I’m fond of saying that people who describe themselves as having “strong opinions, lightly held” are not observably different than those who just have strong opinions. But perhaps I’m unfair.
If you (a) have known a person who used the phrase, and (b) in fact turned out to lightly change a strong opinion, could you describe what happened?
@marick
it seems to be a hallmark of self-styled futurists? and perhaps other assorted public pseudo intellect[ch]uals?
if someone means by it
"I'm a Bayesian",
so they're regularly updating their beliefs from new data without _over_ correcting (recency bias), that's good. That's not how I'd expect a Bayesian to identify themselves ("I'm a Bayesian" being preferable), but perhaps it's more meaningful to _tout les autres_.
@marick I, personally, only say it in a particular context: when I am openly making a strong statement in order to draw out my respondents.
A recent instance: "In TDD, one should leave the microtests in the test file in the order in which you created them. Strong opinion lightly held, any takers?"
@GeePawHill @marick
WRTO TDD example, in some micro-test frameworks I've used — which were somewhat lacking in preventing order dependencies — I wouldn't dare reorder microtests !
But I think I see where you're heading:
the order they're added is *likely* the order they should fail in, so that the first fail is the most informative.
So I'd say reorder iff the most informative all-simpler-tests-before-this-pass, this-&-multiple-from-here-fail order is not the order added, so swizzle it.
@GeePawHill @marick
👍 Your singular 'opinion' (vs. plural) used as a marker, combined with addition of "any takers?" is nice!; a humble, honest alternative of the card-table "Change My Mind" meme-template (which generally oozes non-humble inflexibility and frankly sea-lion levels of "just want to discuss" argumentativeness).
