To some extent, to succeed in the modern world, you have to override your instincts with a thought-out response to things. Whatever heuristics we've built up over thousands of years are interesting, but some of them don't apply anymore. (If you were a prehistoric human and you encountered a beehive, you'd eat all the honey. But now you can get hundreds of beehives worth of honey in one trip to the grocery store, and your body's not going to tell you to not eat it. It will tell you the opposite -- this tastes great! You just have to learn that it's bad for your health and choose not to do it, no matter how good it would taste.)
Basically, the human brain is a neural network trained on very old data. Fortunately, it is also very adaptive and can ignore that training data with some conscious effort. You need to operate your brain in that mode more now than you did 10,000 years ago.
"Strong opinions weakly held" means "argue your point but sometimes you're going to lose." Evolution might not have rewarded losing over the course of millions of years, but whatever meeting you're arguing in doesn't have that kind of staying power. You can lose the argument and the human race will survive another generation. Whatever argument you're having probably doesn't matter in any meaningful sense. It's not life or death.
The author of this post knows what "strong opinions, weakly held" means. They explain it in their own words, and take effort to explain the difference between the catchphrase understanding and application of it versus the genuine application of its principles. The author also presents arguments as to why even the genuine application fall short, which I don't believe you responded to.
(If it seems I'm picking on you: yours is the top post in the comments, and I don't feel like you're engaging with the post beyond a surface level.)
Bee Facts: You don't get hundreds of beehives worth of honey from a trip to the store. Hives typically produce multiple liters in a single summer. Last summer, our Hive made around 3 liters and there was enough for all the family to have their own jar. Many apiarists have multiple hives and a group of 10 hives could fill the grocery's honey section in September.
I agree, but that doesn't make the "old data" problem go away.
It's worth noticing that in the first part (Paul Saffo forecasting), the problem is all in one head. Saffo recognizes an unintuitive methodology: strong opinions weakly held. He's only really dealing with himself, his intuitions, tactics that work for him.
The second part gets social:
"you’ve decided, along with your boss, to build a particular type of product for a particular subsection of the self-service checkout market."
This is a good example, imo. These decisions are made with imperfect information, and they incorporate a lot of interlocking opinions. Ex ante can only get you so far. You need to make a decision and start rowing to progress, change paths when necessary.
Multiple people are involved. Credibility is on the line, among many subtle subroutines of group psychology that we aren't even aware of. The solution from Tetlock, express your opinion as a probability, is a solution to the problem in its group form. When people are in meetings making big decisions, a lot more than the big decisions is going on. Human power dynamics are taking place. Being right can play a very small role in these.
I think the author has a blindspot. "This is not how the human brain works" is one kind of challenge. "This is not how human groups work" is another. It isn't a derivative of the first.
> "Strong opinions weakly held" means "argue your point but sometimes you're going to lose.
The definition is not about arguing with others (so there’s no “looser”), it’s about arguing with yourself to avoid being wedded to poorly thought out points of view. From the article (emphasis mine):
> Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then – and this is the “weakly held” part – prove yourself wrong.
I have found that in software that is wrong. If you want to succeed in software you need to do what is most popular which largely follows innate human behavior. Unlike many other professions there is no licensing, accredidation, or common ethic which means there is no standard baseline of competence.
This is visually explained when thinking about the difference between success and capability and then viewing that difference on a graph, such as a bell curve.
My take on "strong opinions, weakly held:" It's about combating your own confirmation bias by being willing to do the work of re-examining your conclusions in the light of new evidence. It's hard to do b/c we get emotionally invested, and also because once you make a conclusion an assumption, it becomes implicit & fades into the background -- so it's harder to question.
On the flip side, it's also about trusting your own reasoning above the crowd -- you are thus able to pick up the $20 bill on the ground instead of being sure it's fake b/c nobody else has picked it up already.
Honestly I DON'T trust my own reasoning. I can do this adversarial process as described in this article on my own, but that's incomplete. People outside of me have information and ways to view things that I don't. Others work as a discriminator and you update your opinions and views as more information comes in and challenges your own ideas. But it is because I don't trust my own reasoning that I read textbooks, seek out experts, and try to get as many views as possible, because no one has the complete picture.
I think a better headline for the post would have ended with “... doesn’t work that well for me.” The author tried the “strongly held” strategy, found it difficult, and decided to justify another strategy of asking “how much are you willing to bet on that?” instead.
Why not both? After all, deciding “how much to bet” is probably one kind of fairly strong opinion. It’s at least strong enough to bet on. Betting strategy changes as information changes, so maybe you could construe that bet (or strong opinion) as being loosely held.
