I like the phrase strong opinions, weakly held. In my experience, a fantastic tool for hearing people’s best reasoning is to present a strong opinion of your own while making it clear you’re open to alternative points of view, additional facts,1 and changing your mind.
But I summarize my philosophy slightly differently. I think about the art of being wrong frequently but not often. A key aspect of consciousness is the self-awareness that you’re constantly carrying around a useful but inaccurate mental model of the world. The better this model is at predicting the future the better off you’ll be, but our information is imperfect, the world is constantly changing, and people are inscrutable, so perfection is unachievable.
Luckily, it doesn’t matter so much how many times — how frequently — we are wrong. If you’re anything like me that number’s been uncountably high for a while. What matters is if you’re content to stand there in your wrongness and be wrong or if you process the world as it is, and update your model, so that next time you’ll be right. This is obviously easier said than done,2 but if you’re not willing to frequently realize that you’re wrong, then you often will be.