I am taken by the comments by people about my
post on Strong
Opinions, Weakly Held. Just as the
first time I heard this idea from Bob Johansen at the Institute for the Future, it strikes
many people as a compelling test of whether a person is wise or not. There is an intriguing footnote to all this
in Rich’s comment, where he points out that historian A. J. P. Taylor is
credited with a similar remark that was published in the 1970’s, describing
himself as having “Extreme views weakly held.” I also got a number of emails about other variations on this theme. I especially liked the one from Marc Garrett,
who writes since1968.com. Marc tells me the tagline he has been using
for several years is "Fierce opinions, briefly held, quietly disowned." I admire both the wisdom and the honesty in that statement.
I bet if
we dug into it enough, we could find variations of this saying that go back for
thousands of years. Certainly, the idea of having the courage to express
yourself and act, but to update your ideas when better facts and ideas come
along, goes back at least to Plato’s writings. A lovely example of the impossibility of tracking
down who said what first can be found in a 1965 book by the late sociologist Robert C.
Merton, On
the Shoulders of Giants Merton
documents his quest to discover who first developed a saying that is often
attributed to Sir
Isaac Newton, “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants.” As Merton shows, Newton didn’t invent this
saying. The originator turns out to be
impossible to find, as this charming book shows. Merton – with the help of many colleagues —
finds variations that go back at least 1,000 years before Newton’s time. My favorite is “A dwarf
standing on the shoulder of a giant may see farther than the giant himself.”
The
ignorance, arrogance, and lack of humility that too often goes along with
claims of originality has led me (as I said in an earlier post) to propose Sutton’s
Law in Hard Facts: “If you think that you have a new idea, you
are wrong. Someone else probably already had it. This idea isn’t original either;
I stole it from someone else”
PS: Merton’s son, also Robert
C. Merton, won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1997 — quite a family!
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