You won't be easily manipulated by virtue of having strong opinions, as long as they're weakly held, because you'll probably state your strong opinion to someone who knows better than you. If your opinion is actually weakly held, you'll recognize that their opinion is closer to the truth and adjust yours accordingly.
Often my own intuition is at odds with the "evidence I have" and I turn out to be right later.
I mean evidence in a broad sense, encompassing all information available to you for basing your worldview upon, including your intuition. If your intuition has been reliable in the past, and the scientific evidence was being put out by entities with obvious incentives for a certain conclusion, then it's rational to weigh your intuition highly relative to the scientific evidence.
What does 'a strong opinion' mean to you? Because I think we have different ideas of what that means.
I think the people who are against forming strong opinions on little data, thinks it essentially means being confident, speaking your mind, and influencing others towards seeing things your way, when you haven't done much research into a topic. Which I think is a bad idea, because it has a high chance of propagating misinformation.
Often my own intuition is at odds with the "evidence I have" and I turn out to be right later.
I mean evidence in a broad sense, encompassing all information available to you for basing your worldview upon, including your intuition. If your intuition has been reliable in the past, and the scientific evidence was being put out by entities with obvious incentives for a certain conclusion, then it's rational to weigh your intuition highly relative to the scientific evidence.