Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might Be the Worst Idea in Tech (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might Be the Worst Idea in Tech (2019)

blog.glowforge.com

24 pointssherilm46 comments

> 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.

Agreed--I think the OP misunderstands the concept. I have a background in architecture, and in that design context, it's definitely helpful if someone with good intuition is quick to form opinions. Even if the overall destination is unknown, when a design lead is presented with early concepts, they need to be able to quickly form a judgment: is this concept good/promising/interesting? Is it better or worse than other alternatives being compared? In the lack of a clear opinion, junior designers can find themselves flailing and directionless.

Yes, those opinionated people can sometimes be wrong. But there's a difference between being stubborn/difficult, and giving clear value judgements when presented with choices, while being willing to revisit when further study proves those initial judgements wrong.

How would you feel if, as a junior developer, every time you asked a more senior colleague for direction, they just shrugged their shoulders?

I’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.

If 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".

The 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.

Ya agreed there's a difference between strong opinion and lack of social intelligence

> 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.

It'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.

No no you've got it backwards they are stereotyping denizens.

This 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.

I'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!

Hey! Thanks for not taking offense at my (very purposefully) "strong" opinion :-)

To be clear, I'm not fundamentally opposed to your point. That said, strong opinion incoming -- I think adding the "in my opinion" and "I could be wrong" doesn't actually solve the problem.

It's like the boss who says, "my door is always open" when nothing could be further from the truth. Or adding "no offense intended" to a clearly offensive statement.

What matters is the environment, not the words spoken. If the environment is right, the words are unnecessary. If the environment is wrong, the words are a lie.

You are 100% right that the words have to be consonant with the environment. And I still think there is a ton of value in making the words explicit. E.g. if you are a manager, and in fact your door is always open, but you don't say it and you assume your employees will gather that from your demeanor and behavior - you could find out years later that you were totally wrong and employees (especially junior employees and those from underrepresented groups) may not realize it was ok to approach "the boss".

"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.

Stopped 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.

Well 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.

Is 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.

How sure are you of this opinion?

> 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.

Being 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.

I'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.

The 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.

It'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.

> ... 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.

loose opinions, strongly held:

"I'm not sure. And I'm pretty sure you aren't either. Let's try some prototypes."

> 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.

Aren'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/

The statement is absolutely true but the people who have bought into the Woke Mind Virus nonsense are going to cry about it anyway. And then they will use some other statistics that they think will be a justification for making racist statements without understanding why one thing is racist and the other thing isn.

Have you considered that there might instead be a consistent, principled objection towards injecting the author's personal stereotypes of random ethnic groups? A 5 word aside that takes the discussion from analysis corporate culture towards people complaining about other hypothetical people who complain about the "Woke Mind Virus" seems both toxic and ineffective.

I have not, nor do I care to entertain that line of thinking.

There are resolutely principled people of all kinds.

What is your basis for saying it is “absolutely true” that the loud, strongly-held opinions this author is railing against, come mostly from white males? I’m guessing just your personal observation.

Would you be shocked to learn my experience has been different?

Are 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...

Rationale, meritocratic, observation and data driven people can directly make the observations they need, rather than using skin color or gender as a proxy.

If someone saw your comment out of context they'd probably assume you were defending some pretty vile shit.

But he presents no evidence! And this in an article about having evidence for your opinions.

Oh grow up. This is pure concern trolling.

“Concern trolling” is when someone pretends to be concerned but isn’t actually, and really thinks the opposite.

I’ll wager the commenter was legitimately bothered by the statement (as I was). You may disagree with his opinion, but it’s not cool to question his motive.

It’s totally cool to question motives and in fact it’s an important part of understanding why things happen.

On HN I think we expect better, which includes the courtesy to not question each other’s earnestness, and to challenge people’s positions and not their motivations.

Well I hate to tell you this but motives are an important piece of how the world works. People don’t think and say things in a vacuum. I am not generous with giving people the benefit of the doubt when their position is in alignment with white supremacists.

> It’s totally cool to question motives

Oh yeah? OK, in that case: Yours are looking ever increasingly dubious.

Most of HN submitted content is worth reading for technical merit alone, but it does not include with racist or sexist content. If anything, we treat racist and sexist content as something to fight.

That I raised attention to this issue does not justify a problematic label like "concern trolling".

We are better than this, and our content should reflect that.

(2019)

Bunch of snowflakes in this thread lmao

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