I agree that pithy phrases shouldn’t be used to justify “strongly held bad opinions” but how are we even deciding what a “bad” opinion looks like?
In the end we probably all want to come to the most correct conclusions and be willing to change when presented with new information. How we get there probably doesn’t matter as much as a majority deciding it’s worth the time and effort to do so in the first place.
On how do you tell apart a bad opinion from a good one, the ancient Stoics (lately I'm quoting them more, as I'm immersed in their writings) have some thoughts here. For the longer version, you have to read their works[1], but to give an extremely simplified version, without butchering the concept:
The Stoics have this notion of 'impression' and 'assent'. It goes like this: An impression of walking strikes you. But only after you told yourself "yes, it is fitting for me to walk", thus giving your 'assent' (agreement) to it, will you actually go for a walk. Of course, we know that we don't actually verbalize like that; as it all happens too quickly. Their goal here is to not evade responsibility to shape ones own judgements, opinions, and even emotions "in accordance with reason".
Thus, the Greek philosopher Epictetus' favourite way of describing the Stoic project is: "making correct use of mental impressions".
- - -
The same technique of impression/assent is also used, along with others, to diagnose "passions" (Greek, páthos—it's a loaded word that is used to categorize many emotions, including the debilitating ones). Thus, for the Stoics, the cause of any "passion" is an "error of judgement". What sort of error? Mistaken system of values—there's a ton more to this, but I have to skip it for brevity's sake. FWIW, some reading recommendations on this topic on a thread here[1].
There's a type of exercise where you're not asked "I want to do $x, how do I achieve that?" but instead are asked "I don't know what to do, can you find out?" where the scope might be anywhere from "pick an new ERP" to "reorganise the entire worldwide operations to be a more effective at all things digital".
If faced with such a wide open question you could do some research and start asking all the questions you think of, but you're then just hoping to narrow in on something by luck. The "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" method works well here, if within the first week you can learn enough to form some opinions, you now have some ideas to test against and disprove. You can start to decide on what information is important and what isn't important, rather than trying to gather all the possible information and synthesize it later on.
If you have an opinion such as "you should formulate a strategy to sell direct to the consumer instead of relying on distribution alone" you have a starting point and have narrowed things down from "how do we sell more things?". You might not have one opinion, you might have five. It takes experience to come up with opinions quickly when faced with limited data and potentially a large problem space.
It's hypothesis-driven decision making. It does require both iteration and the willingness to let your original opinions go--kill your darlings.
> if within the first week you can learn enough to form some opinions, you now have some ideas to test against and disprove
Interestingly there is some evidence that this might lead to anchoring bias related issues. I am not sure what we can do to improve the situation, however.
I was unaware of the origin story for this phrase. I've mostly seen it used to duck actually arguing with people, a la this paragraph:
More generally, “strong opinions weakly held” is often a useful default perspective to adopt in the face of any issue fraught with high levels of uncertainty, whether one is venturing a forecast or not. Try it at a cocktail party the next time a controversial topic comes up; it is an elegant way to discover new insights — and duck that tedious bore who loudly knows nothing but won’t change their mind!
I think the original intent of "strong opinion" is make a decisive conclusion without hemming and hawing. In other words, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, say "Well, I believe it's a duck" but allow for the possibility that you are wrong and be willing to admit that if evidence comes forth showing you are wrong.
I don't operate that way. I have a high tolerance for ambiguity and I am more comfortable with the answer "I don't know" than most people seem to be. Most people seem to have a tremendous need to categorize things and I think this is useful for such people: Go ahead, categorize it. Just don't be overly committed to categorizing it. Be willing to change your mind about it.
Most people fail at the "Be willing to change your mind about it" part.
Most people seem to use this phrase not as a rule of thumb for how to think their way through something -- which can take work and it helps if you go ahead and deal with whatever is in front of you and then take the next step -- but simply to deflect fightiness in online forums.
I'm happy to debate with people, but a lot of argumentation on the internet isn't really intellectual debate trying to tease out the merits of an idea. It gets personal. It gets ugly. It is actually fighting, not debating, and we call both "argument" and do a poor job of distinguishing the two things.
So I have seen this phrase, but it was consistently used to basically say "Don't @ me!" In other words, "I want to go ahead and speak my mind in public to satisfy some need of mine, but I don't really want to deal with other people not agreeing and all that. I just want to say a thing and that's it."
I think the original idea has some merit -- go ahead and state firmly what you think it is but be willing to change your mind -- but that's not what most people seem to use the phrase to mean. Not at all. And what it has come to mean is pretty lame.
