Imprecision in Thought Part 1 When Something Sounds Wrong—But You Can’t Explain Why

Introduction

Don’t ya just love those moments where you start out certain you know what to do, and then a quick pause to check that all systems are “go” gives you some unexpected clarity—and you realize you’re about to make a colossal blunder?

Picture this—I’m wiling away a few idle minutes scrolling Facebook. An old friend’s post catches my eye. You know the guy…one of those cats you’ve known your whole life but are primarily connected now via social media. What starts as a visceral mix of irritation and bemusement—that face scrunch when you encounter dairy past its prime—quickly accelerates into something stronger. Something is wrong about that post. You can’t immediately put your finger on it, but you are certain it’s wrong. And what makes it worse: this person is intelligent, educated, and decent—so what the hell are they doing posting this?
So…battle stations. Damn the torpedoes.

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The Feeling Isn’t the Conclusion

Here’s the thing: in the heat of the moment, I thought the problem was that someone who knew better had posted some bullshit. Sure—that’s a problem. But a bigger one is heading for war without being able to articulate why. I wasn’t really reacting to the conclusion. I was reacting to the process that produced it. And the kicker? I was a few keystrokes away from using that same half-baked process myself. Different opinion, same underlying error. The definition of insanity starts to feel uncomfortably relevant.

That’s the cycle this series is about. That moment when something hits wrong, you react before you understand it, and in doing so you reproduce the very thing that got you riled in the first place. We need precision about what’s actually happening in that moment—because if not, we won’t be correcting bad thinking. We’ll be piling on. So let’s sort out what’s happening, why it matters more than we think, and what it looks like to slow down and think clearly enough to break the pattern instead of feeding it.

This is fundamentally a series about precision in language reflecting precision in thought. So before I do any petard hoisting, let’s make sure we’re using our words well.

What Imprecision Actually is (And Is Not)

What do I mean by imprecision in thought?

I don’t mean what that initial visceral reaction in your head is telling you—that the person posting is unintelligent, thoughtless, evil, ignorant, or misinformed. And I don’t mean “we just see things differently” in the polite agree-to-disagree sense. The problem with imprecise language is that it obscures the underlying thought so completely that you can’t reliably tell which of those explanations—if any—actually applies. You don’t know what they’re really saying.

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When Argument Stops Working

You’ve seen this play out. A post goes up. Someone responds. That response triggers another, and another. Try to follow the logic—track the claims, test the reasoning, check the facts—and you get lost fast. Positions shift mid-thread. Arguments morph. At some point it becomes clear that very little thinking is actually happening, and even less is being communicated.

In theory, argument should work differently. If your goal is truth—if you believe there is an objective reality to discover—then no argument has a loser. If I’m right, I gain confidence in what’s true. If I’m wrong, I gain clarity by having my error exposed. Either way, both parties should walk away with a better grasp on reality.

Felt that way after reading your average comment-section flame war? Yeah, didn’t think so.

So what is imprecision in thought?

It shows up in a few predictable ways:

• skipping complexity instead of simplifying it
• ignoring constraints, limits, or competing facts
• leaning too heavily on a single data point to prove or disprove everything
• expressing ideas so broadly—or so narrowly—that they lose practical value

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How to Balance Narrow vs Broad

Here’s the framework we’ll use going forward:

An idea that’s useful is narrow enough to be true, but broad enough to be useful.

That may sound abstract, but it shows up in concrete ways. When I studied biology, we were introduced to a long-standing tension in how scientists classify living things—lumpers versus splitters.

Lumpers group things together broadly. They’re comfortable placing something like the duck-billed platypus in with mammals, even though it lays eggs and looks like it was either designed by committee or—as Robin Williams once suggested—created when God was in a particularly mischievous mood. Splitters, on the other hand, would insist the platypus doesn’t cleanly belong anywhere and should probably sit in its own category entirely. They’ll take it even further—creating distinctions like “lesser apes” just to separate out animals like gibbons from the “great apes,” even though the practical difference is limited.

I’m not here to settle that debate. The point is that both approaches are trying to solve the same problem: how to describe reality in a way that is specific enough to be accurate, but general enough to be useful. Too broad, and your categories stop meaning anything. Too narrow, and they stop being useful.

