Nuanced Discussion Quotes

We know there are good sugars and bad sugars, and we don't discuss whether food in general is good or bad for us. We need to be far more nuanced when we talk about the effects of video games.

The issues at the core of our national debates are more complicated than can be explained in soundbites and slogans by talking-heads and special guests. The media caters to our TL;DR-afflicted nation with over-simplified lowest common denominator journalism which completely fails us when the issues are not black-or-white or when the answers require caveats. Nuanced discussions don’t make attention grabbing headlines or dramatic journalistic copy so media reporting disproportionately accentuates extreme perspectives to create the conflict-drama that drives viewers and readership. The resulting rhetoric polarizes rather than convinces.

You can't have a nuanced debate on Twitter, it's just people shouting.

You can choose to listen to one end of the spectrum or the other on Twitter, just like you can on television. But hopefully what we've done is given a voice to that broad middle ground.

I feel it’s important to talk about the complex issues affecting us. And these are complex issues. I think it’s insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence.

The great challenge facing us today is to learn once again how to talk to one another, not simply how to generate and consume information. The latter is a tendency which our important and influential modern communications media can encourage. Information is important, but it is not enough. All too often things get simplified, different positions and viewpoints are pitted against one another, and people are invited to take sides, rather than to see things as a whole.

It is not productive to see things in simple black and white, and talk in either anti-nuclear or pro-nuclear terms.

I think the documentary is something that people are hungry for, that it embodies careful thought, nuance.

When people realize that in the long run you may be turning off the audiences more, even though they will look temporarily--in the end they turn away, we really need to develop other metaphors and not talk about two sides, but talk about all sides.

Somehow [Kenya Bariss] has figured out how to explore these very weighty, sticky, sharp topics, and still be funny and not make fun of the topic.

Sometimes, if you really don't know how you feel about a topic, reading how both sides argue it can help.

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

It's unfortunate that in an interview sometimes things can seem so black and white.

I think sometimes you need a little more explanation than the characters that you're allowed on Twitter.

So many people discuss, you know, Israel/Palestine as if it's people on a spectrum.

Thumbs up or thumbs down on a website is not a conversation. The danger is you get into a habit of mind where politics means giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a website. The world is a much more complex place.

When individuals approach one another with deep purposes on both sides they seldom come at once to the matter which they have most at heart. They dread the electric shock of a too sudden contact with it.

It's just hard to have a nuanced discussion with like a thousand people, 30 of which are white-power skinheads.

The media caters to our TL;DR-afflicted nation with over-simplified, lowest common denominator journalism which completely fails us when the issues are not black-or-white or when the answers require caveats. Nuanced discussions don’t make attention grabbing headlines or dramatic journalistic copy so media reporting disproportionately accentuates extreme perspectives to create the conflict-drama that drives viewers and readership. The resulting rhetoric polarizes rather than convinces.

It's really nice to see that, looking at all sides of the abortion issue - from the person who doesn't want to have kids so they're going to have an abortion and that's not traumatic for them, to somebody who loses a wanted pregnancy, to somebody who has complicated feelings because of their religion. We can talk about all of those complicated and individual stories and not feel like there's any one abortion story that's right or wrong.