Do shades of gray or does black-and-white thinking more accurately describe reality?
A unifying principle related to the previous one that conceptually cuts across much of the analysis and approach taken here is that it’s more useful, accurate, and informative to look at varying “shades of gray” instead of viewing things through black-and-white schemes. While on one level looking at shades of gray may seem to add a degree of complexity that black-and-white schemes don’t have, the benefit is it doesn’t falsely classify things as “all one way” when they are really some of both (or some of three or four things), thus better reflecting reality. The huge downside of black-and-white schemes is they often generate fallacies and lead to unacknowledged or hidden complexities and absurdities. For example, if you classify foods as either “live” or “dead,” it’s now your job to explain how it is that most of the civilized world lives to the age of 75 primarily on dead food, while most raw-foodists can’t live on a pure, all-live-food raw diet for more than just a few years before ba
