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.
I have lately had a converse experience, where my superiors expect me to have strong opinions about things that are not even half-baked. Or rather, they ask me about it and even if I hedge and say "I'm not sure but..." they interpret it as gospel and move forward with laden expectations.
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 conviction in those opinions.
> 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 issue. The problem at hand doesn't require one make a decision any time soon, but if you don't, you are viewed negatively. So the social systems around you push you to make a decision even when one is not needed.
Almost every time I've heard someone use the phrase "fence-sitter" it is this scenario. At my work, we have surveys where we rank things on a 5 pt scale: 1 is strongly against, 5 is strongly in favor, and 3 is neutral. There's a significant block of people who keep pushing HR to make it a 4 point scale so there is no neutral option. I've had several discussions with them, and they've never been able to give me a good reason, beyond statements like "You have to have some opinion!" and some negative comment about fence sitters.
But yes, for certain things (e.g. investing for retirement), it's probably better to pick a safe option than not pick anything.
I've seen people with analysis paralysis at the lowest level of development, and I've seen opportunity-chasing in different directions of different market segments at the top of orgs - sometimes fence-sitting takes the shape of trying to go down both roads, rather than no roads.
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.
Being decisive has nothing to do with a strong opinion.
It does bring up one of my issues with these pop philosophies. So many people interpret them differently while claiming to have the exact same interpretation.
An analogy the original concept makes me think of, is how you can pour out some stuff like sand or flour, and it's hard to tell how much you have because it forms a mound. But if you shake it, it levels out. And if you're pouring onto a scale, shaking makes it pour more continually and lets you get the exact amount you want. In general, going back and forth seems like a way of reducing hysteresis, and that's what the "strong opinions weakly held" concept sounds like to me. The human tendency is to resist flip flopping to present an outward image of stability, so it's best to do constant internal flip-flopping without losing your place and letting people know. I haven't thought of the concept by the catchphrase/meme, but I have many times thought that whenever I see a claim, I need to reverse it in my mind and think about whether it's any more or less plausible to consider the opposite. To avoid the friction and path-dependence of an idea. People like to be contrarian and sometimes they appear to be smart people, who scoff at this sort of thing, reversing obvious statements. But I still think it's vital.
What is the practical implication of that? "Strong opinions, weakly held" means (IIUC) make a decision, but be open to changing it if data points to it being wrong. It helps avoid the trap of looking for perfect data to make a perfect decision. Can you provide a practical application of "weak opinions, strongly held"?
Tools that cultivate more position-taking of this sort, that's what I firmly believe is part of healing the world we've thoughtlessly created through digital mediation of everything.
There are another version of "weak opinions, strongly held", and unfortunately the version I encountered more: "I don't know why and I don't care, but I will do it my way and you can't change it".
Your interpretation sounds very much more similar to "weak opinions, weakly held" to my ear.
> In my experience, ‘strong opinions, weakly held’ is difficult to put into practice
I 100% agree when interacting with other people, but I think it's still valuable for your personal growth if you're intellectually honest with yourself.
"How much are you willing to bet on that?" is definitely a smart question to ask other people though.
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.
I've thought along these lines recently and I think a better formulation for clear communication of opinions is:
1) State a complete argument with premises, reasoning, and conclusion
2) State whether you believe the argument to be true
3) Check your stated reasoning to the point that you believe it to be logically valid
4) Check your stated premises to the point that you believe them to be true.
I believe that by sharing our premises and our reasoning, we are not only offering some humility, but we're also inviting respectful engagement. We express accountability by stating our beliefs. That way, if any of those are challenged, it means they're being challenged on the merits and it helps us update our own point of view.
By stating an argument in that manner, that can be compared to stating it "strongly", even if you are also welcoming input on the truth of your premises or the validity of your reasoning, which can be compared to "weakly held".
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.
On how do you tell apart a bad opinion from a good one, the ancient Stoics (lately I'm quoting them more, as I'm immersed in their writings) have some thoughts here. For the longer version, you have to read their works[1], but to give an extremely simplified version, without butchering the concept:
The Stoics have this notion of 'impression' and 'assent'. It goes like this: An impression of walking strikes you. But only after you told yourself "yes, it is fitting for me to walk", thus giving your 'assent' (agreement) to it, will you actually go for a walk. Of course, we know that we don't actually verbalize like that; as it all happens too quickly. Their goal here is to not evade responsibility to shape ones own judgements, opinions, and even emotions "in accordance with reason".
