Diversity of opinions is helpful for risk management, specifically the risk that you commit all your resources to the single idea that turns out to be wrong. This is commonly known as “don’t put all your eggs into one basket”. Risk management is not only about money.
if you don’t know how to determine a correct answer, there’s not much to think about until you do.
I strongly disagree. In fact, figuring out how would you recognize a correct answer if it happens to bite you on the ass is the major thing to think about for many problems.
The benefit I mentioned above of diversity (higher chance of getting the right answer) is the same thing as what you’re talking about then, not like you said :”That, too, but there are other issues as well”. If you can recognize the correct answer when you see it, then the use of diversity is to increase your chances of getting the right answer.
So are we down to the only correct use of the original quote is when people aren’t sure how to recognize a correct answer?
Nope. The thing is, it’s not a “correct”—“not correct” binary dilemma. For any reasonably complex problem there might be a single “correct” answer (provided what you consider optimal is fully specified) and a lot of different “technically not correct” answers. Those “technically not correct” answers are all different and will rise to different consequences. They are not the same—and if getting the “technically correct” answer is unlikely, you do care about which “incorrect” answers you’ll end up using.
Basically, diversification helps with dealing with the risks of having to accept “technically not correct” answers because the technically correct one is out of reach.
Diversity of opinions is helpful for risk management, specifically the risk that you commit all your resources to the single idea that turns out to be wrong. This is commonly known as “don’t put all your eggs into one basket”. Risk management is not only about money.
I strongly disagree. In fact, figuring out how would you recognize a correct answer if it happens to bite you on the ass is the major thing to think about for many problems.
The benefit I mentioned above of diversity (higher chance of getting the right answer) is the same thing as what you’re talking about then, not like you said :”That, too, but there are other issues as well”. If you can recognize the correct answer when you see it, then the use of diversity is to increase your chances of getting the right answer.
So are we down to the only correct use of the original quote is when people aren’t sure how to recognize a correct answer?
Nope. The thing is, it’s not a “correct”—“not correct” binary dilemma. For any reasonably complex problem there might be a single “correct” answer (provided what you consider optimal is fully specified) and a lot of different “technically not correct” answers. Those “technically not correct” answers are all different and will rise to different consequences. They are not the same—and if getting the “technically correct” answer is unlikely, you do care about which “incorrect” answers you’ll end up using.
Basically, diversification helps with dealing with the risks of having to accept “technically not correct” answers because the technically correct one is out of reach.