Well, low effort one liners are frowned upon for good reasons so I don't mind the downvotes but I couldn't resist.
I just wish the same treatment was also applied to non-joke useless comments. "I too have a baby and I love him", ok great.
The article's message is that non-defensive writing traditionally presumed the author's openness to (in your case) changing their mind, and that today we have all become defensive writers because there is now an expectation that someone will use nitpicks about inconsequential points to discredit the entire piece.
> today we have all become defensive writers because there is now an expectation that someone will use nitpicks about inconsequential points to discredit the entire piece.
Even such inconsequential things as, for example, pointing out the parent's incorrect choice of "adverse" instead of "averse," which has no bearing on the argument.
There's almost always a mistake, overgeneralization, or convenient shortcut in anything a person says. Holding people to an impossible standard just adds stress all around.
Context is really important in communication. When speaking with someone face to face, you pick up on vocal intonations and body language to give you context to their speech. As well, knowing someone personally gives context to what they are saying.
On the internet, you have none of those things, only text. I think we are hitting a wall with our written languages because they can't adequately communicate context. Emoticons are a great evolution in this respect, because I can assign emotional context to some writing with a simple set of characters :).
I like your point that context and audience are the problem, but I don't think it's an issue with text as much as it is the web. If I give you a hand-written note, I know exactly who is reading it (at least at first, how many embarrassing stories involve a note that ended up in the wrong hands?) and I can presume that in my writing.
But when I write a blog post on the web, it's stapled to a bulletin board that has the eyes of the entire world. I have no idea who will read it today, tomorrow, or years from now. I don't know who will take pieces of it out of context and repost them elsewhere.
It is honestly scary. I was going through some old posts of mine a while back and felt like they were funnier and a more brave. Several years have slowly but surely toned me down, often for the worse.
I have to constantly remind myself to be courageous in my writing. I have to remember to focus on how the right reader will experience it, and tune out the wrong ones.
One of the common methods people use to attack posts with ideas they don't agree with is to take the prose literally. This is much like the "work to rule" form of protest that unions use, and the "letter of the law" rather than the spirit of it, and of course all those "zero tolerance" policies.
Bravery is overrated. You learn to pick your battles and your opponents - you either talk just to charitable people, or under the protection of the Mighty Banhammer wielded by a charitable mod.
Who's the mod on Twitter say? You will encounter people on there who actively choose to follow the opposite of that principle. That's what I mean by public.
Oh, I what you mean now. I too am afraid of the public Internet, and sincerely hope to never have to deal with it.
For most of the time, even on Twitter the social network / filter bubble works, if you're not a celebrity. But I am afraid of saying anything non-PC there.
fantastic... "...avoid attributing irrationality, logical fallacies or falsehoods to the others' statements, when a coherent, rational interpretation of the statements is available.", I like that essentially "snapping" our interpretations to their best fit interpolations within some rational space of ideas.
One approach to resolving this would be to not make statements that are literally not true and to correct statements that are literally not true to not be literally not true.
That creates bland writing and the process of correcting every little deviation is so pedantic that it provides a strong incentive to stop writing. Both of these problems result in a world where we learn less, grow less, and take fewer risks with our writing.
What is wrong with truly being charitable, assuming the absolute best intentions and giving writers the license to deviate a little to let them make a point?
Nothing is wrong with being charitable. Some statements are just wrong, or there is no assumption of best intentions that can satisfy the claims being made.
What is wrong with not writing blatantly false statements or calling out wrong statements for being wrong (or, asking for a correction)?
There is a reason compilers cannot take arbitrary text and produce the program you are 'actually' thinking of.
"Perfect is the enemy of good", perfection isn't always necessary for effective communication, and the perceived intent of the writer usually matters more. If you think the writer is trying to mislead someone, or they said something that you think will lead to misunderstandings of something important, then call them out or ask for a correction. I took the post as being more about "the writer didn't cover all the edge cases" than about "the writer wrote something intentionally false/wrong/misleading".