An analogy the original concept makes me think of, is how you can pour out some stuff like sand or flour, and it's hard to tell how much you have because it forms a mound. But if you shake it, it levels out. And if you're pouring onto a scale, shaking makes it pour more continually and lets you get the exact amount you want. In general, going back and forth seems like a way of reducing hysteresis, and that's what the "strong opinions weakly held" concept sounds like to me. The human tendency is to resist flip flopping to present an outward image of stability, so it's best to do constant internal flip-flopping without losing your place and letting people know. I haven't thought of the concept by the catchphrase/meme, but I have many times thought that whenever I see a claim, I need to reverse it in my mind and think about whether it's any more or less plausible to consider the opposite. To avoid the friction and path-dependence of an idea. People like to be contrarian and sometimes they appear to be smart people, who scoff at this sort of thing, reversing obvious statements. But I still think it's vital.
On the other hand, when faced with a fork in the road, it's important to choose. Often it doesn't matter which - but if you vacillate, and especially if you are leading - then you can fail by not choosing.
So, strong opinions: decisively go down one road; weakly held: turn around if information suggests it looks like the wrong road.
You can only update your opinions if you engage with reality, which demands a certain conviction in those opinions.
This is a great way to put it. It’s a position I end up taking a lot—there are so many situations where no one involved has enough information to justify strong beliefs.
There are another version of "weak opinions, strongly held", and unfortunately the version I encountered more: "I don't know why and I don't care, but I will do it my way and you can't change it".
Your interpretation sounds very much more similar to "weak opinions, weakly held" to my ear.
Tools that cultivate more position-taking of this sort, that's what I firmly believe is part of healing the world we've thoughtlessly created through digital mediation of everything.
What is the practical implication of that? "Strong opinions, weakly held" means (IIUC) make a decision, but be open to changing it if data points to it being wrong. It helps avoid the trap of looking for perfect data to make a perfect decision. Can you provide a practical application of "weak opinions, strongly held"?
> In my experience, ‘strong opinions, weakly held’ is difficult to put into practice
I 100% agree when interacting with other people, but I think it's still valuable for your personal growth if you're intellectually honest with yourself.
"How much are you willing to bet on that?" is definitely a smart question to ask other people though.
Framework? That’s just silly. It’s a turn of phrase that helps you change your attitude or approach a problem from a new direction.
“If at first you don’t succeed...” I suck. I’m never going to try again! Haha.
I didn’t know the origin of the phrase, and that’s a testament to its creativity.
As a life long learner, I found it useful in ways not related to the origin story. It helps me to overcome imposter syndrome.
I know a little bit about a lot of things, and a lot about a very few things. And I love solving problems with design thinking. Go for it. Feel confident about your knowledge if you have done the work, but know there are others who know more.
All that gets nicely summarized by Strong opinions, weakly held.
> Framework? That’s just silly. It’s a turn of phrase that helps you change your attitude or approach a problem from a new direction.
While you're welcome to interpret it however you wish, one of the main points of the article is that it is a methodological framework laid out by Paul Saffo[1], but that most people ignore the framework and focus on the catchphrase.
> it is quite difficult for the human mind to vacillate between one strong opinion to another.
For the specific subset of people in tech, I don't believe this is true. How many times have you and someone else had a strong disagreement about the cause of a bug or design of a system, conclusively determined that one answer is correct, and then had the other person come back (usually after a small delay) acting as though they'd agreed with you all along? I've been seeing this for over thirty years. Half the time, the other person even tries to claim they came up with the idea on their own and everyone else was slow to pick it up. Same thing is frequently evident right here. It's easy for some people to switch from one strong opinion to another, and the popularity of "strong opinions weakly held" makes it even easier.
I also think that SOWH is behind a lot of cargo culting and conspiracy theories. People want to get credit for being the champion of an idea, even if they don't fully understand it or it has low odds of being correct, and the appeal increases with the challenge of convincing others. After all, if they're wrong they can just switch sides and claim they'd been on the right side all along. If they're right, it's an epic victory (in their own minds at least).
Strength of belief is not inherently virtuous. It should be proportional to strength of evidence, not armor worn for the sake of a silly maxim. Strong belief in SOWH itself is an example of faith over empiricism.
I don't like the idea all that much. It seems close to how I operate instinctively, but somewhat neglects the coexisence of mutually exclusive ideas, which, I believe, is rooted in the poor choice of the word "opinion".
The reality of human perception is that we never have absolute knowledge and can only operate on a framework of assumptions; when two possible assumptions are mutually exclusive, we often pick the most likely candidate and focus on that scenario.
