This viewpoint leads to blog posts like "Why you MUST do X to be a good engineer (2015)", and then "Why I was wrong to say you MUST do X to be a good engineer (2019)"
‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
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Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
#12I prefer "weak opinions, strongly held", as in, "I don't know. And I am pretty sure you don't either." Won't sell me any books, but it's been my experience.
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.
I have seen "I don't know. And I am pretty sure you don't either," effectively used to end pro-creationism arguments.
Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
#13I prefer "weak opinions, strongly held", as in, "I don't know. And I am pretty sure you don't either." Won't sell me any books, but it's been my experience.
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.
I have lately had a converse experience, where my superiors expect me to have strong opinions about things that are not even half-baked. Or rather, they ask me about it and even if I hedge and say "I'm not sure but..." they interpret it as gospel and move forward with laden expectations.
Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
#14I think it's difficult to approach a problem with a Depth-first Search mentality without using "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held". If one goes in with "weak opinions" it's easy to find oneself constantly backtracking and checking the other nodes early on in the chain of assumptions and doing a mental Breadth-first Search instead.
That's not to say that it's the right approach for every situation, but for problems that will have a lot of dependent unresolved assumptions "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" is sometimes necessary to maintain focus to break through the problem.
Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
#15It'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.
Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
#16There'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.
Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
#17Ultimately, truth-seeking is a personal thing and you should tune your methods to the machine that is you.
tl;dr SOWH is good. Don't claim it for yourself. Sloppy Priors are good. Be careful of not adjusting on evidence. The bet trick is very good. Be careful about your utility function.
Personally, among the people I know the following doesn't happen:
> In such cases, the failure mode is that ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ turns into ‘Strong Opinions, Justified Loudly, Until Evidence Indicates Otherwise, At Which Point You Invoke It To Protect Your Ass.”
And that is mostly because it's really easy to claim you're operating in SOWH and really hard to determine if you actually are. So most truth-seekers apply the same techniques of epistemology to it as they do to other things that require auto-evaluation with no objective truth set: you trust weighted external input more than your own. Am I charismatic? Am I intelligent? Am I whiny? It is hard for me to say. It is far easier for me to find that out from people I can identify as trusted on the subject.
I remain convinced that operating in SOWH is empowerment (at a 80% certainty har-har). I believe that the Bet Trick and the Sloppy Prior Trick are both clever techniques to improve your search for truth as well.
The Bet Trick is very good. My personal danger is that I do not apply linear utility (i.e. an unlikely win makes me much happier than a string of losses). So if I predicted that the US would be open by August and I'm right that makes me way happier than if I predict repeatedly that median summer temperature is greater than median winter temperature in Saskatoon. I'm okay losing $200 repeatedly on the former for the win.
The Sloppy Prior also has the trick that it allows you to examine your reaction to evidence. Your Sloppy Posterior to the weakest of evidence must be different from your Sloppy Prior! If it isn't, your cognition is currently failing you. The only problem is that the sloppiness gives you room to avoid having different posteriors.
That last part I find very hard in almost-certain and almost-never situations: if a set of instrument measurements show that temperatures across the Earth are the same as they were 40 years ago, then it's highly likely that the measurements are broken, but it is not certain, so my posteriors for AGW given that evidence should drop. But they don't unless I am conscious of this.
Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
#18the truth is probably more nuanced
objectively considering information is further than most people ever get. most people are just out here trying to win arguments
so let's assume you're open minded
you could weave components of this new info into what you already know, and discard the rest
but what do you keep?
does the most convincing empiricism trump everything? are personal values involved?
that's up to you
Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
#19I prefer "weak opinions, strongly held", as in, "I don't know. And I am pretty sure you don't either." Won't sell me any books, but it's been my experience.
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.
Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
#20I 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.
Inspired by: http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-parkhttp://k...