Consider the statement "People are smarter than dogs." This is not literally true, but is true in a very useful sense. Our language need not look like legal contracts, which are written to be literally true, and yet still they have ambiguity problems.
A proper application of the Principle of Charity would lead you to assign more probability to the theory that WalterBright put a fully-formatted sentence inside quotation marks, with a dot at the end and... a capital letter at the beginning. Therefore, his "People" are just "people", and the capital P only marks the start of the sentence.
Some dogs can be trained to herd sheep in a remarkably precise way, with just hand gestures and whistles to control them. There are plenty of people on this planet, born with mental defects, that would be incapable of learning to do this. Nevertheless, "People are smarter than dogs" is a usefully true statement, even whilst not being 100% correct. It certainly communicates the idea better than: "People, after having attained a certain level of mental development after birth, and not counting those born with mental defects or receiving cerebral injuries after birth, are smarter than most dogs, putting aside for the moment the possibility of a dog being born with a mutation allowing it to reason at a much higher level than is usually seen in the dog population".
One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.
To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).
Some dogs can be trained to herd sheep in a remarkably precise way, with just hand gestures and whistles to control them. There are plenty of people on this planet, born with mental defects, that would be incapable of learning to do this. Nevertheless, "People are smarter than dogs" is a usefully true statement, even whilst not being 100% correct. It certainly communicates the idea better than: "People, after having attained a certain level of mental development after birth, and not counting those born with mental defects or receiving cerebral injuries after birth, are smarter than most dogs, putting aside for the moment the possibility of a dog being born with a mutation allowing it to reason at a much higher level than is usually seen in the dog population".
One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.
To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).
I feel compelled to write about race issues because I am a person of color. The issues directly impact my life. But I'm afraid because readers might be pissed off enough to get me fired. :/
Sadly, if you live in the states, you are likely correct to feel that way. I haven't had many racial incidents in the tech workplace, but I have had enough to understand that it definitely could be held against you in the long term.
I wrote a few sentences about gender equality at my last job for the company blog. Some people didn't like it so they escalated it to the CTO without contacting me. As a result, the editor who approved my piece was super stressed and apologetic. She quit a few months later. I wasn't surprised.
They wanted me to add the word "more" to the title of the second point. Which makes sense, but that's literally a one minute conversation. My boss was like "Sorry for going behind your back. I didn't realize you were going to find out."
To be fair, I understand where they are coming from. It's an reaction all marginalized groups share. My version is when white authors write about PoC issues. But I voice my complaints by tweeting at them. ;)
It sounds like you're saying it's fine to be racist against whites, but offensive to do the same thing to your personal "in-group." Little ironic, lol.
He thinks I'm racist for quoting wikipedia. I've met people like him at work. Overly sensitive people is exactly why I don't want to write about race issues.
Often, when people are referring to racism, they're referring specifically to Institutional racism. As a general rule (because everything is naturally full of gray areas) it's considered to be impossible for whites to experience institutional racism in countries where we're the majority. So while a PoC could certainly be bigoted against whites, it wouldn't be accurate to say that they're inflicting institutional racism on them.
" As a general rule (because everything is naturally full of gray areas) it's considered to be impossible for whites to experience institutional racism in countries where we're the majority."
Sorry, what? Considered by whom? Because we should have a word with these people about how unimaginative they are.
For one thing, there are plenty of ways a member of group X could experience institutional racism in an X-majority country. Perhaps they live in a Y-dominated region of the country, or work for a Y-owned company, or group Y has more political/economic/cultural power in society despite being a minority, or they work for an organization whose policy is to hire and promote Y preferentially.
More generally, I don't see the purpose of desperately insisting that institutional racism can never affect group X. To say that group X can be harmed certainly doesn't mean that group Y isn't harmed more. It's a weird and pointless linguistic game that harms the purpose of achieving equality of opportunity by gratuitously driving away allies.
I know it's lazy to just link to a Wikipedia article on the subject, but I'm going to anyway, because I'm too lazy to address all the things in your post when you can do your own research.