Thus, the Greek philosopher Epictetus' favourite way of describing the Stoic project is: "making correct use of mental impressions".
- - -
The same technique of impression/assent is also used, along with others, to diagnose "passions" (Greek, páthos—it's a loaded word that is used to categorize many emotions, including the debilitating ones). Thus, for the Stoics, the cause of any "passion" is an "error of judgement". What sort of error? Mistaken system of values—there's a ton more to this, but I have to skip it for brevity's sake. FWIW, some reading recommendations on this topic on a thread here[1].
I understand what “weakly held” means, but what does the “strong opinions” part mean? I couldn’t get this from the post.
What would be an example of a weak opinion and a related strong opinion? Is this just the difference between “the 49ers will win most of their games this year” and “the 49ers will win the Super Bowl this year”?
If so, why is the latter preferred?
Edit: thanks for the downvote, perhaps you can help me understand what is meant by the term, or why you found my comment to be inappropriate?
Weak opinion: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start.
Strong opinion: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start.
Strongly held: I tested the battery and voltage and current are within good thresholds. I still believe what I believed before.
Weakly held: I tested the battery and voltage and current are within good thresholds. I have adjusted my belief about what I believed before.
WOSH: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as dead. I still cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start.
WOWH: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as dead. It could be the battery, maybe. Hard to say.
SOSH: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as functioning fine. It's definitely the battery, though.
SOWH: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as functioning fine. The reason why my car won't start is not my battery; I think it won't start because my starter motor is broken.
Downvotes occur for all sorts of reasons. Please don't introduce noise into the discussion. It's annoying to other readers for all sorts of reasons. I am often tempted to downvote anyone who complains about them.
Thanks for the examples. Is it possible for a weak opinion to be something other than "IDK why X is happening"? That is, can it be an affirmative opinion about some causal relationship or future event?
Honestly, if someone asked me whether the WO example above was strong or weak, I would tend to say it is strong because it is a categorical statement. To me, a weak statement would be "I think my car won't start because there's either a battery problem or a starter engine problem or a wiring problem". That doesn't take a strong stand or eliminate many possibilities.
I think in the context of the original statement it was a heuristic for searching for truth, i.e. "to know, form hypotheses then subject them to falsification tests".
So yes, in the meaning of SOWH, all WO are ones that leave you unable to progress. Your reading of 'categorical implying strong' is reasonable, imho, in just the meaning of the word 'strong'. It's just not what I believe was the intended meaning in the statement of SOWH.
Interesting, so the SO part of SOWH just means "have opinions that can be validated"? That seems very weak, no pun intended. Would anyone go around advocating for people to have WO, using that definition? I guess if that's what it means, then SOWH is pretty vacuous.
Perhaps it's my background (law, economics, logic) but I assumed that "strong" referred to "the strong form" of an argument or hypothesis (such as the efficient market hypothesis). I never understood why someone would say it's better to embrace strong forms of arguments, since these tend to be more extreme (and IMO, things tend to be wrong more when they are taken to extremes).
Despite your belief that it is vacuous, WO is a pretty standard mode of operation for many. It usually manifests as "We just don't know enough. Let's collect more information." or "There's not enough to go on. Let's wait it out." etc.
i.e. unstructured search is more common than hypothesize-falsify despite the latter being established epistemology since early 1900s or before.
This viewpoint leads to blog posts like "Why you MUST do X to be a good engineer (2015)", and then "Why I was wrong to say you MUST do X to be a good engineer (2019)"
I think it's difficult to approach a problem with a Depth-first Search mentality without using "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held". If one goes in with "weak opinions" it's easy to find oneself constantly backtracking and checking the other nodes early on in the chain of assumptions and doing a mental Breadth-first Search instead.
That's not to say that it's the right approach for every situation, but for problems that will have a lot of dependent unresolved assumptions "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" is sometimes necessary to maintain focus to break through the problem.