This seems to be a reasonable methodology throughout most of human evolution, where decisions more often needed to be immediate.
In a modern world though, it seems like a way more helpful mental model is a superposition of scenarios and adequate responses to any of them; in conclusion, the only reasonably principle on which to make decisions would be maximizing the probability of being adequately prepared for the outcome of a situation, which can be simplified as "Be prepared for as many likely outcomes as possible", or, more correctly, act in such a way that maximises the sum of the probabilities of all the outcomes you are adequately prepared for.
EDIT: I probably should have read the entire article before writing all that; just one paragraph after where I had stopped the author actually makes a very similar point.
I understand what “weakly held” means, but what does the “strong opinions” part mean? I couldn’t get this from the post.
What would be an example of a weak opinion and a related strong opinion? Is this just the difference between “the 49ers will win most of their games this year” and “the 49ers will win the Super Bowl this year”?
If so, why is the latter preferred?
Edit: thanks for the downvote, perhaps you can help me understand what is meant by the term, or why you found my comment to be inappropriate?
Weak opinion: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start.
Strong opinion: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start.
Strongly held: I tested the battery and voltage and current are within good thresholds. I still believe what I believed before.
Weakly held: I tested the battery and voltage and current are within good thresholds. I have adjusted my belief about what I believed before.
WOSH: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as dead. I still cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start.
WOWH: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as dead. It could be the battery, maybe. Hard to say.
SOSH: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as functioning fine. It's definitely the battery, though.
SOWH: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as functioning fine. The reason why my car won't start is not my battery; I think it won't start because my starter motor is broken.
Downvotes occur for all sorts of reasons. Please don't introduce noise into the discussion. It's annoying to other readers for all sorts of reasons. I am often tempted to downvote anyone who complains about them.
There is an entire industry devoted to giving people strong opinions about stuff they have not researched themselves.
They hide behind the false idea that people are unable to evaluate evidence. They will chew it for us. As proof of this, they offer up endless anecdotes of others believing things that the viewer is really sure are either true or false. The most effective 'bias hacks' are easily shown to be false; all that matters is that the viewer believe that "other" people hold that opinion.
A real test is who is willing to discuss it without getting emotional and derailing. The side that needs insulation does that for a reason.
Gaming confirmation bias is perhaps the 2nd most effective tool used to manipulate mass psychology.
I perhaps haven't been using the phrase as originally intended, but I've always used the phrase "strong opinions, loosely held" when it comes to hiring and building a team, and I've found it incredibly useful.
The "strong opinions" part for me means hiring someone who not just has a lot of experience on some topic or technology, but they understand it at a very deep level. The strong opinions come from a place of perhaps having been burned hard by a particular technology or process (or, contrarily, loving a technology or tool for some reason), and being able to point out the 10 little details that turn out to be big issues in real-world usage.
The "loosely held" part to me means being able to trust that (a) you don't know everything in all situations and (b) most importantly you're willing to really listen to other people on the team and are open to the idea that you may be wrong.
It's terrible as a meme, and terrible as a culture guidepost for a big group.
It is only effective in the context of a closed small trusting group making decisions.
One needs to make decisions, often with laughably insufficient information. So make one and watch carefully and be able to reverse if evidence tells you differently. Only works if you already have a strong trust culture and relatively equal power.
Using that policy as a leader of a larger group with a necessarily weaker trust culture and unequal power fails terribly because it comes across as capricious, and irresponsible.
Oh my god, yes. You also have to take the input of the group as “evidence,” and acknowledge when you may not know much about something, but someone else does.
I do this on Hackernews sometimes. I just state my opinion, however weakly held, and wait for it to be torn apart, where I learn a lot, and all my biases are revealed to me. That's how learning works: you challenge your own assumptions, or let your assumptions to be challenged by others.
> wait for it to be torn apart, where I learn a lot
That's probably fine somewhere like HN, but I'd warn people against doing it too much IRL. I have an ex-friend who liked to play the "you just need to" game as a primary learning technique. I say ex-friend because I got tired of the initial implication that his few minutes' of thought could overturn lessons it might have taken me years to learn, until I did the labor of educating him. Maybe some of that was a "me thing" except that he has several other ex-friends for the same reason. I have other still-friends who are a bit less extreme about it, but it's generally not a relationship-positive behavior.
That does work to educate you, but has the side effect of distorting the discussion here. For instance, I'll see a bunch of comments recommending a particular approach for writing software. I might come away thinking most of HN approves of that approach, and so there must be something to it. But what if all those comments are just people trying out the idea, in hopes that other people will tear it apart?