The fact is, the occasional inconvenience on whites in America (as a convenient example) from occasional pockets of bigoted blacks is fundamentally different from the regular impact on blacks from the institutionalized racist tendencies in society.
Sorry, no, I'm not going to click on that link. As you pretty much realized yourself, just linking to Wikipedia and saying "read this, I'm too lazy to explain my point of view" is not going to convince anyone of anything. This is a discussion, not a classroom. You're going to have to do the legwork yourself.
Institutional racism is defined (according to the wikipedia article you link to) as unequal statistical outcomes and unequal statistical treatment (e.g. group X being more likely to live in poor neighborhoods), sliced by race.
White people can certainly experience this in countries where they are the majority. As an example taken directly from the wikipedia article, white people significantly underperform Asians on standardized tests, they are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, have worse health, and are disproportionately likely to be "targeted" by police (also they commit less crime).
Can you cite any piece of evidence in favor of institutional racism by whites against blacks that doesn't also support institutional racism by asians against whites?
Colored person here as well. I'd advise you to discuss these matters under an assumed name. Discussing them on a public forum (such as a company blog) is generally a bad idea (if you want to keep your job). Of course you can go full militant but you have to understand the risks. Personally, I need to pay the bills right now, but as soon as I accumulate some F* U money, it's on :)
And that sucks. We need you to share your experiences. We need to feel your struggles and understand them well enough to identify with them, and really internalize, "what if that were me?"
When that happens, most of us respond with empathy and because we understand, support and activism to make it better and have one another's backs.
Progress happens, and things get better. I believe in all of that deeply. I've paid hard to stand for it too. More than once.
Some of us respond with rage, hate, and all manner of emotions, and that sucks. It's not like any of us actually picks these things, so how does it make any real sense to be held to account for them? (Color, gender, gay, etc...)
It is, like you say, a contact sport with very real implications for us all. To me, that contact is good. It helps to understand others and it can help to keep the worst in check for fear of consequences too.
But there is a lot of difficulty in that quiet response one just can't quite pin down... fired one day, for example.
I'm an ordinary white guy, and I've had this sort of thing happen when I've gone to bat for someone who needed it.
Making things better is expensive in this way, and I'm not entirely sure we can avoid it. We may blunt it some, but people remain exposed all the same.
I understand your fear. It has a real basis and all of us must weigh these things. At some points in life, maybe we can take the hit. At others, it may cost too much.
I don't have answers, other than to say there are a lot of us who get it.
Thanks for this. It is indeed very difficult for most people to identify with and internalize the struggles of those stuck in the margins of society. It takes concerted effort and is not something that comes easily to most people. That's why discussions are important.
Yeah. A lot of people don't want to either. Going there can often lead to questions about the self and character and other things... I went through that. Small town ignorance, married a wonderful woman who some how saw better in me, and a lot of introspection on car rides home to shake it.
Doing that hurts and it's scary, but it also rewards one with security and empathy needed to understand just how completely unacceptable bigotry, racism, etc... really are too.
The triggers for that so very often happen by another person, a target, sharing.
I also feel compelled to write about race issues. I don't write about them, though-- the issue is too poisoned to even approach if you aren't the correct race. I churn quietly instead.
There is no correct race, you just need to do your homework. Plenty of white people write about race. You just have to have a sound argument, based in actual study of race. If you're just going to regurgitate ancient stereotypes then yeah, people will criticize you. If you are unable to have a conversation about your views with a person of another race you probably haven't done enough homework yet.
If you don't want to take the time to do that, that's fine. But don't churn. And don't blame other people.
I'm a white male and I feel totally confident expressing my opinions on race and gender, including opinions that go contrary to mainstream feminist and anti-racist positions. You might be surprised to learn that women and people of color are not unified in their beliefs about race and sex.
But that's only because I've taken the time to listen very carefully to criticism, to listen particularly carefully and gently when someone is telling me something that seems wrong, and do my own research. It's not just a matter of watching the world go by and having an opinion.
