I’m a fan of strong opinions weakly held. You should always have an opinion and it’s ok for it to be wrong if you’re willing to change it as you learn.
It’s kind of a prerequisite for growing up into roles of responsibility.
You simply don’t get far in terms of business, climbing career ladders, being thought of as reliable and being someone trusted if you react without thinking. I mean, yah there are companies run by morons who conflate loud stupidity for confidence, but largely most of the time if you make yourself available to handle responsibility by proving you won’t attack someone’s character or dismiss someone out of hand or act annoyingly confident about things you don’t know anything about, you will become the “go to” person to handle things.
Just being someone who asks other people a lot of questions makes you likeable and people will choose to want to be around you because they rather tell you about themselves or things they know than be lectured.
That seems like hubris and foolishness. Like, if you know you have limited experience with food saying the one you’ve tried is the best of all seems unlikely to be true. Maybe this is a bad example?
Yes, it’s absurd intentionally to avoid discussions of the merits of the opinion. The goal was to focus on the method of establishing a strong opinion and changing based on new learning or evidence.
Yes you’ll be wrong a lot, but that’s not a bad thing. The constant process of using existing knowledge to form an opinion and then updating as you get more information leads to being wrong less often. It’s also basically the scientific method.
It depends on the decisions you take based on those opinions. For me a strong opinion is one based on a lot of data, that is unlikely to change. Otherwise you compromise, hedge or do some amount of risk management.
I’m a fan of strong opinions weakly held. You should always have an opinion and it’s ok for it to be wrong if you’re willing to change it as you learn.
In my experience it’s extremely liberating to withhold judgement sometimes, especially when it’s not needed.
It’s kind of a prerequisite for growing up into roles of responsibility.
You simply don’t get far in terms of business, climbing career ladders, being thought of as reliable and being someone trusted if you react without thinking. I mean, yah there are companies run by morons who conflate loud stupidity for confidence, but largely most of the time if you make yourself available to handle responsibility by proving you won’t attack someone’s character or dismiss someone out of hand or act annoyingly confident about things you don’t know anything about, you will become the “go to” person to handle things.
Just being someone who asks other people a lot of questions makes you likeable and people will choose to want to be around you because they rather tell you about themselves or things they know than be lectured.
What makes the opinion strong, then?
You take a stance fully, like “McDonald’s is the best food ever” the weakly held part is changing when you try literally any other food.
That seems like hubris and foolishness. Like, if you know you have limited experience with food saying the one you’ve tried is the best of all seems unlikely to be true. Maybe this is a bad example?
Yes, it’s absurd intentionally to avoid discussions of the merits of the opinion. The goal was to focus on the method of establishing a strong opinion and changing based on new learning or evidence.
That sounds like a hassle, and leads to being wrong most of the time, doesn’t it? Most often the answer to any question is some form of “it depends”…
Yes you’ll be wrong a lot, but that’s not a bad thing. The constant process of using existing knowledge to form an opinion and then updating as you get more information leads to being wrong less often. It’s also basically the scientific method.
It depends on the decisions you take based on those opinions. For me a strong opinion is one based on a lot of data, that is unlikely to change. Otherwise you compromise, hedge or do some amount of risk management.
evidence based logic and reasoning.
Then why would hold it “weakly”? I’m not sure I understand the concept…
new evidence
New logic too?
if applicable.