We’re Not Dumb, We’re Missing Context
Introduction: The Case For Bottom-Up Nuance
Nuance and subtlety are on life support. Public discourse increasingly feels like a team sport where the goal isn’t understanding - it’s winning. We defend our “side” at all costs, prioritizing the appearance of being right over the more difficult work of getting to the best answer and ultimately driving the best outcome.
You’ve likely heard this complaint a thousand times, but I promise this isn’t another think piece blaming politics or social media. The real issue runs deeper. Many of us have stopped practicing the habits that make nuance possible. We complain that the world has become polarized and shallow, yet rarely examine our own role in that trend. The fix won’t come from institutions; it starts with how each of us forms and communicates our own opinions.
The more we rely on borrowed ideas and flatten others into caricatures, the less capable we become of genuine understanding. Rebuilding nuance begins with reclaiming our own thinking - and with remembering that intelligence, status, and value are all context-dependent.
This essay explores why nuance so often collapses in modern life, what the concept of context can teach us about intelligence and status, and how we can use a bottom-up approach to restore nuance through intentional opinion-making.
How Nuance Falls Apart
Society’s loss of nuance isn’t some mysterious cultural illness. It’s the compound effect of small cognitive habits many of us have fallen into - often without realizing it. There are countless factors driving polarization, but three in particular stand out: our growing passivity toward information, our lack of empathy for other people’s contexts, and our overconfidence in our own assumptions.
The Passivity Problem
We live in a world of infinite input. There’s more content available than any human could meaningfully process in a lifetime, and algorithms are happy to feed us an endless stream of opinions tailored to our tastes. The result is a subtle shift in how we spend our time: we consume more, but we think less. Put simply, though we’re absorbing more information than ever, we’re forming our own opinions less often.
That imbalance matters. Polarizing and reactionary content attracts the most attention, so it’s what we see most. When we casually adopt those takes and repeat them without filtering them through our own judgment, we reinforce the very dynamics that make discourse worse. It’s a self-reinforcing loop: outrage performs well, so it spreads; we see it, we share it, and the cycle repeats.
This isn’t about moral purity - everyone consumes. The problem is passivity: treating opinions as something to download rather than develop. Rebuilding nuance begins with reclaiming the creative side of thinking - taking the time to interpret what we consume before deciding what we believe. Run everything you hear through your own experiences and values. Don’t just accept information at face value.
The Empathy Gap
We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their outcomes. When we make a mistake, we know the full context - we were tired, distracted, or under pressure, so we forgive ourselves. But when someone else stumbles, we rarely grant them that same grace. Their actions become their whole story.
This dynamic extends to a broader scale. We see ourselves as complex, multi-layered people, yet we flatten everyone else into one-dimensional characters in our personal narratives: the bad driver, the rude coworker, the inconsiderate stranger. When we cut someone off in traffic, we’re running late for an important meeting; when they cut us off, they’re an idiot who doesn’t know how to drive.
That’s the empathy gap - the distance between how we explain our own behavior and how we interpret everyone else’s. The truth, of course, is that no one is purely good or bad. Each of us is a collage of influences, experiences, and contradictions. Even the people who frustrate us most are, in some causal sense, products of their circumstances. If you were swapped with them cell for cell, you’d be them - grumpiness, flaws, and all.
Closing that gap is the first step toward nuance. When we remember that everyone carries their own mix of strengths and blind spots, it becomes easier to look for shared ground rather than proof of difference. We’re generally more alike than we think: most people just want safety, purpose, and love for themselves and the people they care about.
The more we practice that kind of empathy, the harder it becomes to flatten people into opponents. And once we stop flattening, we start noticing the next trap: how quickly we let a single detail - a belief, a label, or a vote stand in for an entire, messy human being.
The Assumption Trap
“Stereotype” is kind of a dirty word, but they do exist for a reason. Our brains are wired to fill in gaps and make quick judgments so we can navigate the world efficiently. But somewhere along the way, we started mistaking those shortcuts for truth. We’ve become comfortable extrapolating entire worldviews from a single data point.