The only response I've read that makes sense. I'm not anti-white people, I'm anti-"white supremacy" and institutional racism. I have plenty of white friends who know what the deal is, that's why I'm friends with them. For the rest, no amount of sophistication or refinement is going to mask your profound ignorance on the topic.
This is why there's a lot of avoidance of the topic. Frankly most people don't know what they are talking about. I frequent a forum that's filled with "PoC" and we have a lot of arguments in our ranks too.
You're being dishonest here. Your choice of words paints a certain picture, but we all know what kind of people get people fired for their controversial opinions, and they wouldn't go after a self-described poc for talking about race. The example you give further down (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859834) shows that you know how it works in practice, which is why I'm saying "dishonest" rather than "confused".
This is a startup opportunity and can be solved through UX and richer moderation tools. UX influences user behavior. One small example, a richer moderation system that captures -1 because violation of HN guideline #6 "avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them could short circuit entire flamewar threads. I think a psychologist could probably build the right UX to get top 1% expertise to generate incredible discussions reliably and funnel the 99% peanut gallery off to the side where they can happily contribute too. I would have liked to see reddit build this but they have had years and years to do something interesting, i guess they are too big to innovate now
good rules and UI can help, but good UI won't change the way people are, and for any given set of rules, people motivated by strong emotions will find creative ways to break the rules to get their needs satisfied.
the only 100% reliable solution is to completely remove their freedom of expression (eg, with an all-powerful moderator, whose interpretation of the rules is law).
I get the feeling a reactionary effect has been an increase of traffic on anonymous image boards like 4chan. There the only value you have is in your argument; there is no profile to judge.
People can say whatever they want there - and they certainly do - but if their argument is invalid or poorly constructed it is shot down or ignored, which serves as a lesson about the strength of a point made in a sterile environment. Of course there are plenty of trolls and people who argue the opposite point for the lulz, but that's just a cost of the medium.
There is no perfect form of communication. If there was, we'd all be using it.
Even though I have long ago given up imageboards, this is basically what I came to say. If you think the problem of self censorship due to judgement is the problem, publish anonymously and go hog wild.
I would much rather we have an anonymous set of opinions (because to be quite honest, I will never meet most of you, or be able to connect on a personal level, even if you are awesome) than a people looking to appeal to the crowd.
Unfortunately on 4chan et all this ends up making certain ideas the same as an established figure, ideas(memes in this community) which propagate whether or not they are good, just because they are established.
"The defensive writing style also encourages another sort of ugliness, which is that “avoiding saying something wrong” becomes a primary focus of the writing, rather than communicating or exploring ideas which the author might himself be unsure of."
One thing that's great about Gwern Branwen's writing is that Gwern's essays are accompanied by a "belief tag". That tag gives the ability to say "This essay is exploratory; I don't have a high degree of confidence that it's canonically true." Details here: http://www.gwern.net/About#belief-tags
Having the option to dissociate ideas from one's person can give a lot of freedom to put contrarian ideas out there and spark debate in search of the Truth without fearing personal attack. Indeed, one of the things that I consider to make a healthy company culture is that ideas can be criticized without the people behind the ideas feeling criticized themselves.
It's one of the surprising side-effects of the Internet that anything whatsoever you might say in a public forum can potentially offend someone, somewhere, somehow.
you're being down voted because your response does not contribute to the discussion; we all get it, people can feel offended from almost any statement - that is the point of this article.
You can look at this positively and that if someone gets offended then at least people are reading your work. It is very disheartening when you take the time to write something thoughtful and you get no response at all.
This has been turned into art by professional media outlets. That's the whole point of almost every single article they publish - the more people they can outrage or offend, the more people read and thus the more ad money flows in.
> It is very disheartening when you take the time to write something thoughtful and you get no response at all.
Scott Alexander explored this topic in [0]. He also laments the fact that the posts he considers most valuable are read the least, while his most controversial ones are also the most popular. He even has a nice graph of it[1].