I don't think there's anything wrong with qualifying your opinions. You can still get people to challenge you on them. Isn't that why people start their sentences with "for sake of argument" or "playing devils advocate"?
I've found this is a phrase loved by those who enjoy argument for its own sake, and who don't have a very deep understanding of a particular subject matter.
> Saffo’s original idea is so quotable it has turned into a memetic phenomenon... ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ turns into ‘Strong Opinions, Justified Loudly, Until Evidence Indicates Otherwise, At Which Point You Invoke It To Protect Your Ass.’
I think an approach of collecting questions rather than answers works well. If you're really interested in a question then you should try to answer it, but be wary of accepting the first answer you see or think of.
I have questions that I've thought about for years, and some tentative hypotheses to go with them.
Honestly I rarely remember the full details of why I chose a particular tech. I did the deep research, picked what I believed to be the best tool, implemented and deployed it and now that tool is my baseline.
If you asked me a couple years later “why the hell did you chose that?!” I probably couldn’t give you many details that formed my opinion originally and couldn’t vociferously defend it by arguing minutiae of spec sheets. But I do know if you want to sell me on something new its gotta beat that baseline tool, not whatever opinions I might have had at the time of choosing.
For me the „strong opinion weakly held“ is a way of mental prototyping:
> Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then – and this is the “weakly held” part – prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction. Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again. You will be surprised by how quickly the sequence of faulty forecasts will deliver you to a useful result.
The author of the blog post however finds failure with it for guiding investments gradually, it failing when new information is discovered along the way. But that isn‘t the purpose, to guide one in small day to day adjustments. The purpose is to explore a not well known landscape for strategic decision making. To gather enough solid non trivial insight to make a well founded strategic decision. There are better tools for operational management once one has committed to a direction.
Strong opinions help me often to escape analysis paralysis. It also helps me to surface my premature judgements and transcend them.
[+] [-] jrockway|5 years ago|reply
To some extent, to succeed in the modern world, you have to override your instincts with a thought-out response to things. Whatever heuristics we've built up over thousands of years are interesting, but some of them don't apply anymore. (If you were a prehistoric human and you encountered a beehive, you'd eat all the honey. But now you can get hundreds of beehives worth of honey in one trip to the grocery store, and your body's not going to tell you to not eat it. It will tell you the opposite -- this tastes great! You just have to learn that it's bad for your health and choose not to do it, no matter how good it would taste.)
Basically, the human brain is a neural network trained on very old data. Fortunately, it is also very adaptive and can ignore that training data with some conscious effort. You need to operate your brain in that mode more now than you did 10,000 years ago.
"Strong opinions weakly held" means "argue your point but sometimes you're going to lose." Evolution might not have rewarded losing over the course of millions of years, but whatever meeting you're arguing in doesn't have that kind of staying power. You can lose the argument and the human race will survive another generation. Whatever argument you're having probably doesn't matter in any meaningful sense. It's not life or death.
[+] [-] scott_s|5 years ago|reply
(If it seems I'm picking on you: yours is the top post in the comments, and I don't feel like you're engaging with the post beyond a surface level.)
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|5 years ago|reply
It's worth noticing that in the first part (Paul Saffo forecasting), the problem is all in one head. Saffo recognizes an unintuitive methodology: strong opinions weakly held. He's only really dealing with himself, his intuitions, tactics that work for him.
The second part gets social:
"you’ve decided, along with your boss, to build a particular type of product for a particular subsection of the self-service checkout market."
This is a good example, imo. These decisions are made with imperfect information, and they incorporate a lot of interlocking opinions. Ex ante can only get you so far. You need to make a decision and start rowing to progress, change paths when necessary.
Multiple people are involved. Credibility is on the line, among many subtle subroutines of group psychology that we aren't even aware of. The solution from Tetlock, express your opinion as a probability, is a solution to the problem in its group form. When people are in meetings making big decisions, a lot more than the big decisions is going on. Human power dynamics are taking place. Being right can play a very small role in these.
I think the author has a blindspot. "This is not how the human brain works" is one kind of challenge. "This is not how human groups work" is another. It isn't a derivative of the first.
[+] [-] jt2190|5 years ago|reply
The definition is not about arguing with others (so there’s no “looser”), it’s about arguing with yourself to avoid being wedded to poorly thought out points of view. From the article (emphasis mine):
> Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then – and this is the “weakly held” part – prove yourself wrong.
