What do you think?

[this text is currently work in progress…]

People are frequently asked what their opinion is on a subject:

• What do you think of this or that politician?
• Do you believe that X will achieve Y?

Why do we ask this? What are we hoping to extract from this?

• The identity of the person in relation to us
• Some possible insight we had not thought of before
• If the person is authorative, we might be swayed to think like them

But what are we really hearing?

• What that person right now, with the current context, within their limited knowledge of the world is managing to formulate on-the-fly about a question that was just asked.
• They might - and probably would - answer differently in a different circumstance (years earlier, years later, different interviewer, etc.)
• A miopic opinion/belief, probably not based on any facts, rather a summary of summaries of the experience of that human