It's terrible as a meme, and terrible as a culture guidepost for a big group.
It is only effective in the context of a closed small trusting group making decisions.
One needs to make decisions, often with laughably insufficient information. So make one and watch carefully and be able to reverse if evidence tells you differently. Only works if you already have a strong trust culture and relatively equal power.
Using that policy as a leader of a larger group with a necessarily weaker trust culture and unequal power fails terribly because it comes across as capricious, and irresponsible.
Oh my god, yes. You also have to take the input of the group as “evidence,” and acknowledge when you may not know much about something, but someone else does.
There's a type of exercise where you're not asked "I want to do $x, how do I achieve that?" but instead are asked "I don't know what to do, can you find out?" where the scope might be anywhere from "pick an new ERP" to "reorganise the entire worldwide operations to be a more effective at all things digital".
If faced with such a wide open question you could do some research and start asking all the questions you think of, but you're then just hoping to narrow in on something by luck. The "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" method works well here, if within the first week you can learn enough to form some opinions, you now have some ideas to test against and disprove. You can start to decide on what information is important and what isn't important, rather than trying to gather all the possible information and synthesize it later on.
If you have an opinion such as "you should formulate a strategy to sell direct to the consumer instead of relying on distribution alone" you have a starting point and have narrowed things down from "how do we sell more things?". You might not have one opinion, you might have five. It takes experience to come up with opinions quickly when faced with limited data and potentially a large problem space.
It's hypothesis-driven decision making. It does require both iteration and the willingness to let your original opinions go--kill your darlings.
> if within the first week you can learn enough to form some opinions, you now have some ideas to test against and disprove
Interestingly there is some evidence that this might lead to anchoring bias related issues. I am not sure what we can do to improve the situation, however.
Ultimately, truth-seeking is a personal thing and you should tune your methods to the machine that is you.
tl;dr SOWH is good. Don't claim it for yourself. Sloppy Priors are good. Be careful of not adjusting on evidence. The bet trick is very good. Be careful about your utility function.
Personally, among the people I know the following doesn't happen:
> In such cases, the failure mode is that ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ turns into ‘Strong Opinions, Justified Loudly, Until Evidence Indicates Otherwise, At Which Point You Invoke It To Protect Your Ass.”
And that is mostly because it's really easy to claim you're operating in SOWH and really hard to determine if you actually are. So most truth-seekers apply the same techniques of epistemology to it as they do to other things that require auto-evaluation with no objective truth set: you trust weighted external input more than your own. Am I charismatic? Am I intelligent? Am I whiny? It is hard for me to say. It is far easier for me to find that out from people I can identify as trusted on the subject.
I remain convinced that operating in SOWH is empowerment (at a 80% certainty har-har). I believe that the Bet Trick and the Sloppy Prior Trick are both clever techniques to improve your search for truth as well.
The Bet Trick is very good. My personal danger is that I do not apply linear utility (i.e. an unlikely win makes me much happier than a string of losses). So if I predicted that the US would be open by August and I'm right that makes me way happier than if I predict repeatedly that median summer temperature is greater than median winter temperature in Saskatoon. I'm okay losing $200 repeatedly on the former for the win.
The Sloppy Prior also has the trick that it allows you to examine your reaction to evidence. Your Sloppy Posterior to the weakest of evidence must be different from your Sloppy Prior! If it isn't, your cognition is currently failing you. The only problem is that the sloppiness gives you room to avoid having different posteriors.
That last part I find very hard in almost-certain and almost-never situations: if a set of instrument measurements show that temperatures across the Earth are the same as they were 40 years ago, then it's highly likely that the measurements are broken, but it is not certain, so my posteriors for AGW given that evidence should drop. But they don't unless I am conscious of this.
I think an approach of collecting questions rather than answers works well. If you're really interested in a question then you should try to answer it, but be wary of accepting the first answer you see or think of.
I have questions that I've thought about for years, and some tentative hypotheses to go with them.
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 wear masks, that has stuck and a lot of people think either you lied originally or you don't know what you're talking about - ideas made worse by being promoted for political gain.
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.
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:
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."