[+] [-] austincheney|5 years ago|reply
This is visually explained when thinking about the difference between success and capability and then viewing that difference on a graph, such as a bell curve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768137
[+] [-] ouid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambdatronics|5 years ago|reply
On the flip side, it's also about trusting your own reasoning above the crowd -- you are thus able to pick up the $20 bill on the ground instead of being sure it's fake b/c nobody else has picked it up already.
[+] [-] godelski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpdillon|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCBCk4xVa0
[+] [-] redelbee|5 years ago|reply
Why not both? After all, deciding “how much to bet” is probably one kind of fairly strong opinion. It’s at least strong enough to bet on. Betting strategy changes as information changes, so maybe you could construe that bet (or strong opinion) as being loosely held.
I agree that pithy phrases shouldn’t be used to justify “strongly held bad opinions” but how are we even deciding what a “bad” opinion looks like?
In the end we probably all want to come to the most correct conclusions and be willing to change when presented with new information. How we get there probably doesn’t matter as much as a majority deciding it’s worth the time and effort to do so in the first place.
[+] [-] kashyapc|5 years ago|reply
The Stoics have this notion of 'impression' and 'assent'. It goes like this: An impression of walking strikes you. But only after you told yourself "yes, it is fitting for me to walk", thus giving your 'assent' (agreement) to it, will you actually go for a walk. Of course, we know that we don't actually verbalize like that; as it all happens too quickly. Their goal here is to not evade responsibility to shape ones own judgements, opinions, and even emotions "in accordance with reason".
Thus, the Greek philosopher Epictetus' favourite way of describing the Stoic project is: "making correct use of mental impressions".
The same technique of impression/assent is also used, along with others, to diagnose "passions" (Greek, páthos—it's a loaded word that is used to categorize many emotions, including the debilitating ones). Thus, for the Stoics, the cause of any "passion" is an "error of judgement". What sort of error? Mistaken system of values—there's a ton more to this, but I have to skip it for brevity's sake. FWIW, some reading recommendations on this topic on a thread here[1].[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990579
[+] [-] gav|5 years ago|reply
If faced with such a wide open question you could do some research and start asking all the questions you think of, but you're then just hoping to narrow in on something by luck. The "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" method works well here, if within the first week you can learn enough to form some opinions, you now have some ideas to test against and disprove. You can start to decide on what information is important and what isn't important, rather than trying to gather all the possible information and synthesize it later on.
If you have an opinion such as "you should formulate a strategy to sell direct to the consumer instead of relying on distribution alone" you have a starting point and have narrowed things down from "how do we sell more things?". You might not have one opinion, you might have five. It takes experience to come up with opinions quickly when faced with limited data and potentially a large problem space.
It's hypothesis-driven decision making. It does require both iteration and the willingness to let your original opinions go--kill your darlings.
[+] [-] yodon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowfox|5 years ago|reply
Interestingly there is some evidence that this might lead to anchoring bias related issues. I am not sure what we can do to improve the situation, however.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
More generally, “strong opinions weakly held” is often a useful default perspective to adopt in the face of any issue fraught with high levels of uncertainty, whether one is venturing a forecast or not. Try it at a cocktail party the next time a controversial topic comes up; it is an elegant way to discover new insights — and duck that tedious bore who loudly knows nothing but won’t change their mind!
I think the original intent of "strong opinion" is make a decisive conclusion without hemming and hawing. In other words, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, say "Well, I believe it's a duck" but allow for the possibility that you are wrong and be willing to admit that if evidence comes forth showing you are wrong.
I don't operate that way. I have a high tolerance for ambiguity and I am more comfortable with the answer "I don't know" than most people seem to be. Most people seem to have a tremendous need to categorize things and I think this is useful for such people: Go ahead, categorize it. Just don't be overly committed to categorizing it. Be willing to change your mind about it.
Most people fail at the "Be willing to change your mind about it" part.
Most people seem to use this phrase not as a rule of thumb for how to think their way through something -- which can take work and it helps if you go ahead and deal with whatever is in front of you and then take the next step -- but simply to deflect fightiness in online forums.
I'm happy to debate with people, but a lot of argumentation on the internet isn't really intellectual debate trying to tease out the merits of an idea. It gets personal. It gets ugly. It is actually fighting, not debating, and we call both "argument" and do a poor job of distinguishing the two things.
So I have seen this phrase, but it was consistently used to basically say "Don't @ me!" In other words, "I want to go ahead and speak my mind in public to satisfy some need of mine, but I don't really want to deal with other people not agreeing and all that. I just want to say a thing and that's it."
I think the original idea has some merit -- go ahead and state firmly what you think it is but be willing to change your mind -- but that's not what most people seem to use the phrase to mean. Not at all. And what it has come to mean is pretty lame.
