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Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might Be the Worst Idea in Tech (2019)
- CRConrad 3y ago> ... in the tech industry, with our motto of “strong opinions, loosely held” (also known as “strong opinions, weakly held”), we’ve glorified overconfidence. No. That the opinions are (or should be) “loosely / weakly held” means precisely that we aren't (or shouldn't be) overly confident in them. Congratulations on writing an entire essay on how you didn't understand a wide-spread expression.
- khazhoux 4y ago> Stroll through an engineering office and you are likely to hear the (mostly white, mostly male) denizens making statements like… For an essay on quantifying your priors, it’s odd to find this stereotyping of white males.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoIt's trendy to do, which is funny since trendy ideas are the most loosely held but strongly expressed while the trendiness lasts. Nice that they're going on public record with their views so they can't later claim they weren't in love with the metaphoric butterfly collar of acceptable bigotry.
- peteradio 4y agoNo no you've got it backwards they are stereotyping denizens.
- OrvalWintermute 4y ago> Stroll through an engineering office and you are likely to hear the (mostly white, mostly male) denizens making statements like: This racist/sexist stereotypical line jumped out in the reading of this article. I cannot support Micheal Natkin writing pejoratively about groups in this manner.
- vkou 4y agoAre you saying that the author's not allowed to observe that some demographics engage in particular behaviours more frequently than others? I thought that we should strive to be rational, meritocratic, observation and data-driven people...
- gray6 4y ago[dead]
- OrvalWintermute 4y agoI don't think bringing up the author's race or ethnicity is any more positive than what the author did. It kind of brings up this veiled anti-race issue which I think detracts from the conversation. The initial article doesn't pass the smell test, nor does your comment.
- unusualmonkey 4y agoRationale, meritocratic, observation and data driven people can directly make the observations they need, rather than using skin color or gender as a proxy.
- traverseda 4y agoIf someone saw your comment out of context they'd probably assume you were defending some pretty vile shit.
- khazhoux 4y agoBut he presents no evidence! And this in an article about having evidence for your opinions.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoAren't engineering offices populated with such people? Is that at issue at all? This page seems to support the statement: https://www.zippia.com/engineer-jobs/demographics/ https://www.zippia.com/engineer-jobs/demographics/
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago> The loudest, most bombastic engineer states their case with certainty, and that shuts down discussion. I work with this person and none of the devs here even say anything about strong opinions, whether or not they're weakly held. This (the engineer's in the example) is poor argumentation, not a loosely-held strong opinion. I can have a strong opinion and simply not voice it. I might change that opinion after gaining a new perspective because I don't identify with the opinion (hold it weakly). Complaints about people who don't introspect aside, this doesn't read as an issue with the "strong opinions" idea.
- catsarebetter 4y agoYa agreed there's a difference between strong opinion and lack of social intelligence
- kayodelycaon 4y agoI’ve always associated “strong opinions” as “strongly stated”. Or in other terms with an attitude of “I have said this and I’m right.” It’s very dismissive and unnecessarily confrontational.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y agoIf someone has that attitude then they are not "weakly" or "loosely" holding their opinion and I'd further argue that they don't even have an opinion and instead just "want to be right". That is an implementation of "I don't give a fuck what's true, tightly held".
- jfengel 4y agoThe advice doesn't give any direction one way or the other on how you express the opinion. Some interpret "weakly held" to mean "hold your tongue"; some interpret "strong opinions" as "opinions worthy of being expressed strongly". The advice in thus kind of vapid: it doesn't tell you how to apply the opinion in the very important case that others disagree with it. The advice is most apropos in a vacuum -- and applies perfectly to your opinion of a spherical cow.
- andy_xor_andrew 4y ago> Strong opinions loosely held might be the worst idea in tech I strongly disagree with this, but if you can make a convincing argument I'll definitely consider it.
- kayodelycaon 4y agoBeing one of the louder persons in the room when it comes to opinions, I’ve noticed that some of my colleagues are unlikely to challenge my views unless I explicitly ask for their input. This gets worse if you’re a senior developer mentoring junior developers. They may lack the confidence or knowledge required to challenge you when you are wrong. If you want to see studies on how detrimental this is to proper team function, look at Crew Resource Management in commercial air travel. There are painful lessons learned from many, many accidents. The rules are written in blood.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- programmarchy 4y ago(2019)
- metal 4y agoStopped reading at the anti-white bs. I'm pretty sure that if the author had put "black" instead of "white," this article wouldn't have even been linked here. It's fashionable to openly express anti-white bigotry these days.
- cool_dude85 4y agoHow sure are you of this opinion?
