[dullgiulio]

Tangentially, the adage "strong opinions, weakly held" is nonsense. If you have a strong opinion, you look like a fool if you change your mind when evidence is shown to you.

It is much better to just stay humble. Show your insecurities and lack of knowledge openly and early, you'll be surprised to see how people reactions change from hostile/confrontational to outright helpful.

[skrebbel]

I've always been a fan of "strong opinions held weakly" and the rebuttals I read to it so far were, to me, weird straw man articles about assholes at work and not being one.

But your comment totally convinced me, thanks. There's no need for strong opinions, even when weakly held. It adds nothing.

Amazing how a few sentences can do more than entire blog posts sometimes.

[carlmr]

>Amazing how a few sentences can do more than entire blog posts sometimes.

A long form article is more likely to try to make many points at the same time, some strong, some weak, some wrong ones.

Comments are usually short, making only one point. Furthermore they're sorted and filtered by popularity. This means that strong, pithy statements are displayed much more prominently.

Likewise this article could use some editing.

[thanato0s]

What do you mean by "this article could use some editing"? It should have less ideas, fixing the spelling and grammar mistakes, or something else?

[carlmr]

Spelling and grammar mistakes are one thing. Mainly though the article lacked focus.

[dgb23]

Essentially you changed your weakly held strong opinion about strong opinions held weakly.

I like it!

[etripe]

I always interpret the "strong" part to mean "take ideas to their conclusion" or "don't do anything half-assed". I guess that's the beauty of these aphorisms: their validity is in the eye of the beholder.

I would argue it's possible to be serious about your convictions (i.e. take them to their conclusions), humble and open to being proven wrong.

[ZephyrBlu]

Why do you think people look like fools when they change their mind based on evidence?

We never have all the information, so we create opinions based on the available information we have. You can do this without being arrogant.

To me, changing your mind when presented with new evidence shows humility.

[skrebbel]

I agree, I don't think anyone who changes their mind looks like a fool. But if you were humble before, you look great, and if you were (apparently) unreasonably confident, then you look good. The unfounded confidence adds little.

[ZephyrBlu]

100% agree. Every time I've been unreasonably confident about something it has come back to bite me in the ass.

[ben509]

You're misinterpreting the adage.

I was doing martial arts in school, and my sensei had me demonstrate some forms. Being new, I was very hesitant.

He was annoyed at this and explained that when I kept hesitating, I didn't complete a motion fully. He couldn't see what I was trying to do because I wouldn't commit to it. Thus he couldn't show me what I was doing wrong and teach me the correct way to do it.

"Strong opinions weakly held" is trying to address the problem of not committing to a position. It can manifest as not fully expressing your ideas, or adding unnecessarily qualifiers to them, or not following them to their conclusions.

The consequences can be you don't fully advocate your position, or someone with a different idea isn't able to identify the weaknesses in your argument.

> If you have a strong opinion, you look like a fool if you change your mind when evidence is shown to you.

If you present your views as mush, you can also sound like a fool. If you're citing a standard and say, "the standard says this, but I'm not really sure I read it correctly," you don't sound humble, you sound like you can't read.

If, otoh, you simply cite the standard, then your colleague is clear on where you're coming from. So now he can object that implementations don't follow it; the discussion can advance.

I think the problem you're getting at is someone staking their reputation unnecessarily on their views. You're right: that's a mistake. I've been in an argument over a fairly subjective design decision where one guy got frustrated and said, "look, my 20 years working with databases says we do it this way."

To avoid that, the key is to be specific; "we tried that on project X and it worked / didn't work, and this is very similar." Now it's not your reputation at stake, you're simply giving a factual account of your experience.

And sometimes the matter really is subjective or the data isn't great. If that's the case, you want to be clear about that uncertainty, "we just don't know because our data is crap." Then it becomes clear the team needs to put more resources into getting better information.

[pm215]

On the other hand, if you're too strong about how you phrase your case, some people will take you at face value and assume "he seems pretty sure about this, he's probably right". A little hedging in how you phrase things gives other people an easier-to-take opening to raise counterpoints without feeling like they're getting into an actual argument.

[watwut]

I once worked with a guy who had strong opinions during code review and changed them often (usually after reading blog). I hated working with him.

With people who have strong opinions and stick to them you can at least learn their opinions and adapt or fight once. If they change every week, you have to fight or adapt constantly. Last week you need to use x syntax wherever possible, this week you must not use it. And big deal about difference each time.

[webmaven]

> I once worked with a guy who had strong opinions during code review and changed them often (usually after reading blog). I hated working with him.

> With people who have strong opinions and stick to them you can at least learn their opinions and adapt or fight once. If they change every week, you have to fight or adapt constantly. Last week you need to use x syntax wherever possible, this week you must not use it. And big deal about difference each time.

If they are constantly changing their opinions back and forth based on whatever blog they read most recently, those aren't strong opinions weakly held. They're just weak opinions, strongly advocated (or strongly enforced, depending on your co-worker's authority).

Also, if they are privileging opinionated blog posts over the arguments of their colleagues, the solution is simple: start a blog.

[dullgiulio]

Another reason for people trying too look overly confident is when they are overly exposed over a certain topic.

For example, if you have very narrow job titles and roles in a team ("he is our DevOps, she is our architect"...) everyone will have to defend their role, often trying to sound infallible.

If instead you make the whole team responsible for all team tasks, everyone will be more open to leveraging everyone else's suggestions.