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

It is to trust your own reasoning, not information or ideas. Reasoning is a process.

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.

That sounds more like a hypothesis than an opinion.

In the less testable world of opinions (over, say, business strategy) it isn't always possible to settle things by experiment, making it more difficult to let those opinions go.

And I don't mean, deliberately make incorrect decisions, I mean, allow yourself to have made a mistake.

Some people get the reputation that they act like they know everything. You can even see some of those accusations creep up in various threads on this topic.

There are two major types of people who get that reputation. People who will never admit they're wrong and people who will admit they're wrong so fast, you don't even notice they've changed their stance.

The first type of people think the second type is just doing what they're doing. But no, the second type is more than willing to be wrong. They know that it's going to happen. It goes back to Socrates, knowing you know nothing. Accepting that your knowledge is incomplete. There are no stakes for being wrong if you don't put them up. The second type are also the type to not worry about laying blame about who is wrong. They just want to correct the mistake.

Be more concerned about what is wrong rather than who is wrong.

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.