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

I was unaware of the origin story for this phrase. I've mostly seen it used to duck actually arguing with people, a la this paragraph:

More generally, “strong opinions weakly held” is often a useful default perspective to adopt in the face of any issue fraught with high levels of uncertainty, whether one is venturing a forecast or not. Try it at a cocktail party the next time a controversial topic comes up; it is an elegant way to discover new insights — and duck that tedious bore who loudly knows nothing but won’t change their mind!

I think the original intent of "strong opinion" is make a decisive conclusion without hemming and hawing. In other words, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, say "Well, I believe it's a duck" but allow for the possibility that you are wrong and be willing to admit that if evidence comes forth showing you are wrong.

I don't operate that way. I have a high tolerance for ambiguity and I am more comfortable with the answer "I don't know" than most people seem to be. Most people seem to have a tremendous need to categorize things and I think this is useful for such people: Go ahead, categorize it. Just don't be overly committed to categorizing it. Be willing to change your mind about it.

Most people fail at the "Be willing to change your mind about it" part.

Most people seem to use this phrase not as a rule of thumb for how to think their way through something -- which can take work and it helps if you go ahead and deal with whatever is in front of you and then take the next step -- but simply to deflect fightiness in online forums.

I'm happy to debate with people, but a lot of argumentation on the internet isn't really intellectual debate trying to tease out the merits of an idea. It gets personal. It gets ugly. It is actually fighting, not debating, and we call both "argument" and do a poor job of distinguishing the two things.

So I have seen this phrase, but it was consistently used to basically say "Don't @ me!" In other words, "I want to go ahead and speak my mind in public to satisfy some need of mine, but I don't really want to deal with other people not agreeing and all that. I just want to say a thing and that's it."

I think the original idea has some merit -- go ahead and state firmly what you think it is but be willing to change your mind -- but that's not what most people seem to use the phrase to mean. Not at all. And what it has come to mean is pretty lame.

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.

TL;DR: Strong opinions, weakly held doesn't work because of Anchoring Bias[1].

Obviously if you fall prey to anchoring bias, you're doing the "weakly held" part wrong, but I think that almost everybody does this wrong, even people who know about anchoring bias and do their best to guard against it. I've known about anchoring bias for maybe a decade, recognized it in my own beliefs, taken steps to attempt to address it (i.e. meditation and reading opposing opinions to my own) and while I'll give myself the credit that maybe I'm a bit better than an average person at changing my own beliefs now, I'm still objectively very bad at it, frequently coming across places where it's clear looking back that I was wrong for years due to anchoring bias. It's much easier, I think, to permeate everything in my own belief system with a fundamental level of doubt, and only form really strong opinions with overwhelming evidence. But even that is only somewhat effective. Anchoring bias is a pretty powerful foe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)

I think a better headline for the post would have ended with “... doesn’t work that well for me.” The author tried the “strongly held” strategy, found it difficult, and decided to justify another strategy of asking “how much are you willing to bet on that?” instead.

Why not both? After all, deciding “how much to bet” is probably one kind of fairly strong opinion. It’s at least strong enough to bet on. Betting strategy changes as information changes, so maybe you could construe that bet (or strong opinion) as being loosely held.

I agree that pithy phrases shouldn’t be used to justify “strongly held bad opinions” but how are we even deciding what a “bad” opinion looks like?

In the end we probably all want to come to the most correct conclusions and be willing to change when presented with new information. How we get there probably doesn’t matter as much as a majority deciding it’s worth the time and effort to do so in the first place.

The first time I saw this phrase was in some sort of "qualities of an effective leader" type article, but targeted at techies.

Don't know if that's the real origin though.

Edit: I should've read the article first. The actual original is much less tiresome.