‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well

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.

The author has apparently never met a Trump supporter.

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.

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