I've been banned from a few forums for not toeing the line on the moderator's personal agenda. It comes with the territory of discovering as you get older that other people are sometimes just crazy and you shouldn't feed the crazy.
I mean that literally. These people have mental health issues and they want you to bend over backwards to accommodate them out of a sense of guilt or something. You shouldn't do it. You're just enabling the sickness. It's like those guys who keep running out for more Twinkies even after their partner has grown so large that they can't fit through the door of the bedroom and are trapped.
If someone is claiming that your use of regular English adverbs is triggering their PTSD then they are the ones with the problem, not you.
How about introducing a simple convention for indicating your degree of belief in similar manner to the sarcasm indicator /s: One could write for example /p1 .. /p9 to refer to the probabilities 0.01% .. 99.9%.
That could resolve a lot of issues that occur in text communication. /p7
Funnily enough, that was an oft-ridiculed approach taken by IT industry analysts Gartner for many years. $NEWTECH will achieve > 50% penetration within 5 years. p = .65
I absolutely love the "belief tags" / "epistemic status" annotations. Gwern stole his "belief tags" from[0] (I link it because there's a cool article there worth checking out), and Scott Alexander has also adopted them.
This sort of matches the way I personally thing about information and my own opinions. Back in my head I always have this feeling of "degree of confidence", of how sure I am about what I'm saying, and it's often hard to express it in the speech itself. It fits perfectly as meta-data / qualification. Saying once, "this is a thought I'm playing with, I'm not sure either way" beats having to qualify every sentence with "maybe".
Also, I have most fun reading arguments that sound totally convincing to me but are tagged by author as something he doesn't have high confidence in. I end up having to figure out how this smart guy just convinced me of something he himself isn't sure about.
It seems that many people who I would call "intellectually honest" end up developing speech patterns to avoid (1) speaking in absolutes; and (2) making statements of opinion articulated as statements of fact. An example of (1) is to use the words "many" or "most" instead of "all". An example of (2) is to start opinions with "I think".
Those speech patterns, though, can lead to writing which is bland and less than forceful, full of justifications with no interesting assertions to be found. One huge plus of this belief metadata, as you note, is that it frees the author to make bold and daring statements (and hopefully back them up) without committing to the truth of those statements. I think it can make for great writing – the style of strong and passionate assertion mixed with (via the disclaimer) the sensibilities of a reasoned opinion.
I'm having trouble justifying the tradeoff between: "That's well reasoned but far too wishy washy" and "So forceful! So eloquent! Factually wrong but the way you said it completely sold it to me! Amazing!"
Do you actually believe what you wrote? How sure are you that this is an accurate portrayal of your thoughts? Is it true that this trade-off can be best described "Obama vs. Trump"? Do you expect your opinion to change in time, or stay the same?
Write down the answers in a few words, then slap them in brackets at the beginning, and there, you've created your first belief tag :).
So timely. In another HN thread, I simply raised a point that drunk driving wasn't the largest threat to road safety based on statistics, and was labeled an apologist drunk driver.
The real problem is that if you put your ideas out there, and someone says something like that, and you don't respond, they've gotten the last word, and your silence is a patent acceptance of their point (as it would be in a face-to-face debate). So we try to guard our opinions with "This is just my opinion" (duh, whose else opinion would it be?), or try to beat others to the counterpoints, and when you are constantly setting up defenses to your ideas, your idea loses a lot of potency and clarity.
As engineers, we are hardwired to nitpick. Coming up with counter-examples is the default response. Instead, I try to say a supporting example first. This helps me learn from other people's point of view.
Edit: Though I admit I don't do the best job on HN. :/
I agree. Programming is an applied form of constructive logic. A program that works is an example (existence proof) that its specification (a theorem) can be fulfilled (proven). When we review code, we’re generally trying to disprove—looking for ways in which the program doesn’t fulfill the specification.
This is just not true. You are not 'hard wired' to react in such a specific manner, and being an engineer does not mean ripping things apart.
