Whose Opinion Counts?
- Written by
- Pierre Teo
- Updated
- Topic
- Mental models
When building something, we might get comments and advice from well-meaning or not so well-meaning people, some with strong opinions on what we should be doing next.
A lot of it comes from armchair critics who sound completely confident, but something about the advice often feels hollow or frustrating. Over time, I've spent a lot of time thinking about why so much advice feels off, how to tell what's actually worth listening to, and how to protect our sanity as builders.
These are some notes and quotes that helped me make sense of it.
1. Judging the experience vs diagnosing the cause#
There seem to be two very different kinds of claims someone can make about something we've built.
The first is: this is bad as an experience. For this, we don't need to be practitioners. We don't need to be a chef to know the food is oversalted, or an engineer to know a product is difficult, confusing, or awkward to use. The user is the authority on how the experience feels to them. When someone says "I got stuck here" or "this didn't work for me," that's real signal.
The second is: here's why it's bad, here's what we should have done, and here's how easy this is to fix. This is where things get shaky. Diagnosing the underlying cause and prescribing the fix requires actual builder knowledge. "They should just do X, it's so obvious" is easy to say when someone has never had to deal with the messy tradeoffs, real-world constraints, and unintended consequences under the hood.
2. The "practitioner" filter is narrower than it seems#
We're often told to only take advice from practitioners. But the more I build, the more I realize that who actually qualifies as a relevant practitioner is much narrower than it looks.
Someone might have built something successful ten or fifteen years ago in a completely different era. The market was different, distribution was different, and the timing was different. Their playbook might have worked brilliantly in their day, but today much of the tactical advice may no longer apply.
Or their experience is in an entirely different domain. What works in enterprise sales doesn't work in consumer apps; what works in physical manufacturing doesn't translate to digital products or creative writing. The dynamics, economics, scale, and feedback loops are completely different.
Even among people building in the same domain right now, every situation has its own quirks. People have wildly different strengths, weaknesses, and risk tolerances. In business and creative work, for every playbook that worked, you can find a counter-example of someone who succeeded by doing the exact opposite.
We also love to quote extreme outliers like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs as universal templates. But unless we have Elon Musk's extreme personality, risk appetite, and circumstances, copying his methods rarely works.
3. Steve Jobs on advice without ownership#
A common trap with outside commentary is the lack of accountability. In many cases, the person giving the advice doesn't have to live with the consequences of being wrong.
Steve Jobs talked about this during a 1992 talk at MIT Sloan, when a student asked him about going into management consulting. He said consulting gives you a broad view of companies, but it's paper-thin because you never own the outcome:
where one has a chance to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground,
He used a great metaphor: consulting is like looking at pictures of bananas on a wall instead of eating one. The picture might be accurate, but it's only two-dimensional:
Without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three-dimensional.
You can end up with a wall full of pictures (worked in bananas, worked in peaches, worked in grapes) and never have tasted one. Unaccountable commentators and casual advisors rarely suffer when a recommendation fails. They can offer an opinion, move on, and leave the builder to clean up the mess.
4. Nassim Taleb on skin in the game#
Skin in the Game is the modern articulation of that asymmetry. The core idea: be wary of advice from someone who doesn't bear the downside of being wrong.
Don't tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.
Taleb points out that pundits, forecasters, and commentators collect upside from sounding smart, while bearing little to no downside if they're wrong.
Brandolini's law makes the problem worse:
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
It takes five seconds for someone on social media to write a confident critique of what we made, and it takes hours of building to actually solve the problem. Criticism is cheap; building is hard.
5. Plato on eloquence#
Why does confident advice sound so convincing even when it's off the mark?
Plato wrestled with this 2,400 years ago when arguing against the Sophists, who taught rhetoric: how to win arguments and sound persuasive regardless of the truth. Plato pointed out that persuasiveness and truth are completely independent variables. Skilled speakers exploit our natural tendency to assume that someone who speaks well must be right.
Psychologists today call this the halo effect or verbal fluency bias: eloquence is not evidence.
This is especially tricky for builders because articulating and sounding smart is the commentator's entire job. An articulate commentator can easily sound more convincing than a builder in the middle of the struggle, even when the builder understands the problem far better. The polish is part of the performance.
How I try to filter the noise#
When someone offers an opinion or critique on what I'm building, I try to run it through a few questions:
- Is this a report of their experience, or a prescription on what to do? If someone says something feels broken, confusing, or unappealing, I take it seriously. If they tell me how to architect the solution, I treat it as one idea among many.
- Does this person actually have skin in the game? What do they have at stake if their advice is wrong? If they bear none of the downside, take the advice with caution.
- Is their experience actually relevant to my situation? Did they do this recently in a similar domain and context, or are they reciting a playbook from a different world or ten years ago?
- Am I persuaded by the content, or just the delivery? If I strip away the confident tone and articulate phrasing, does the underlying logic still hold up?