On having views

Most people who write publicly do not actually have views. They have positions — which is a different thing. A position is adopted because it is safe, or expected, or consistent with the tribe you want to be seen as belonging to. A view is something you have arrived at through genuine thinking, something you would hold even if it cost you something to hold it.

The difference is visible in the writing. Positions produce hedged, balanced, “on the one hand, on the other hand” prose that reaches a careful non-conclusion. Views produce writing with a direction — something is argued, something is at stake, someone could disagree. The reader finishes a piece and knows what the writer actually thinks.

I have spent years reading and occasionally writing in professional contexts where views were dangerous and positions were rewarded. Consulting, finance, corporate strategy — these are environments that prize the appearance of rigour while systematically discouraging the kind of intellectual risk-taking that actual rigour requires. You learn to sound considered while saying nothing that could be held against you.

I am trying to unlearn that. Not because controversy is a virtue — it is not — but because writing that says nothing is a waste of the reader’s time and, more importantly, a waste of the thinking that should have preceded it. If I have worked through an idea seriously enough to write about it, I should write about what I actually concluded, not a diplomatic average of the possible conclusions.

This is harder than it sounds. The instinct to hedge is deep, especially on topics where you are not a credentialled expert. Who am I to have a view on education policy, or India’s technology strategy, or what agentic AI will do to financial services? The answer, I think, is that the credential requirement is itself a kind of position — a way of outsourcing thinking to authority rather than doing it yourself. Experts deserve weight. They do not deserve a monopoly.

So: I will write what I actually think. I will be wrong sometimes. I will update when the argument is good enough. But I will not perform uncertainty I do not feel or balance I do not have, because that is not writing — it is noise wearing writing’s clothes.