Prove Yourself Wrong

Saffo wrote this in a 2008 post on his website, “Strong Opinions weakly held,” about forecasting. Nobody has complete information about the future, so rather than wait for all the data, he makes a tentative forecast from what he has and then tears it apart: “the fastest way to an effective forecast is often through a sequence of lousy forecasts.” The “strong opinion” is letting your intuition reach a conclusion, however imperfect. The “weakly held” part is to “prove yourself wrong”: “Look for information that doesn’t fit.” The phrase had been his mantra for that process since the mid-1980s, and this line widens it beyond forecasting, to any question with a lot of uncertainty.

Asked about “strong opinions loosely held” on Tim Ferriss’s podcast in 2016, Marc Andreessen said betting on an idea that goes against the consensus takes “strong conviction,” but the world changes, and most people hate changing their minds. The best hedge fund managers are the exception: tell them they’re wrong and they ask, “Why do you think that?” If you’re right, they switch from betting on a company’s stock to betting against it. For struggling startups, Andreessen sees two ways to fail: switching to a new idea every time he meets them, and determination that hardens into stubbornness and then self-destruction. Telling the two apart, he said, comes down to the founder’s judgment.

Jason Fried, co-owner of 37signals, wrote in a 2012 post that Jeff Bezos, answering questions at Fried’s office, said people who are “right a lot” often change their minds. In Fried’s summary, the smartest people are “constantly revising their understanding,” while people who are often wrong are obsessed with details that support only one point of view. Flatiron Health co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg liked the saying “Strong opinions, loosely held.” In the passage behind Turner’s line about a hundred pieces of feedback, Turner glosses it as being willing to change direction quickly once new data comes in.