[+] [-] GlennS|5 years ago|reply
Don't know if that's the real origin though.
Edit: I should've read the article first. The actual original is much less tiresome.
[+] [-] recursivedoubts|5 years ago|reply
Won't sell me any books, but it's been my experience.
[+] [-] perl4ever|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrkel|5 years ago|reply
So, strong opinions: decisively go down one road; weakly held: turn around if information suggests it looks like the wrong road.
You can only update your opinions if you engage with reality, which demands a certain conviction in those opinions.
[+] [-] s3cur3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NhanH|5 years ago|reply
Your interpretation sounds very much more similar to "weak opinions, weakly held" to my ear.
[+] [-] patcon|5 years ago|reply
Tools that cultivate more position-taking of this sort, that's what I firmly believe is part of healing the world we've thoughtlessly created through digital mediation of everything.
[+] [-] raz32dust|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m12k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ZephyrBlu|5 years ago|reply
I 100% agree when interacting with other people, but I think it's still valuable for your personal growth if you're intellectually honest with yourself.
"How much are you willing to bet on that?" is definitely a smart question to ask other people though.
[+] [-] owenversteeg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtiansimon|5 years ago|reply
Framework? That’s just silly. It’s a turn of phrase that helps you change your attitude or approach a problem from a new direction.
“If at first you don’t succeed...” I suck. I’m never going to try again! Haha.
I didn’t know the origin of the phrase, and that’s a testament to its creativity.
As a life long learner, I found it useful in ways not related to the origin story. It helps me to overcome imposter syndrome.
I know a little bit about a lot of things, and a lot about a very few things. And I love solving problems with design thinking. Go for it. Feel confident about your knowledge if you have done the work, but know there are others who know more.
All that gets nicely summarized by Strong opinions, weakly held.
[+] [-] zbentley|5 years ago|reply
While you're welcome to interpret it however you wish, one of the main points of the article is that it is a methodological framework laid out by Paul Saffo[1], but that most people ignore the framework and focus on the catchphrase.
1. https://www.saffo.com/02008/07/26/strong-opinions-weakly-hel...
[+] [-] notacoward|5 years ago|reply
For the specific subset of people in tech, I don't believe this is true. How many times have you and someone else had a strong disagreement about the cause of a bug or design of a system, conclusively determined that one answer is correct, and then had the other person come back (usually after a small delay) acting as though they'd agreed with you all along? I've been seeing this for over thirty years. Half the time, the other person even tries to claim they came up with the idea on their own and everyone else was slow to pick it up. Same thing is frequently evident right here. It's easy for some people to switch from one strong opinion to another, and the popularity of "strong opinions weakly held" makes it even easier.
I also think that SOWH is behind a lot of cargo culting and conspiracy theories. People want to get credit for being the champion of an idea, even if they don't fully understand it or it has low odds of being correct, and the appeal increases with the challenge of convincing others. After all, if they're wrong they can just switch sides and claim they'd been on the right side all along. If they're right, it's an epic victory (in their own minds at least).
Strength of belief is not inherently virtuous. It should be proportional to strength of evidence, not armor worn for the sake of a silly maxim. Strong belief in SOWH itself is an example of faith over empiricism.
[+] [-] tomaskafka|5 years ago|reply
Switching Python to eg. Node is easy as long as I don't see myself as "the Python guy".
[+] [-] DarkWiiPlayer|5 years ago|reply
The reality of human perception is that we never have absolute knowledge and can only operate on a framework of assumptions; when two possible assumptions are mutually exclusive, we often pick the most likely candidate and focus on that scenario.
This seems to be a reasonable methodology throughout most of human evolution, where decisions more often needed to be immediate.
In a modern world though, it seems like a way more helpful mental model is a superposition of scenarios and adequate responses to any of them; in conclusion, the only reasonably principle on which to make decisions would be maximizing the probability of being adequately prepared for the outcome of a situation, which can be simplified as "Be prepared for as many likely outcomes as possible", or, more correctly, act in such a way that maximises the sum of the probabilities of all the outcomes you are adequately prepared for.
EDIT: I probably should have read the entire article before writing all that; just one paragraph after where I had stopped the author actually makes a very similar point.
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
What would be an example of a weak opinion and a related strong opinion? Is this just the difference between “the 49ers will win most of their games this year” and “the 49ers will win the Super Bowl this year”?
If so, why is the latter preferred?
Edit: thanks for the downvote, perhaps you can help me understand what is meant by the term, or why you found my comment to be inappropriate?
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
Weak opinion: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start.