Picture the kind of person who has an “In this house, we believe no human is illegal…” sign in their yard - now picture the kind of person furious that Bad Bunny is performing at the Super Bowl. You probably imagined two very different people, and you could probably guess where each one stands on a dozen unrelated social or political issues. And chances are, you’d be mostly right.
I’m not suggesting we approach every interaction as a blank slate - that would be exhausting and unrealistic. Stereotypes, at their best, are rough pattern recognition. They can even be useful starting points*. The problem isn’t that we make assumptions - it’s how confident we’ve become in them. We treat our guesses as fact and avoid conversations that might challenge them. We’d rather preserve the neat stories in our heads than test them against reality.
That’s the real trap: our assumptions don’t just make us wrong, they make us incurious. When we think we already know who someone is, we stop engaging with them altogether. We miss the chance to uncover the contradictions and nuances that make people (and conversations) interesting. By opting out of those interactions, we lose opportunities to refine our own thinking.
The reality is that most of us hold inconsistent or even contradictory beliefs somewhere. That’s not a flaw - it’s often the sign of a mind doing its own filtering, wrestling ideas through lived experience rather than blindly adopting them. It’s not realistic to expect anyone to hold perfectly consistent, rational beliefs. We’re all emotional creatures. In my experience, it’s often quite the opposite: the more contradictions someone holds, the more interesting they are**.
When these habits of overconfidence and avoidance scale up, they become cultural. We start to see entire groups as simple, misguided, or unintelligent - while granting ourselves endless complexity and context. After all, how could anyone possibly disagree with someone as thoughtful and multi-faceted as us?
But what we often dismiss as stupidity is usually just difference - a gap in context we don’t understand.
Rethinking “Smart”: The Context of Intelligence
Intelligence, like almost everything else, is contextual. Yet we often talk about it as if it’s a single, universal score - some fixed trait that sits neatly on a spectrum from smart to stupid. That illusion makes it easy to label people as intelligent or not, while ignoring the conditions that shape what they know and how they think.
So many of the qualities we admire - intelligence, talent, status, success - are deeply dependent on environment and experience. A genius in one setting can be useless in another. Whenever we compare ourselves to others on those traits, we’re flattening all the variables that make them meaningful: context, opportunity, background, and values. The doctor who thrives in a hospital setting might owe that expertise to a lifetime of structured education and access, while the farmer who never went to college might know more about soil chemistry and weather patterns than the doctor ever will. Both are intelligent - just in different contexts.
In reality, there are at least two kinds of intelligence worth distinguishing. The first is general intelligence - critical thinking that applies across contexts. The second is domain-specific intelligence - expertise that depends on a particular environment or body of knowledge.
General intelligence is less about raw IQ and more about habits of thought:
Sniffing out obvious BS
Recognizing your own limits (i.e., acknowledging when you’re not an expert)
Forming your own opinions instead of repeating others’
Communicating those opinions clearly
Explaining the reasoning behind them in a way that makes sense
People might not agree with where you land on an issue, but if they can follow the logic that got you there, you’ve already created the foundation for real dialogue.
Domain-specific intelligence, on the other hand, is when you are the expert. It’s the craftsperson, the coder, the nurse, the mechanic who can diagnose a problem that others can’t even describe. Knowing the limits of your own expertise - and deferring to others when they’re in their domain - is a form of intelligence in itself. It’s the humility to recognize that no one is smart everywhere.
A few examples make this obvious. The rural mechanic who might feel out of place at a black-tie gala could be the savior when the gala guest’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders - some of the most technically skilled dancers in the world - go home and resume their day jobs as nurses, office managers, and teachers***. Genius, skill, and competence all depend on setting. Often, those settings overlap neatly with class and geography. What looks like “ignorance” from a distance is often just intelligence tuned to a different environment - rural instead of urban, practical instead of academic, hands-on instead of theoretical. We miss that truth when we assume intelligence only counts if it comes with the credentials or characteristics of our own world.
