121–130 of 175 posts
All new data should change opinions, even if it's a small piece of data that affects your opinion only on the margins, it is still a change toward an opinion that will better map onto reality.
> this is not how the human brain works 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 hone…
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 p…
Except expressing it in a probability form doesn't remove the group dynamics problem but rather makes it worse I feel. Or rather you're back to square one and gain little. The probability is no longer your confidence but the number you need to give to satisfy group dynamics. Not too high or you may be punished if the view turns out wrong. Also not one that disagrees with the people in charge too much. The original approach implicitly argues that without power dynamics you make better decisions.
To answer the question of "when should you change your opinion?": All new data should change opinions, even if it's a small piece of data that affects your opinion only on the margins, it is still a change toward an opinion that will better map onto reality.
> this is not how the human brain works 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 hone…
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 p…
*look at how many people consider Trump's election impossible when the odds clearly indicated he had a non-negligible chance of success.
> this is not how the human brain works 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 hone…
(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.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Honestly I DON'T trust my own reasoning. I have this and it's a real problem for software development because everyone expects a senior to be gung-ho about their solutions and perfectly confident. Whereas I'm always asking for second and third opinions about things and people (largely management but occasionally other developers) view that negatively.
I think this might be due to a difference in optics. What you see as 'asking for a second or third opinion' might be seen by others as lack of independence, leadership and ownership. Mostly everywhere senior developers are expected to self-manage and make difficult decisions on their own, unprompted, and just present working solutions to the business. It's okay to take time on this - solving it on your own, consultin…
Context matters here too, if you know Alice and Bob on Team [X] are just great at crypto or DB work or whatever, then getting their feedback before implementing a feature might make sense / be a standard due-diligence thing.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
Probability really doesn't help in a group context. In most cases you are pulling a number out of your ass, people don't have intuitive understanding of probability* , and it implies a level of certainty in the likelihood of an outcome that doesn't exist (which leads to bad decisions because you are building on a faulty basis). *look at how many people consider Trump's election impossible when the odds clearly indica…
A good example would be the early attitudes to face masking from the governments, medical experts, and media of certain countries. Some recognition and consideration of the deep experience and expertise of medical experts in Asia countries where SARS occured could surely have saved many lives.
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.
What is this in your first sentence? The technique that is being criticized as wrong here? That's not what this article is introducing.
Sometimes stating an opinion is making the unconscious, conscious, and then learning the truth about a subject by the insights and replies of others.
In other words, I'm shooting in the dark most of the time on HN and waiting to hit a target, or some truth I can salvage from the replies of others.