While I want to believe this post, I also wonder how long they have been doing the new technique (did i miss them mentioning that?). I say it because I wonder if "percentage confidence" is now the hard part, where humans are terrible at estimating such things.
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.
> 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.’
> ...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 of not doing the second half. You should be looking for evidence that you're wrong, not evidence that you're right.
This is later borne out by the proposal of adding confidence intervals and dates by which assumptions should be robust against being disproven. You'll find this type of language on experimental design in lots of scientific fields.
This article is about someone's journey to rediscover the thing their source already knew (using scientific rigor can take a hypothesis into a theorem, and gradually bring you nearer an understanding of the underlying truth), and then call it something else because the original distillation of a theory into a soundbyte flew past them.
The article was strange because the author said the method doesn't work because people don't hold opinions weakly, i.e. don't update them upon new evidence. And then dives into trying to question what new evidence even means. I've never heard the phrase "Strong Opinions, held weakly" but during my education and work I've always been told "stick to your guns and be confident. You came to conclusions for a reason. But keep your mind open because you can never have the full picture."
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.
Yes! I think that science also demonstrates how Bayesianism, the author's proposed remedy, misses the point somewhat.
What probability do I put on my belief in quantum mechanics? Zero! It has to be wrong, because it doesn't account for gravity. On the other hand, I'd bet on it for every question it can answer.
Scientific theories are the strongest opinions of all. If you can imagine how the laws of physics, the antiquity of Earth, or natural selection could possibly be wrong, you don't understand them. But, historically, those theories replaced previous theories, which were strongly accepted in their day, and did turn out to be wrong.
There is no way that some theories could possibly be wrong, but it's almost certain that some of those theories are wrong. This is about a deeper type of uncertainty than probability can describe.
> For instance, Steve Jobs was famous for arguing against one position or another, only to decide that you were right, and then come back a month later holding exactly your opinion, as if it were his all along.
Unrelated to the larger theme of the post, but I absolutely hate it when people do this. I thought it sounded like a silly parable until I saw people do it in real life. At which point I concluded it was some kind of characteristic of narcissism.
To this type of person, an idea isn't good until it's theirs. They will trash your idea, and trash you. When your idea seems convenient they will take credit and fail to cite you as an influence. That's ok, one can suppose, if not for the next part. Likely they have forgotten you gave them that idea in order to help them. They still think you are trash. They will have no qualms trashing your next idea with personal attacks just like the last one.
I have this "theory" that one trait of successful people is forgetfulness. In my experience they tend to forget their mistakes and also forget the source of their successful ideas.
I tend to suffer from this, only in the _other_ dirrection, in that I forget when I give something or I add something or I help with something or I forget conflicts with people and slights reeal easy. My mistakes and failures, I remember vividly. Does that set me up for anti-success I wonder?
Honestly, as somebody who suffers from "strong opinions, weakly held" I make it a point to include names in my notes on design ideas of who first suggested something so when I pivot to "my old plan is stupid we need to go that way" I can say so-and-so's plan.
I'm someone who does that I believe. I don't see it as a bad thing. I'm not going to go and pretend it was my idea, it's just that I take a while to make up my idea of what's right, and I'll discuss edge cases and all kind of issues with others really thoroughly and strongly, I'll do that with many people, about the same thing. And then I'll kind of form my own opinion from that, which could be 90% of person's X, and 10% of person's Y, or any other combo, sometimes mixed in with some of mine as well, but not always, it's very possible I was the most wrong of all initially.
In practice, it means that when I commit behind an idea, I'm often right. But the ideas are not necessarily mine. And I don't care.
I wouldn't say it's narcissistic, for me, I feel it's actually the opposite. I don't care that I came up with it or you or who did, or even if multiple people contributed to it, I just care that it's the right idea, and once I'm confident that it is, I will strongly upheld it and hold it as my opinion. That's because I've already put it to the test by arguing against it in all possible ways, talking to many others about it, getting their opinions, their alternative ideas, etc.
It's not a bad thing if people are careful about giving credits. I have seen both extremes of that:
1) The type who does exactly what the OP said, treat people like trash and think when they commit to an idea, they are often right. When they change their opinion, they don't give credit either, since they want to maintain the image that they are often right. I have seen great teammates left due to those people. I would not want to work with those people either.