Strong opinion: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start.
Strongly held: I tested the battery and voltage and current are within good thresholds. I still believe what I believed before.
Weakly held: I tested the battery and voltage and current are within good thresholds. I have adjusted my belief about what I believed before.
WOSH: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as dead. I still cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start.
WOWH: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as dead. It could be the battery, maybe. Hard to say.
SOSH: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as functioning fine. It's definitely the battery, though.
SOWH: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as functioning fine. The reason why my car won't start is not my battery; I think it won't start because my starter motor is broken.
Downvotes occur for all sorts of reasons. Please don't introduce noise into the discussion. It's annoying to other readers for all sorts of reasons. I am often tempted to downvote anyone who complains about them.
[+] [-] jakeogh|5 years ago|reply
They hide behind the false idea that people are unable to evaluate evidence. They will chew it for us. As proof of this, they offer up endless anecdotes of others believing things that the viewer is really sure are either true or false. The most effective 'bias hacks' are easily shown to be false; all that matters is that the viewer believe that "other" people hold that opinion.
A real test is who is willing to discuss it without getting emotional and derailing. The side that needs insulation does that for a reason.
Gaming confirmation bias is perhaps the 2nd most effective tool used to manipulate mass psychology.
Propaganda and Manipulation: How mass media engineers and distorts our perceptions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfo5gPG72KM
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|5 years ago|reply
The "strong opinions" part for me means hiring someone who not just has a lot of experience on some topic or technology, but they understand it at a very deep level. The strong opinions come from a place of perhaps having been burned hard by a particular technology or process (or, contrarily, loving a technology or tool for some reason), and being able to point out the 10 little details that turn out to be big issues in real-world usage.
The "loosely held" part to me means being able to trust that (a) you don't know everything in all situations and (b) most importantly you're willing to really listen to other people on the team and are open to the idea that you may be wrong.
[+] [-] jonahbenton|5 years ago|reply
It is only effective in the context of a closed small trusting group making decisions.
One needs to make decisions, often with laughably insufficient information. So make one and watch carefully and be able to reverse if evidence tells you differently. Only works if you already have a strong trust culture and relatively equal power.
Using that policy as a leader of a larger group with a necessarily weaker trust culture and unequal power fails terribly because it comes across as capricious, and irresponsible.
[+] [-] lambdatronics|5 years ago|reply
1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore, this must be done.
[+] [-] dgreensp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jermier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|5 years ago|reply
That's probably fine somewhere like HN, but I'd warn people against doing it too much IRL. I have an ex-friend who liked to play the "you just need to" game as a primary learning technique. I say ex-friend because I got tired of the initial implication that his few minutes' of thought could overturn lessons it might have taken me years to learn, until I did the labor of educating him. Maybe some of that was a "me thing" except that he has several other ex-friends for the same reason. I have other still-friends who are a bit less extreme about it, but it's generally not a relationship-positive behavior.
[+] [-] gklefnbkon|5 years ago|reply
I don't think there's anything wrong with qualifying your opinions. You can still get people to challenge you on them. Isn't that why people start their sentences with "for sake of argument" or "playing devils advocate"?
[+] [-] eska|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dangeranger|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chillacy|5 years ago|reply
> Saffo’s original idea is so quotable it has turned into a memetic phenomenon... ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ turns into ‘Strong Opinions, Justified Loudly, Until Evidence Indicates Otherwise, At Which Point You Invoke It To Protect Your Ass.’
[+] [-] bena|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|5 years ago|reply
I have questions that I've thought about for years, and some tentative hypotheses to go with them.
Inspired by: http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-parkhttp://k...
[+] [-] xref|5 years ago|reply
If you asked me a couple years later “why the hell did you chose that?!” I probably couldn’t give you many details that formed my opinion originally and couldn’t vociferously defend it by arguing minutiae of spec sheets. But I do know if you want to sell me on something new its gotta beat that baseline tool, not whatever opinions I might have had at the time of choosing.
[+] [-] heisenbit|5 years ago|reply
> Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then – and this is the “weakly held” part – prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction. Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again. You will be surprised by how quickly the sequence of faulty forecasts will deliver you to a useful result.
The author of the blog post however finds failure with it for guiding investments gradually, it failing when new information is discovered along the way. But that isn‘t the purpose, to guide one in small day to day adjustments. The purpose is to explore a not well known landscape for strategic decision making. To gather enough solid non trivial insight to make a well founded strategic decision. There are better tools for operational management once one has committed to a direction.
Strong opinions help me often to escape analysis paralysis. It also helps me to surface my premature judgements and transcend them.