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

commoncog.com

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

#161

Post by zbentley »

austincheney wrote: post #149
zbentley wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to succeed in software you need to do what is most popular which largely follows innate human behavior I totally disagree. Many of the most valuable, respected, and successful software engineers I've encountered have evinced deep distrust of what is currently popular in the field. Their avoidance of (and advocacy for continued avoidance of) new/trendy software fads, particularly on the frontend, enabled…

> Their avoidance of (and advocacy for continued avoidance of) new/trendy software fads, particularly on the frontend, enabled excellent engineering I absolutely agree with that. You are describing an expert, which is not likely somebody successful or respected, particularly with regard to their front-end web technology peers. Expertise is not frequently revered by other developers, particularly when compared with co…

Maybe I've just been lucky with where I've worked, but I've often seen those people get significantly rewarded for their anti-fad efforts--both in terms of money/promotions and respect from their colleagues.

I've seen the opposite too, but not as often.

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

#162

Post by chillacy »

Dangeranger wrote: post #30

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.

I like how the author put it:

> 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.’

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

#163

Post by chillacy »

scott_s wrote: post #125
jrockway wrote: post #77

> 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…

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:…

To go further, the Author also suggests an alternate technique along the lines of Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets and Superforecasting where probabilities are assigned to estimates. I had previously encountered such practice in Scott Alexander's blog and thought it clever: have skin in the game and keeping track of wins and losses.

This whole section of the author's blog is very interesting. It goes into the US Intelligence Community's interest in superforecasters and the Good Judgement Project, a kind of elite tournament of forecasters. It talks about how superforecasters estimate by overcoming cognitive biases and questioning assumptions. And then it ultimately points out though that there are limits to forecasting and low probability events do occur all the time.

https://commoncog.com/blog/the-forecasting-series/

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

#164

Post by austincheney »

fapjacks wrote: post #113
atq2119 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent poster clearly meant licensing in the sense of accreditation for the people involved. I.e. there is no formal barrier to entry, which is great on the one hand, but it also means that there are pretty unqualified developers out there.

Anybody who's done hiring will attest that "formal barriers to entry" (i.e. accreditation via certifications and degrees) say very little about a programmer's ability to produce valuable output. Hiring would not be "the big problem" in tech if one could simply outsource the hiring decision to such a formal barrier to entry. But, since formal barriers to entry are demonstrably useless signals specifically for hiring p…

> But, since formal barriers to entry are demonstrably useless

Could you provide an example of such a barrier? Bar exams and medical review are extremely valuable to other industries. They demonstrate both competence and ethics.

Since software is utterly lacking anything resembling a formal qualification barrier it’s hard to say a thing isn’t valuable. It doesn’t make sense to disqualify something that was never there in the first place.

Industry ethical standards are also hard to disqualify because they similarly don’t exist. To someone who has never met such a burden for any professional industry it’s an easy thing to deem as worthless. In other industries compliance to ethical standards are more important than perceptions of competence.

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

#165

Post by austincheney »

zbentley wrote: post #161
austincheney wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their avoidance of (and advocacy for continued avoidance of) new/trendy software fads, particularly on the frontend, enabled excellent engineering I absolutely agree with that. You are describing an expert, which is not likely somebody successful or respected, particularly with regard to their front-end web technology peers. Expertise is not frequently revered by other developers, particularly when compared with co…

Maybe I've just been lucky with where I've worked, but I've often seen those people get significantly rewarded for their anti-fad efforts--both in terms of money/promotions and respect from their colleagues. I've seen the opposite too, but not as often.

A complete disdain for jQuery is what allowed me, as a full time JavaScript developer, to become promoted to a senior and nearly double my salary. That is only because I was working, at the time, in a niche area where jQuery failed amazingly in production. I was deemed an expert and rewarded for it, but that is astonishingly rare. Now you cannot get hired, much less attain any kind of success, without something like Angular or React even you can write superior code without those in half the time. That is why I only look for jobs that primarily deal with writing for Node, but even still competence is not well appreciated when interviewing.

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

#166

Post by ouid »

jrockway wrote: post #77

> 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…

A lot of people have replied to this, but in what way is a brain a neural network trained on old data? That does not make any sense at all.

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

#167

Post by aspenmayer »

ouid wrote: post #166
jrockway wrote: post #77

> 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…

A lot of people have replied to this, but in what way is a brain a neural network trained on old data? That does not make any sense at all.

You inherited the DNA which built your brain from your parents. I believe they refer to the historical conditions which created selection pressures for your parents’ ancestors to survive rather than fail to live long enough to reproduce.

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

#168

Post by ouid »

aspenmayer wrote: post #167
ouid wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people have replied to this, but in what way is a brain a neural network trained on old data? That does not make any sense at all.

You inherited the DNA which built your brain from your parents. I believe they refer to the historical conditions which created selection pressures for your parents’ ancestors to survive rather than fail to live long enough to reproduce.

DNA is not a neural network, (and neither is a brain, for that matter). The comment is still decidedly nonsensical.

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

#169

Post by dwd »

jakeogh wrote: post #160
dwd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In places like Japan you are expected to wear a mask if you're sick, so there's no reason that shouldn't become standard in the West. More important could be that workplaces require staff to either stay home and not infect the office when they have the flu, or wear a mask if they have to go in.

Nobody is suggestion people go to work when they are sick. That's not new to the West, odd to suggest it is. Fake masks: https://stpauls.vxcommunity.com/Issue/Us-Experiment-On-Infan...

If you're a casual employee and don't have any sort of paid sick leave you either turn up or forgo the money (and potential future work). There are also those who pride themselves on never taking sick leave and "soldiering on", but invariably infect their coworkers. Here's some survey stats:

http://www.nsf.org/newsroom_pdf/Flu_in_the_workplace_(final)...

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