91–100 of 175 posts
It unfortunately doesn't work because people in general don't get that knowledge progresses and what may previously been considered a truth, no longer is - and that should be how it works because we learn and grow as a civilisation.[1] But it's not - people don't accept that what they were told previously is no longer correct. A good example is the current arguments around mask wearing. By originally saying don't wea…
> ...make a tentative forecast based on the information available, and then systematically tear it apart, using the insights gained to guide my search for further indicators and information... This is literally the scientific method. Come up with a falsifiable premise, then attempt to falsify it. Arguing that science is hard is pretty irrelevant. Most of the failings present in this article are really just evidence o…
As I see it, if the method is wrong because people don't use it correctly then don't throw out the method, update it to be more usable. Which is exactly the systematic tearing apart and rebuilding process that the author actually is engaging in himself. Adversaries to an idea is a good thing.
In simpler terms, ‘strong opinions, weakly held’ sometimes becomes a license to hold on to a bad opinion strongly, with downside protection, against the spirit and intent of Saffo’s original framework.
Beliefs are very hard to change as the human brain has a perception bias in favour of currently held believes. Data driven goals are a much more objective way to test your beliefs and drive business decisions.
The article is spot on. As humans it is incredibly difficult to avoid being committed to your decision, a big problem for 'strong opinions, weakly held'. I think Elon's advice is much better and I try to exercise it regularly: "Assume you are wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong."
How's that going with Elon's pronouncements on Covid-19? I only saw lots of him assuming he was right against clearly better informed medical opinion.
CDC Influenza and pneumonia deaths by influenza season and age: United States, 2008–2015: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/health_policy/influenza-and-pn... (these are not estimates, see the footnote)
2015-2016
Flu: 7,961
Pneumonia: 131,858
All: 1,769,940> 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 have found that in software that is wrong. If you want to succeed in software you need to do what is most popular which largely follows innate human behavior. Unlike many other professions there is no licensing, accredidation, or common ethic which means there is no standard baseline of competence. This is visually explained when thinking about the difference between success and capability and then viewing that dif…
There's roughly two ways to follow trends "successfully" in the software world:
1. Eager and somewhat blind.
This fits with your comment and follows the kind of innate behaviour we're discussing. And it will bring you some success: you'll always be up on "cool new thing" as long as you're afforded the freedom to jump from project to project and don't fall into a rut where you're tasked with maintaining the last crappy "cool new thing" you championed that noone wants anymore.
2. Pragmatic skepticism.
You look at network effect and community support as rational, technical pros when weighing tech choices. You're successful because, while you're usually up on "cool new thing", you approach tech tentatively enough not to fall into the vendor lock-in hole. If you're ever tasked with maintaining some old thing you made, you're less screwed as you never jumped with both feet.
Of the above two, the first is a much more common success story, largely because the software community loves reinventing the wheel, so most engineers don't fall into that particular maintenance rut. There's no moral hazard with approach number #1, but I still wouldn't go as far as to say it's the right way.
My take on "strong opinions, weakly held:" It's about combating your own confirmation bias by being willing to do the work of re-examining your conclusions in the light of new evidence. It's hard to do b/c we get emotionally invested, and also because once you make a conclusion an assumption, it becomes implicit & fades into the background -- so it's harder to question. On the flip side, it's also about trusting your…
Honestly I DON'T trust my own reasoning. I can do this adversarial process as described in this article on my own, but that's incomplete. People outside of me have information and ways to view things that I don't. Others work as a discriminator and you update your opinions and views as more information comes in and challenges your own ideas. But it is because I don't trust my own reasoning that I read textbooks, seek…
You should trust your reasoning, that is, the deliberate process/method by which you arrive at conclusions, but you should be constantly seeking score your levels of uncertainty, and, yes, falsify your hypotheses and disprove your theories. Your reasoning, however, should be well trained, reliable, and trustworthy. We should have a high level of confidence in our methods/procedures.
> But it is because I don't trust my own reasoning that I read textbooks, seek out experts, and try to get as many views as possible, because no one has the complete picture.
Indeed, Annie Duke says: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/annie-duke/:
“ [T]hat core thing of: are you good at thinking probabilistically is a bigger thing than you think.
And then on top of that, you have to be somebody who’s really interested in understanding when the things you believe are inaccurate. And you have to be so incredibly hungry to collide with corrective information. You have to be openminded to the corrective information.
You have to be updating your beliefs constantly, and I think that you just have to be willing to have less endowment to your own beliefs and hold those really loosely because you have to keep this end goal in mind. I’m not trying to win this hand. I mean, I am, but I understand that there’s all sorts of things that might intervene in my ability to do that. I’m trying to win in the long run.
And the worst thing that I could find out is that I believed something was true and held onto that belief too long, so it affected my bottom line. You just have to be thinking that way all the time. And then you have to be willing to try to solve for it. ”
More generally, “strong opinions weakly held” is
often a useful default perspective to adopt [...]
Try it at a cocktail party the next time a
controversial topic comes up
"[Technology X] is the worst thing ever and people who use it are setting the industry back by ten years. Prove me wrong!"
Don't be that guy.
The guy who's even worse than a regular blowhard: the blowhard that doesn't even necessarily believe what he's saying; he's just trying to stir up debate.
The social equivalent of a message board troll, essentially.
If you want to incorporate "strong opinions, weakly held" into your own internal decision-making and opinion-forming process, cool. Not a bad way to go. It's also appropriate in many contexts with others - ie spitballing sessions where everybody is tossing out possible solutions to a problem they're tying to solve or hell, maybe a drinking session with friends where you're all three or four drinks deep and shooting the shit, being silly.
But at "cocktail parties" or other casual social situations like hallway or lunch table conversations? Yeeesh. Don't be that person, where you obnoxiously dump your "strong opinions" onto others. A lot of people don't enjoy debate for debate's sake. (I actually tend to enjoy it - but many do not.)
To be honest this feels a bit to me like saying that cryptography doesn't work that well because it's difficult. The article itself even has examples of people for which it has worked well (eg Steve Jobs).
I recognize the argument that there's people who don't realize that they're bad at and still quote the "strongly opinions, weakly held" idea, but that means it's misused, not that it doesn't work well.
Again, the crypto analogy holds up. We all know some examples of crypto rolled by people who didn't realize it was too difficult for them. But that doesn't mean crypto doesn't work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, when faced with a fork in the road, it's important to choose. Often it doesn't matter which - but if you vacillate, and especially if you are leading - then you can fail by not choosing. So, strong opinions: decisively go down one road; weakly held: turn around if information suggests it looks like the wrong road. You can only update your opinions if you engage with reality, which demands a certain…
> On the other hand, when faced with a fork in the road, it's important to choose. Often it doesn't matter which - but if you vacillate, and especially if you are leading - then you can fail by not choosing. The number of times people think they are at such a fork where non-action is worse than any action is an order of magnitude more than in reality. In my experience, most of these cases are reflective of a social i…
I think it's a lot more common than you think it is - especially because not choosing does not simply mean not taking action, it means lacking focus.
A strong opinion will at least put all the wood behind one arrow, focus in an area. It might not work; deciding when to change tack is where the judgment is, but at least there ought to be some solid feedback to work with.