“Strong Opinions Loosely Held” Might Be the Worst Idea in Tech | Hacker News Reader

“Strong Opinions Loosely Held” Might Be the Worst Idea in Tech

blog.glowforge.com

17 pointsrevvx10 comments

In egalitarian non-competitive environments I am 90% in agreement that this can be useful, however as a philosophy for life I am certain that you will get further by speaking with conviction (strong opinions loosely held), and I don't consider it good advice to give someone outside of those environments.

Understanding the uncertainty of a decision is important to make good decisions however, software massively benefits from first mover advantage so there is a reason why absolutism (even when usually wrong) is actually beneficial. For every conversation you have where you debate the nuanced merits of a direction you give your competitor that many more minutes of time to beat you to the punch. Facebook isn't doing bad because zuckerberg decided to use PHP. Most technology companies have the luxury of being wrong, what should be elaborated on here is how this theory doesn't apply to new areas people from tech want to apply it to (see: anything that has risk you have to actually consider).

Yes, there also often is not a single correct choice for many technology decisions. What is important in many cases is to pick a direction and get everyone aligned.

This doesn't hold for all types of decisions.

I'm 50% sure this is a good article.

I’m 100 percent certain it’s 90% terrible advice unless you never want to make staff or higher.

A person with strong opinions loosely held is unreliable. Today they fully agree with you and tomorrow you're the devil.

So you would rather they tell you the wrong thing twice? C'mon.

The problem with "strong opinions, loosely held" is that "strong" and "loosely" are poorly defined.

"Cubicles are worse than open-plan offices" is a strong opinion, but so is "Only brain-dead worker drones would put up with having to work in a cubicle."

Putting an uncertainty measure on the two statements won't have the same effect (to be clear, adding an "I am 90% sure that.." preface to the second statement changes very little).

“Strong” refers to to the level of passion with which you will defend the opinion.

The point is that you are willing to passionately argue for your side—as opposed to passively avoiding debate—but that you’re not simultaneously ignoring the arguments presented by the opposing side.

The original article here is seemingly little more than a straw man argument against the quoted philosophy.

You are correct. The chaos that results is due to misaligned understandings of what these two words mean in each participating discussion member's head.

It's advantageous to define what these two things mean up front for your team before engaging in debate in this spirit. In my experience, defining strength of opinion as confidence in coverage of potentially relevant circumstances and defining looseness of holding as eagerness to identify blindspots in that coverage can help dissipate some of the toxicity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com