2) The second type also hold strong opinions. When they change their view, they attribute it to people who brought it up. They don't care about maintaining an image that they are "often right". They genuinely thanks the people who brought them good arguments that changes their strongly held opinions. It's not about who invented the idea. But they understand it's good to appreciate people from which you get the new idea. I love working with those people. I try to give proper credits to people when they show me new ideas.
And I don't think the worst part is failing to give credit necessarily. People legitimately forget things, and they independently come up with the same ideas. The problem is when it's wrapped in egotism and inability to see that the person who suggested it earlier did so with good intentions, and might be worth listening to in past, present and future.
I do this with software related things, but what I noticed is that I implement just enough of my own tweaks until I’m comfortable enough taking the credit for the whole idea. My defense when people call me out is to highlight my differences and understate the similarities, even going as far as to say without my features the idea was half baked from the start.
Why do I do it? I don’t know, a lot of developers do it. Just how we are I guess. Not Invented Here syndrome.
We have a client who is like this. It's intolerable, but also so predictable that we basically deal with it by just weaponizing it. We know that when we present information to him, we simply work towards building a message that he will take as his own eventually. Initially he'll crap all over the idea, but invariably will return a few weeks later with a "great idea" that will just be what we told him and then we'll basically get to do whatever we wanted to in the first place.
It requires some ego squelching but in the end we accomplish what we want and everybody ends up relatively happy. However, even after years of successes, this particular client still treats us like the hired help (which I suppose we are).
If the probability is just some made up number reflecting a hunch, it's no better at informing us to take an action or drop an opinion. It's just a way of talking about how weakly we are holding the opinion, and not the real deal from statistics.
The concept still provides no concrete framework for assigning the probability, and for taking action. E.g. do you abort the plan when the probability of success feels like it has dropped to 65%, or does it have to feel like 35%?
You just have to compute the expected value. Let's say we play a game where you have to invest $10.
If you have a 65% chance to win and winning means you get $2 on top of your $10, then abort the plan. The expected value is $12×65% = $7.80 which is less than your investment.
If you have a 35% chance to win and winning means you get $30 on top of your 10$, then continue. An expected value of $40×35% = $14 is worth it.
In reality, the tricky part is often to assign numbers (How much does it cost to switch to Rust? How much errors does the stricter type system catch?) but the framework is available.
Ok, also look up the Kelly criterion because you can go bankrupt even with a high expected value.
"Strong opinions, weakly held" makes sense in exactly one situation:
When you are definitely an expert in a topic you should have your strong opinions about it.
But since everybody is sometimes wrong about something, and that should be very seldom in the expert case, you should be able to let go of one of your opinions, in case you get counter-arguments.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadMore 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.
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.
Won't sell me any books, but it's been my experience.
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 conviction in those opinions.
But you can also fail by choosing wrong and sticking to that conviction too long.
I think the whole point is that how strong your opinion is and how strong you hold it are insufficient to know if you will fail or succeed.
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 issue. The problem at hand doesn't require one make a decision any time soon, but if you don't, you are viewed negatively. So the social systems around you push you to make a decision even when one is not needed.
Almost every time I've heard someone use the phrase "fence-sitter" it is this scenario. At my work, we have surveys where we rank things on a 5 pt scale: 1 is strongly against, 5 is strongly in favor, and 3 is neutral. There's a significant block of people who keep pushing HR to make it a 4 point scale so there is no neutral option. I've had several discussions with them, and they've never been able to give me a good reason, beyond statements like "You have to have some opinion!" and some negative comment about fence sitters.
But yes, for certain things (e.g. investing for retirement), it's probably better to pick a safe option than not pick anything.
People agitating for everyone to "voice their opinion now" are often looking to form a mandate from those opinions.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
Rather than seeming uncertain, one can seem certain that there's not enough data
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.
Is one dimension all that's needed? What about adding: how certain do you feel that your opinion is right
Like, severity + probability maybe?
It does bring up one of my issues with these pop philosophies. So many people interpret them differently while claiming to have the exact same interpretation.
