Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
- *Metadata:
- A framework for thinking developed by Paul Saffo
- Enables us to make decisions or forecasts with incomplete information
- Start with a tentative hypothesis, find evidence that either supports it or refutes, if you find evidence that refutes it - change your hypothesis
- The fastest way to a good forecast is through a series of lousy forecasts
- Make tentative forecasts based on existing data and systematically tear it apart
- Strong opinion
- Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion
- Weakly held
- Prove yourself wrong with evidence
- Engage in creative doubt by actively search for counter evidence
- Inherent biases that impact our thinking
- Law of small numbers
- We are drawn to small anecdotal example over statistically significant data
- Confirmation bias
- We favour evidence that confirms our existing perspective and dismiss contradictory evidence
- Over-optimism bias
- We tend to come up with plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to the best-case scenario
- Assigning cause to random chance
- We are quick to assign causality to events that may in fact be unconnected
- Recency bias
- We bias towards recent events when making decisions