You may be an engineer and choose to make a joke about something. You may be an engineer and something may make you go off and learn about something you didn't know about before. You may be an engineer and react in all sorts of ways to soemthing, nitpick is only one possible outcome.
You are not 'hard wired' to react in such a specific manner, and being an engineer does not mean ripping things apart.
Maybe it's not true for engineering in general, but it certainly is true in software development. When writing code, I am continuously guarding for the totality of my implementation. When reviewing code, I am mainly looking for ways it can fail, corner cases that have been missed, non-total evaluations, etc.
Maybe it's not exactly hardwired, but my nitpicking skills are carefully and purposefully honed.
> Coming up with counter-examples is the default response.
> Instead, I try to say a supporting example first.
I like what you did there. Not just you, it seems many of the comments are coming up with nitpicks or counterexamples. I don't know what that means, I just found it ironic.
I once had a discussion like this with a marketing VP. She didn't understand engineers and how they talked to each other. Conversations between engineers always seemed like arguments to her when in reality they were just poking holes in logic and programs to make things better.
As an analyst, I perfected the art of defensive writing. We had to. Everyone has a vested interest in everything you say. Every way that situations were described, every opinion of what approaches or technologies will/won't work, every product rating, every everything. If not a financial vested interest, then an affinity interest. In the editorial process, we often talked about "hardening" or "bulletproofing" the writing so it could withstand the slings and arrows of relentless criticism.
I've been thinking about that quiet a bit lately. My two random thoughts:
1. I don't think it's strictly bad. More pressure to build coherent and precise arguments is good. It can indeed yield unnecessarily verbose language but I don't think it has to? Inserting qualifiers etc. everywhere is just the most naive way of approaching it, like a newbie programmer using too many nested if statements.
2. We should assume all comments are charitable as well. They are no different, they're just as likely to be misread.
Depending on the situation, some "weasel words" (may, could, probably, etc.) or other ways of adding some fuzz to your arguments are appropriate. But formulating cogent and precise arguments with defensible data and references is better when possible.
I find internet writing to be stimulating in its own way precisely because it is a sort of dash-off writing that does not need to be as precise or exact as would be needed if you were seeking to meet professional standards.
To wit, in law, even in formal contexts, lawyers dish off all sorts of slop in legal briefs, etc. but this really is sub-standard lawyering. To do your job right, you need to meet standards of excellence in making sure you have sound analysis, careful factual recitation, and skilled application of law to facts as you make arguments or seek to achieve some other professional writing goal. This is true as well in less formal professional settings such as writing emails/letters to clients. It may not absolutely matter what you say in terms of precision if a client is not likely to pick up the fine points but it really does matter in terms of maintaining a consistent pride in your professional work. Slop is slop and, when people will evaluate you by how well you are representing a client, it is critical not to be slipshod in your writing.
When writing on the internet, in contrast, you of course want to avoid putting out slop there as well but a lot less precision is needed to make your points. If you make a legal point, it is implied by context that you are making a statement that may not be accurate down to the finest level of detail, that you may be simplifying, or generalizing, or simply venting an opinion that the law may or may not support. Law in itself will vary, even greatly, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and this means that much of what you may be saying is really setting forth broad principles while avoiding a specific application to a given case. For these purposes, there is no need to be defensive, not in the slightest. And I certainly try not to be. Am I ever wrong? Of course, on occasion, yes - I have had a doozie or two in my time, perhaps a number of them. But you try to feel secure about such lapses, knowing that we all err occasionally, and try as a whole to conform to an overall solid record of being as accurate and insightful as possible. While you get the occasional harsh attack, for the most part I have found that people will be charitable knowing that you may have spent no more than 10 or 15 minutes trying to address a sometimes complex topic. Better to give people the benefit of your insights if it is an area where you can do so than it is to leave something in the internet conversion that is wrong or off simply hanging out there. That is a great benefit of the internet. Back in the day, you had to dig deep to find out what people with expertise in their field were thinking and access to this was severely limited. The internet has changed all that. There may be a lot of slop out there but there are also many gems that are there for the taking. As writers, we should be ready to share, if not gems, at least our best thoughts on topics where people might find them helpful.