When we start to see intelligence through this lens, the hierarchy flattens. “Smart” stops being a status label and becomes a description of fit - between a person’s knowledge and their context. When we lose sight of that, it becomes easy to divide the world into the intelligent and the ignorant - a false split that fuels the collapse of nuance across our culture. Instead of recognizing that everyone has strengths in different areas and engaging them accordingly, we simply write them off as stupid.
If we can relearn to see intelligence and status as contextual, we can also relearn to form opinions that respect complexity - in others and in ourselves.
Rebuilding Nuance From the Bottom Up
So what now? How do we actually bring nuance back?
If polarization and simplification are the natural byproducts of passivity, empathy gaps, and lazy assumptions, then the antidote has to be active - something we each practice intentionally. The work of rebuilding nuance won’t come from political institutions or the social media companies developing our algorithms; it has to start with how we think, speak, and listen.
At the simplest level, this means addressing the passivity problem head-on. We need to be more deliberate about engaging with the information that makes its way into our heads - accepting some parts, rejecting others, and shaping it all into opinions that actually belong to us. In practical terms, that means:
Generating your own opinions instead of regurgitating others’
Communicating your stance clearly, even when it’s incomplete or evolving
Explaining how you got there - the reasoning, trade-offs, and values that shaped your view
The goal isn’t to make everyone think alike; it’s to make disagreement productive again. When people understand how you reached your conclusion, they’re more likely to respond in kind. Even if you still disagree, you’re disagreeing on shared ground - with mutual respect for the thought that went into it. This is where common ground is found, and Bad Bunny Super Bowl rejecters begin to actually have fruitful discussions with “In this house we believe…” yard-sign people.
It’s not enough to endlessly consume content and call it awareness. You have to insert yourself into the process. Think critically about what resonates, what doesn’t, and why. The more intentional your inputs - the higher-quality, more nuanced, fact-based ideas you expose yourself to - the sharper your outputs become.
The nice part is that this isn’t just an individual skill; it scales. A culture of people who form and articulate their own opinions is, by definition, a culture that values context and complexity. It rewards curiosity over certainty, understanding over signaling, and creation over consumption.
Developing your own opinions is a creative endeavor - the daily act of making meaning instead of merely absorbing it. And if enough of us do that work, nuance might stop feeling like an endangered species and start feeling like a habit again.
Conclusion: Practicing Context
Nuance isn’t an abstract virtue; it’s a habit of curiosity, practiced one conversation at a time.
We shouldn’t expect this to be fixed from the top down. Political institutions and media companies aren’t exactly incentivized to slow things down and make us more thoughtful. Outrage is profitable. Simplicity is efficient. Picking teams is easier to sell than sitting with complexity. If we’re waiting on a platform redesign or a new batch of politicians to make public discourse more nuanced, we’ll be waiting a long time.
The good news is that the habits that create nuance are still completely within our control. We choose whether to treat other people as caricatures or as full humans with contexts we don’t yet see. We choose whether to adopt opinions wholesale or shape them ourselves. We choose whether to write people off as stupid or ask what kind of intelligence their world might actually require.
Practicing context means zooming out just enough to remember that everyone, including us, is a product of specific experiences, incentives, and environments. It means acknowledging the possibility that someone you disagree with might still be thoughtful in a domain you don’t understand. It means recognizing that “smart” isn’t a trophy some people get to keep - it’s a moving target that depends on where you’re standing.
None of this guarantees agreement. It doesn’t mean every viewpoint is equally valid or that we should stop drawing lines where it matters. What it does mean is that we take responsibility for the part we can actually control: how we think, how we talk, and how we treat the people who land somewhere else on the spectrum.
We can’t legislate nuance into existence. We can’t algorithm our way into empathy. But we can model it from the bottom up by forming our own opinions, explaining how we arrived at them, and giving others the grace of context. If enough of us do that, even in small, unremarkable ways, public discourse might start to feel a little less tribal - and a little more like what it’s supposed to be: a collective attempt to figure things out together.
*At their worst, we know that stereotypes tend to be blatant racism, sexism, or insert other form of prejudice here.
**They could also be a complete idiot. Your mileage may vary.
***This example may or may not be a result of watching the DCC Netflix documentary - against my will, for the record.