Certainty Is a Smell

Author here. Was thinking about this due to some open-source libraries that were oddly hostile to each other, and were ran be two of the most certain people I've ever met. Either (or both) of their approaches could be good ones, but that's not tied to the certainty of their authors.

There's also an interesting meta-issue here. When talking about certainty, how certain should I be about that? In this case probably not very much, but there probably is an appropriate level of certainty for any topic, project, or solution we have. Ideally tied to the level of effort, research, and work we've put into something.

But I think my entire point is that we should never be absolutely certain in ourselves. And we shouldn't fall in the trap of following others who are absolutely certain.