Tools that cultivate more position-taking of this sort, that's what I firmly believe is part of healing the world we've thoughtlessly created through digital mediation of everything.
Your interpretation sounds very much more similar to "weak opinions, weakly held" to my ear.
I 100% agree when interacting with other people, but I think it's still valuable for your personal growth if you're intellectually honest with yourself.
"How much are you willing to bet on that?" is definitely a smart question to ask other people though.
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)
1) State a complete argument with premises, reasoning, and conclusion
2) State whether you believe the argument to be true
3) Check your stated reasoning to the point that you believe it to be logically valid
4) Check your stated premises to the point that you believe them to be true.
I believe that by sharing our premises and our reasoning, we are not only offering some humility, but we're also inviting respectful engagement. We express accountability by stating our beliefs. That way, if any of those are challenged, it means they're being challenged on the merits and it helps us update our own point of view.
By stating an argument in that manner, that can be compared to stating it "strongly", even if you are also welcoming input on the truth of your premises or the validity of your reasoning, which can be compared to "weakly held".
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 Stoics have this notion of 'impression' and 'assent'. It goes like this: An impression of walking strikes you. But only after you told yourself "yes, it is fitting for me to walk", thus giving your 'assent' (agreement) to it, will you actually go for a walk. Of course, we know that we don't actually verbalize like that; as it all happens too quickly. Their goal here is to not evade responsibility to shape ones own judgements, opinions, and even emotions "in accordance with reason".
Thus, the Greek philosopher Epictetus' favourite way of describing the Stoic project is: "making correct use of mental impressions".
The same technique of impression/assent is also used, along with others, to diagnose "passions" (Greek, páthos—it's a loaded word that is used to categorize many emotions, including the debilitating ones). Thus, for the Stoics, the cause of any "passion" is an "error of judgement". What sort of error? Mistaken system of values—there's a ton more to this, but I have to skip it for brevity's sake. FWIW, some reading recommendations on this topic on a thread here[1].[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990579
What would be an example of a weak opinion and a related strong opinion? Is this just the difference between “the 49ers will win most of their games this year” and “the 49ers will win the Super Bowl this year”?
If so, why is the latter preferred?
Edit: thanks for the downvote, perhaps you can help me understand what is meant by the term, or why you found my comment to be inappropriate?
Weak opinion: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start.
Strong opinion: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start.
Strongly held: I tested the battery and voltage and current are within good thresholds. I still believe what I believed before.
Weakly held: I tested the battery and voltage and current are within good thresholds. I have adjusted my belief about what I believed before.
WOSH: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as dead. I still cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start.
WOWH: I cannot conclude anything about why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as dead. It could be the battery, maybe. Hard to say.
SOSH: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as functioning fine. It's definitely the battery, though.
SOWH: I think my battery is dead and that's why my car won't start. You've tested my battery as functioning fine. The reason why my car won't start is not my battery; I think it won't start because my starter motor is broken.
Downvotes occur for all sorts of reasons. Please don't introduce noise into the discussion. It's annoying to other readers for all sorts of reasons. I am often tempted to downvote anyone who complains about them.
Honestly, if someone asked me whether the WO example above was strong or weak, I would tend to say it is strong because it is a categorical statement. To me, a weak statement would be "I think my car won't start because there's either a battery problem or a starter engine problem or a wiring problem". That doesn't take a strong stand or eliminate many possibilities.
So yes, in the meaning of SOWH, all WO are ones that leave you unable to progress. Your reading of 'categorical implying strong' is reasonable, imho, in just the meaning of the word 'strong'. It's just not what I believe was the intended meaning in the statement of SOWH.
Perhaps it's my background (law, economics, logic) but I assumed that "strong" referred to "the strong form" of an argument or hypothesis (such as the efficient market hypothesis). I never understood why someone would say it's better to embrace strong forms of arguments, since these tend to be more extreme (and IMO, things tend to be wrong more when they are taken to extremes).
i.e. unstructured search is more common than hypothesize-falsify despite the latter being established epistemology since early 1900s or before.
That's not to say that it's the right approach for every situation, but for problems that will have a lot of dependent unresolved assumptions "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" is sometimes necessary to maintain focus to break through the problem.
