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Comment by smoothierev | Hacker News Reader

From the Bloomberg article: "Some of the doctrine is made up of Silicon Valley-esque platitudes (“Change begins with the mind”) and clichés (“Make everything absolutely cool and beautiful!”). Some is idiosyncratic: Multiple-choice surveys of potential clients must always have an even number of answer options"

Anyone know what the even number of answer options is about? Is it to force no neutral answers? Is it a numerology thing?

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It's pretty standard when you want to force people to express an opinion. For example, I know a company where the interview ratings sheet does not have a "neutral" choice, you need to either support or oppose the hire and can then calibrate how strongly you feel either way.

I was also wondering about that! “No neutral answers” is an interesting theory, although I’ve used 1-5 preference plus “no opinion” (for an even total of six) before.

An alternative theory might be just that this simply forces people to pay attention when building surveys - nothing magic about even or odd, just forcing that final check-over to make sure everything adds up.

Isn't 3 already basically no opinion

There's a difference between "meh, I don't care" and "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion".

> nothing magic about even or odd, just forcing that final check-over to make sure everything adds up.

Ah; so a no brown M&M's rule.

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