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Where The Framework Breaks

That same tension shows up in everyday thinking.

On one end, ideas become so broad that they collapse into nonsense—look for arguments built on words like “always,” “never,” or “must.” These are some of my “seven dirty words,” and they tend to trap people in false absolutes.On the other end, ideas become so narrow and qualified that they may be technically correct, but practically useless. Perfect in theory. Worthless in application. Imprecision lives at both extremes—and most of what passes for argument today drifts toward one or the other. 

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Certainty Without the Work

And here’s where the problem gets worse: imprecision rarely presents itself as uncertainty. More often, it shows up wearing the costume of certainty.

Some of my consternation here probably comes from being a teacher. The job of a teacher is to pass along facts and knowledge that are both accurate and useful, and to help people learn how to analyze those facts clearly enough to communicate conclusions that can actually be applied. That raises a simple question: if you are not sure what you are saying is true, why are you saying it with such confidence? Why are you saying it persuasively and authoritatively?

Now, to be fair, not every public statement has to come wrapped in finality. If you are thinking out loud, testing an idea, or crowd-sourcing a few IQ points from your social media circle, fine. In fact, that may be one of the genuinely useful things these platforms can do. But that is not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about people passing along claims, arguments, and “facts” with the confidence of settled truth when they have not done even the most basic verification.

Go test this for yourself. Scroll your social media feed of choice and find the most outrageous claim backed by a photo or video. Then spend two minutes checking whether the image is doctored, stripped of context, AI-generated, or recycled from some unrelated event. You will quickly discover how often the confidence arrives long before the verification does.

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Borrowed Authority vs Earned Understanding

What I routinely see is the posture of dogma being applied to things that are invalidated within hours of being posted. That is not dogma. That is theater.

Real dogma—at least in the neutral sense I mean here—is accepted wisdom that has survived repeated examination across time, experience, and generations of human thought. It is passed on confidently not because one person feels strongly about it, but because it has already undergone more scrutiny than any one person could reasonably reproduce on their own. Yes, some things once treated as dogma have deserved to be challenged, corrected, or discarded. But it would be another form of imprecision to jump from “some inherited wisdom was wrong” to “all dogma is bad.” That’s the kind of overreaction and excessive generalization I’m pointing out.

The point is not that “tradition is always right”. The point is that earned certainty and borrowed certainty are not the same thing.

When you present something as unquestionable—when you write with the kind of confidence that expects immediate assent—but your source is a partisan hack site, a cropped meme, or some guy in a Reddit thread swearing it is true, you are trying to borrow the authority of culture without doing any of the work that made true authority possible in the first place. You are using certainty as a shortcut. You are trying to skip the years of testing, reflection, correction, and lived experience that give confidence its legitimacy.

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Show Your Work

That is why “show your work” matters.

Did your math and science teachers insist on it? Good. They were right. Showing your work is how you avoid the trap of clinging to an answer simply because it is yours. It forces you to reveal the process, not just the conclusion. It lets someone else see where you went wrong, and just as importantly, it lets you see it too. First do the work. Then show the work. Then, if the answer turns out to be wrong, you have some chance of finding the error instead of merely defending it.

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The Turn: You’re About to Do It Too

And here’s where this gets uncomfortable.

The same failure mode you’re seeing—the confident expression of half-formed thinking, the certainty without verification, the skipping of steps—is the one you are most likely to use when you respond.

That moment when something hits wrong and your instinct is to fire back? That’s not a sign you’re ready to engage. It’s a sign you’re about to do the exact same thing that bothered you in the first place.

Different conclusion. Same process.

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Closing

The rest of this series is going to continue on this theme: how to clean up your imprecision in thought before worrying about everyone else’s. So before we move to our latter posts and talk about how to fix it, it’s worth sitting with that for a minute. Because if you don’t recognize your own susceptibility to it, nothing that follows is going to land. In the next post we’ll move beyond simply recognizing that my  “mouth may be moving before brain fully engaged” isn’t a unique experience, and discuss what (and how) to do instead.