It is only effective in the context of a closed small trusting group making decisions.
One needs to make decisions, often with laughably insufficient information. So make one and watch carefully and be able to reverse if evidence tells you differently. Only works if you already have a strong trust culture and relatively equal power.
Using that policy as a leader of a larger group with a necessarily weaker trust culture and unequal power fails terribly because it comes across as capricious, and irresponsible.
1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore, this must be done.
If faced with such a wide open question you could do some research and start asking all the questions you think of, but you're then just hoping to narrow in on something by luck. The "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" method works well here, if within the first week you can learn enough to form some opinions, you now have some ideas to test against and disprove. You can start to decide on what information is important and what isn't important, rather than trying to gather all the possible information and synthesize it later on.
If you have an opinion such as "you should formulate a strategy to sell direct to the consumer instead of relying on distribution alone" you have a starting point and have narrowed things down from "how do we sell more things?". You might not have one opinion, you might have five. It takes experience to come up with opinions quickly when faced with limited data and potentially a large problem space.
It's hypothesis-driven decision making. It does require both iteration and the willingness to let your original opinions go--kill your darlings.
Interestingly there is some evidence that this might lead to anchoring bias related issues. I am not sure what we can do to improve the situation, however.
tl;dr SOWH is good. Don't claim it for yourself. Sloppy Priors are good. Be careful of not adjusting on evidence. The bet trick is very good. Be careful about your utility function.
Personally, among the people I know the following doesn't happen:
> In such cases, the failure mode is that ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ turns into ‘Strong Opinions, Justified Loudly, Until Evidence Indicates Otherwise, At Which Point You Invoke It To Protect Your Ass.”
And that is mostly because it's really easy to claim you're operating in SOWH and really hard to determine if you actually are. So most truth-seekers apply the same techniques of epistemology to it as they do to other things that require auto-evaluation with no objective truth set: you trust weighted external input more than your own. Am I charismatic? Am I intelligent? Am I whiny? It is hard for me to say. It is far easier for me to find that out from people I can identify as trusted on the subject.
I remain convinced that operating in SOWH is empowerment (at a 80% certainty har-har). I believe that the Bet Trick and the Sloppy Prior Trick are both clever techniques to improve your search for truth as well.
The Bet Trick is very good. My personal danger is that I do not apply linear utility (i.e. an unlikely win makes me much happier than a string of losses). So if I predicted that the US would be open by August and I'm right that makes me way happier than if I predict repeatedly that median summer temperature is greater than median winter temperature in Saskatoon. I'm okay losing $200 repeatedly on the former for the win.
The Sloppy Prior also has the trick that it allows you to examine your reaction to evidence. Your Sloppy Posterior to the weakest of evidence must be different from your Sloppy Prior! If it isn't, your cognition is currently failing you. The only problem is that the sloppiness gives you room to avoid having different posteriors.
That last part I find very hard in almost-certain and almost-never situations: if a set of instrument measurements show that temperatures across the Earth are the same as they were 40 years ago, then it's highly likely that the measurements are broken, but it is not certain, so my posteriors for AGW given that evidence should drop. But they don't unless I am conscious of this.
objectively considering information is further than most people ever get. most people are just out here trying to win arguments
so let's assume you're open minded
you could weave components of this new info into what you already know, and discard the rest
but what do you keep?
does the most convincing empiricism trump everything? are personal values involved?
that's up to you
I have questions that I've thought about for years, and some tentative hypotheses to go with them.
Inspired by: http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-parkhttp://k...
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 wear masks, that has stuck and a lot of people think either you lied originally or you don't know what you're talking about - ideas made worse by being promoted for political gain.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge
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.
Fake masks:
https://stpauls.vxcommunity.com/Issue/Us-Experiment-On-Infan...
http://www.nsf.org/newsroom_pdf/Flu_in_the_workplace_(final)...
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)
> 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.’
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 of not doing the second half. You should be looking for evidence that you're wrong, not evidence that you're right.
This is later borne out by the proposal of adding confidence intervals and dates by which assumptions should be robust against being disproven. You'll find this type of language on experimental design in lots of scientific fields.
