begins when we present all four with the same level of confidence.

Judgement should include a degree of confidence

For some time now, I’ve tried to attach a small mental label to my own conclusions.

Something like:

I’m fairly sure.

I think this is right, but I could be wrong.

My intuition points this way.

I have no idea.

We don’t always need to say it out loud.

But we should know it.

Because one of the most dangerous things isn’t being wrong.

It’s not knowing how wrong we might be.

Changing your mind doesn’t invalidate your judgement

For a long time, we have associated consistency with maintaining a position.

You said A.

Therefore, you should keep defending A.

But if new information appears and A no longer seems reasonable, continuing to defend A isn’t consistency.

It’s something else.

For me, sound judgement should be stable but revisable.

Stable enough not to change with every headline.

Flexible enough to change when better reasons appear.

I don’t want to think exactly the same tomorrow as I do today.

If I think differently, I want to be able to explain what I learned along the way.

And then artificial intelligence arrived

All of this concerns me especially now that we live alongside language models.

Not because they necessarily make us think less.

Used well, they can do exactly the opposite.

I use them constantly to explore arguments, find blind spots, organise information, test hypotheses or raise questions I hadn’t considered.

But there is an enormous temptation:

to confuse a well-constructed answer with a well-reasoned conclusion.

They are not the same thing.

AI can help us travel the path.

It can show us maps.

It can suggest alternative routes.

It can warn us about a cliff ahead.

But there is something I still consider very difficult to delegate:

deciding what we think after we have seen the map.

Because that decision involves knowledge, experience, context, values, consequences and responsibility.

That is judgement.

The small system I try to use

If I had to reduce all of this to a few questions before taking a position on something important, they would be these:

• What do I actually know, and what am I assuming?
• Where does what I think I know come from?
• Have I understood the strongest argument against my position?
• What interests do the people trying to persuade me have?
• What would I need to discover to change my mind?
• How confident am I in this conclusion?

And I would add a seventh:

Do I actually need to have an opinion about this?

That last one saves me quite a lot of work.

Fewer opinions, better ones

Perhaps developing sound judgement isn’t about knowing more and more things.

Perhaps it’s also about learning to distinguish more clearly between:

what I know,

what I believe,

what I suspect,

and what I still don’t know.

The Internet has given us virtually unlimited access to information.

Artificial intelligence is giving us virtually unlimited access to answers.

That is precisely why I suspect the value will increasingly lie less in having an answer.

It will lie in knowing which questions to ask, which sources to trust, which contradictions to explore, how much to doubt and when to change our position.

And, every now and then, in being able to say calmly:

I don’t know.
Yet.

Perhaps that is part of sound judgement too.

Frequently asked questions about developing sound judgement

Can you have sound judgement on a subject without being an expert?

Yes, but the depth of our conclusions should reflect the depth of our knowledge. You don’t need to be an economist to make personal financial decisions or a doctor to take an interest in health, but that doesn’t make your knowledge equivalent to that of someone who has studied and worked in the field for years. Developing sound judgement also means recognising the limits of our competence.

How can we stop consulting multiple sources from creating even more confusion?

We don’t always need more sources; sometimes we need better questions. When different sources start repeating the same arguments, adding more information may contribute very little. At that point, it is often more useful to identify exactly where the disagreement lies: in the data, its interpretation, the values being prioritised, or the consequences each side considers acceptable.

How do I know whether I’m thinking critically or simply distrusting everything?

Critical thinking doesn’t mean assuming everything is false, self-interested or manipulative. It means asking for evidence proportionate to the importance of a claim and being willing to accept an explanation when the evidence is good enough. Systematically distrusting everything can be just as uncritical as believing everything.

Should we always look for a middle ground between opposing opinions?

No. The existence of two positions doesn’t mean the truth necessarily lies halfway between them. One may be much better supported than the other. Comparing arguments is a way to understand and test them, not a reason to automatically split the difference fifty-fifty.

How can we teach our children to develop their own judgement?

Probably less by telling them what to think and more by getting them used to explaining why they think something. Asking “what makes you think that?”, “how do you know?” or “what might make you change your mind?” can be more useful than immediately correcting their conclusion. The goal shouldn’t be for them to end up thinking like us, but to learn how to build and revise their own reasons.

Can artificial intelligence help us develop critical thinking?

Yes, if we also use it to make ourselves uncomfortable. We can ask it to find weaknesses in our reasoning, build the strongest opposing argument, identify assumptions we are treating as facts, or suggest what information we would need to verify a hypothesis. Used this way, AI stops being a machine for telling us we’re right and becomes a tool for stress-testing our ideas.