Obama is evil and planning to destroy the world. I live in an area where the vast majority of people believe that. One day, I found myself (to my horror) thinking that as well before I stopped myself. Everyone is saying it so it must be true, right?<p>Back to startups. There's a bunch of common knowledge floating around that is complete junk. It's awful and if you follow it you'll destroy any value in the startup you wanted to create. Yet at the same time, these are the people who may become future customers and users for your product.<p>These people may also become your future employees. They have deep technical knowledge about things and you want them to do that and only that thing. You want to learn from them except you don't want to learn from them at the same time.<p>So, how do you not get influenced by others except when you have to?
Form a rational framework for evaluating what people say when you are trying to learn from them.. Basically, when people just give you their opinion and refuse to back it up, remember it is only opinion and NOT anything close to fact. Most BS is easy to detect if you just think about it for a little bit. In some cases, you won't have the knowledge to evaluate a statement well. Try to just go back to these tidbits of information when you have an opportunity to test them or you learn something new to evaluate them.<p>As to the rational framework you should be using, I think the important thing is to have one. Each will suffer from systematic biases and failures of some kind, but as long as you have one you're getting somewhere.