This article is about someone's journey to rediscover the thing their source already knew (using scientific rigor can take a hypothesis into a theorem, and gradually bring you nearer an understanding of the underlying truth), and then call it something else because the original distillation of a theory into a soundbyte flew past them.
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.
That's similar in spirit to scientific method: Formulate a hypothesis and then set out to disprove it. (Overly simplified, of course.)
So, there's definitely something here. But in my experience, the phrase "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" is mostly just used to excuse bad behaviors.
Yes! I think that science also demonstrates how Bayesianism, the author's proposed remedy, misses the point somewhat.
What probability do I put on my belief in quantum mechanics? Zero! It has to be wrong, because it doesn't account for gravity. On the other hand, I'd bet on it for every question it can answer.
Scientific theories are the strongest opinions of all. If you can imagine how the laws of physics, the antiquity of Earth, or natural selection could possibly be wrong, you don't understand them. But, historically, those theories replaced previous theories, which were strongly accepted in their day, and did turn out to be wrong.
There is no way that some theories could possibly be wrong, but it's almost certain that some of those theories are wrong. This is about a deeper type of uncertainty than probability can describe.
Unrelated to the larger theme of the post, but I absolutely hate it when people do this. I thought it sounded like a silly parable until I saw people do it in real life. At which point I concluded it was some kind of characteristic of narcissism.
To this type of person, an idea isn't good until it's theirs. They will trash your idea, and trash you. When your idea seems convenient they will take credit and fail to cite you as an influence. That's ok, one can suppose, if not for the next part. Likely they have forgotten you gave them that idea in order to help them. They still think you are trash. They will have no qualms trashing your next idea with personal attacks just like the last one.
Notes are the worst kind of memory with the highest seek latency.
I am in the business of making good choices - not remembering when, where, how and why I learned the lesson.
In practice, it means that when I commit behind an idea, I'm often right. But the ideas are not necessarily mine. And I don't care.
I wouldn't say it's narcissistic, for me, I feel it's actually the opposite. I don't care that I came up with it or you or who did, or even if multiple people contributed to it, I just care that it's the right idea, and once I'm confident that it is, I will strongly upheld it and hold it as my opinion. That's because I've already put it to the test by arguing against it in all possible ways, talking to many others about it, getting their opinions, their alternative ideas, etc.
1) The type who does exactly what the OP said, treat people like trash and think when they commit to an idea, they are often right. When they change their opinion, they don't give credit either, since they want to maintain the image that they are often right. I have seen great teammates left due to those people. I would not want to work with those people either.
2) The second type also hold strong opinions. When they change their view, they attribute it to people who brought it up. They don't care about maintaining an image that they are "often right". They genuinely thanks the people who brought them good arguments that changes their strongly held opinions. It's not about who invented the idea. But they understand it's good to appreciate people from which you get the new idea. I love working with those people. I try to give proper credits to people when they show me new ideas.
Why do I do it? I don’t know, a lot of developers do it. Just how we are I guess. Not Invented Here syndrome.
It requires some ego squelching but in the end we accomplish what we want and everybody ends up relatively happy. However, even after years of successes, this particular client still treats us like the hired help (which I suppose we are).
> Use Probability as an Expression of Confidence
If the probability is just some made up number reflecting a hunch, it's no better at informing us to take an action or drop an opinion. It's just a way of talking about how weakly we are holding the opinion, and not the real deal from statistics.
The concept still provides no concrete framework for assigning the probability, and for taking action. E.g. do you abort the plan when the probability of success feels like it has dropped to 65%, or does it have to feel like 35%?
If you have a 65% chance to win and winning means you get $2 on top of your $10, then abort the plan. The expected value is $12×65% = $7.80 which is less than your investment.
If you have a 35% chance to win and winning means you get $30 on top of your 10$, then continue. An expected value of $40×35% = $14 is worth it.
In reality, the tricky part is often to assign numbers (How much does it cost to switch to Rust? How much errors does the stricter type system catch?) but the framework is available.
Ok, also look up the Kelly criterion because you can go bankrupt even with a high expected value.
But since everybody is sometimes wrong about something, and that should be very seldom in the expert case, you should be able to let go of one of your opinions, in case you get counter-arguments.