Logarithms confuse me too, even though I “invented” logarithms one day when I was bored before ever being taught about them. I know they’re exponents in reverse, and I know they can be useful to diminish the relative weight of larger numbers, but whenever I see logs in an equation, my degree of “I can figure out what this equation does” takes a significant hit.
I’m actually not as neutral as I may seem. There are quite a few cases where I hold more extreme opinions, but as a general trend, I average somewhere around the middle.
I’m not seeing a conflict here. The point I’m making is that the middle ground is not necessarily in the middle of any two given opinions, because the spectrum is wider than that. And also that the middle is not necessarily the best, just worth evaluating.
This is also true. I like to evaluate solutions outside the presented dichotomy in general, and that often means outside the line between them, but I didn’t want to complicate my initial explanation that much.
It’s an abstraction of a caricature I’ve seen. Point A was civil rights, point B was the KKK, and the middle ground guy was like “what if we only kill half of Black people?”
I’m not scared of conflict, I’m averse to needless conflict. I may get involved in a conflict for the purpose of breaking it up, or I may initiate a conflict for a good cause such as combating hatred and averting future conflicts - if I feel it’d be productive.
As a middle ground kind of guy, I would like to pre-emptively state that a lot of us don’t actually think the answer is always the middle ground between two stances. It’s just that we’re more likely to propose a middle ground solution because we evaluate the plausibility of both stances in a more balanced way (as opposed to existing-stance-holders who are prone to bias towards their own stance.) When the two seem roughly equal in plausibility (which happens fairly often, otherwise the argument would be more one-sided,) that’s an indication to evaluate the middle ground as well.
Middle ground folks are often caricaturized as wanting to find the middle ground between an objectively sensible point A and a radically wrong point B, when the spectrum of opinions is sort of like [ - - - - - A - | - - - - - - B ]. In that caricature, we’re looking for a middle ground at point C [ - - - - - A - | - - C - - - B ], when in actuality we’re evaluating (and not automatically accepting) something two or three steps closer to A. In some such cases, A might already be the most sensible middle ground.