- Spivak 4y agoWell yes because doing that substitution changes the meaning -- you're saying something fundamentally different in the latter article. It's no longer a piece about how a particular aspect of tech culture which got a foothold among the majority (white men) where that behavior not only doesn't reflect poorly on them, where a black man might get called aggressive and woman might get called bitchy, but is actively rewarded because that confidence is, sometimes mistakenly, used as a proxy for competence. And taken from a systems perspective this aspect of culture accidentally and through no ones fault created a prisoner's dilemma that forces group decision making to a local maximum instead of a global one. To write the same article about black people it would require a very different history and cultural context.
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoIs the meaning changed so much as to make it acceptable? I take your point about "that substitution changes the meaning", but I strongly disagree that it changes it enough to make the substitution unacceptable and the original acceptable.
- 27fingies 4y agoBunch of snowflakes in this thread lmao
- joebiden2 4y agoIt's a bit funny how this post contradicts itself by voicing a strong opinion (we don't know yet if it's loosely held). I don't disagree with the general point though. The stronger someone supports an opinion, the harder it gets for less-than-vocal team members / contributors to point out flaws or incorrect facts. This makes it harder for potentially more knowledgeable people who lack self consciousness/"vocalness" to refute the false statement, which most often causes downstream issues of not-so-interested folks to believe in the wrong statement, simply because someone who seems self-assured and knowledgeable voiced it. I think it boils, as most of the time, down to having a team of people complementing each other. If you have someone with strong opinions, make sure they are not the only one.
- recursivedoubts 4y agoloose opinions, strongly held: "I'm not sure. And I'm pretty sure you aren't either. Let's try some prototypes."
- viggity 4y agoI've always been a big fan of the Strong Opinions Weakly Held thing because I thought of it more as being a proxy for being decisive. I've been on too many projects or had life experiences where everything was mired down in endless equivocation and hair splitting. Why argue about what color to paint the bike shed when if one color is truly a problem repainting it later is low cost to fix.
- gcanyon 4y agoThis essay fundamentally misrepresents "strong opinions, loosely held," and is therefore misleading and useless. -- that's a strong opinion, loosely held. Let me explain: The word "strong" in "strong opinions" doesn't mean what the author thinks it does. For example: "toxic certainty" and "overconfidence". That is not what "strong opinions" means here. In fact, the author alludes to the correct interpretation later when they say "The idea of strong opinions, loosely held is that you can make bombastic statements, and everyone should implicitly assume that you’ll happily change your mind in a heartbeat if new data suggests you are wrong." Emphasis mine. Putting it plainly, "strong" refers to the position being taken. "Tesla makes a good electric car" is a weak position. "Tesla makes the best electric car on the market, no one else even comes close" is a strong position. Note that in neither case is my conviction in making the statement in evidence. "Loosely held" is contradictory to the expressed descriptions of "toxic certainty" and "overconfidence". So: the point of the saying is that people should stake out positions of significance without worrying so much about whether they have firmly researched and can support those positions. In a general way, the expression is refining the expression "for the sake of argument." The article then goes on to reasonably criticize the actual idea by suggesting that it is an ideal rarely lived up to in practice, and offers a solution (stating that you are not 100% certain) that actually reinforces the actual point of the original saying. So the title should be something like "Strong Opinions Loosely Held is the Most Abused Idea in Tech -- I'm 90% Certain of That." But this is all just a loosely held idea, I'm happy to be dissuaded.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago"Most abused" is a good way to put it (maybe it's not the most abused, but that's just pedantry). Certainly this idea can be abused and I'd be easily convinced that it is being abused but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
- michaeljnatkin 4y agoI'm the original author. Thank you for reading the article and engaging with it! I don't fundamentally disagree with your point that "Most Abused" is accurate. My experience is that it abused so frequently, and depends so much on a cultural context that generally doesn't exist anymore (if it ever really did), that it needs to be fundamentally rethought. And fortunately the main fix is really simple: even a tiny level of qualification makes a massive difference to how invited other people feel to the discussion. To take your example, if you said "In my opinion, Tesla makes the best electric car, no-one comes close... and I could be wrong, I'd love to hear the counterargument", that minimal adjustment can make a big difference to your coworkers. And presumably you want to get the best out of them!
- mikewarot 4y agoThe last time I was in a room full of engineers, respect was shown to everyone for their decades of professional service, and proven track record of delivering results to the industrial customers they supported. It was quiet and they were just going about their business. I wish I had the discipline back in the day to go into engineering, but the 4 years plus internship and state exam was a huge wall. Programming was a lot easier to get into.