Prove Yourself Wrong

Paul Saffo | Strong Opinions, Weakly Held | Principles

Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect. Then prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction.

| Paul Saffo

Saffo is suggest the use of abductive reasoning rather than deduction or induction, since he suggests intuition as a starting point, feeling your way through an incomplete set of facts to a likely explanation to those facts. A narrative to work through uncertainty. Quite different from inductive or deductive reasoning.

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Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Last week, I had two different opportunities to use the line ‘strong opinions, weakly held’, which I had first heard from Paul Saffo, the well-known future studies figure, long affiliated with Stanford.

The first was an interchange on Bluesky:

That link was hard to find. It turns out that Saffo’s website — https://saffo.com/ — no longer has his original ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ article posted.

I found it at Archive.org (this is a link to the archived post), finally (don’t ask).

It also came up in a discussion with a friend about forecasting, and I described Saffo’s technique of ‘successive approximation’, but updating his forecasts whenever new insights occured, or new events shifted context.

Because it has been consigned to the Archive, I am sharing it with you as a public service, so you can avoid the search I went through).

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