Comment by bee_rider
3 years ago
I also enjoyed reading one of my style-partner’s posts.
The most noticeable similarity is that we both clearly have strong opinions about some things, and like to share information, but also like to be clear about our unknowns or opinions. So, lots of “sounds likes,” “probably,” “could be” and so on.
The downside is, I guess, this could be seen as a bit weasel-word-y or indirect.
> like to be clear about our unknowns or opinions. So, lots of “sounds likes,” “probably,” “could be” and so on.
Commonly called just “hedging” like hedging your bets.
That’s a kinder description than I gave it in my next paragraph, so thanks I suppose.
I do think it is an under-emphasized aspect of honesty, though, that we should be clear about our level of experience/understanding. Especially online — people like to discuss things, even (especially?) when we are just getting started. So if we’ve picked up opinions through osmosis and we start repeating them without testing them, we’re really just amplifying some possibly-incorrect viewpoint (and if we’ve picked it up, there’s a good chance it is already widespread in the community, which is bad if it is wrong).
And I mean, more concretely a measurement is not complete without the error bars!
Often this doesn’t really matter, because it is just chit-chat anyway. But it is nice to keep in mind.
> we should be clear about our level of experience/understanding
there are many languages that encode this info as mandatory grammatical affixes, it's called evidentiality.
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