If I were to stray from my professional topics, then maybe I would be more defensive as well. But the author of this piece emphasizes how the internet may hinder academic writing and I see legal writing as at least broadly similar. So, my experience differs pretty markedly.
There is another perspective to this, which is to appreciate when others have put forth a well-considered argument, and to sometimes relish in the challenge of anticipating the rebuttals and shoring up leaks in your reasoning. Often I will write something out that is somewhat critical, and then I'll think about where people might attack it, and it ends up with a more measured position. I love David Foster Wallace because he was the king of considering all facets of an argument or idea so thoroughly that you can't tell which side he's on (and neither could he).
I would say that the people with the problem that this article describes are the good ones, and they are outnumbered and drowned out in our society by "loudmouths" who don't obsessively consider their statements and who do present their own thoughts and beliefs as factual and/or morally correct, so I would say please do keep qualifying everything and even promoting that type of "defensive" thinking. (The caveat is: don't cater to trolls and the willfully uncharitable, and you have to decide for yourself whether someone is trolling or genuinely trying to make an argument worth responding to [or both], it's tough these days!)
I often think about qualifications like "I believe that...", "It is my opinion that...", "I think that...". Some people argue that they're not necessary, it's implied and obvious, it makes you seem weak, etc., but I disagree. I see so many conflicts created by people communicating their beliefs as facts, and it's not at all obvious that they acknowledge the viability of other opinions.
I've come to realize is that the expected audience is a crucial aspect of the communication requirements. On the internet, the audience is quite wide, and disagreement / outrage usually leads more responses / activity than does agreement and acceptance. I should say, in fact, that agreement leads to further sharing, whereas disagreement leads to comments. Thus, an article that some people agree with and some disagree with, gets re-shared and exposed to a lot of controversy. That eventually finds its way into other outlets, whereby each compelling article has a counter-article somewhere else in addition to all the substance-free vitriolic comments.
What the internet has really done is stop letting us get away with echo chambers, by breaking the walls between them. I think that is a good thing.
I should write a blog post on that :)
PS: This is not new. I think Bertrand Russell said: "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Now, those doubts are reinforced by the threat of being shown wrong. I think it's quite an art to articulate compelling arguments out of factually true statements, and even more of an art to think several steps ahead, choose which statements to focus on in order to draw certain reactions from an audience, and thus build receptivity to your next statements. Daniel Dennett said: You should be able to understand your opponent's arguments so well that you can say it back and they say "I wish I had put it that way". And of course, to do that, we shouldn't just write, we should also read, and all be exposed to the other arguments, instead of the echo chambers that social networks make money off of:
The way I see it, defensive writing is also a kind of self-indulgent, narcissistic behaviour which seeks gratification from always being "correct" and never being proven "wrong".
It requires a certain dose of humility to admit that something you've said was wrong or to accept some parts of the opponent's opinion.
One could say "correct me if I'm wrong" and continue with his thoughts instead of precluding the possibility for outlining an interesting point of view because of a small uncertainty.
It's sort of tangential, but knowing anything I write can be found by Googling my real name has certainly made me write defensively. It's why my main Twitter account is not public.
It's why i occasionally send replies to facebook posts via IRC. Technically quite the opposite of private, but there's a bit of a social convention that it's OK to be a jerk on IRC and that is not only liberating, but also surprisingly detrimental to the xkcd:386 pissing contests that are the root of the defensiveness pchiusano is complaining about.
(disclaimer: IRC is any number of very different places so your experience may vary - oh, how meta-on-topic! And while we're at it: "on IRC, all talk is offensive, not defensive, IRC is part of the internet, therefore the whole post is wrong")
Personally, this whole idea that excessively hedging arguments can be seen as a bad thing is completely new to me. I do it all the time, from a simple AFAIK to explicitly stating all the givens that might be attacked, just in case. I state my opinion, or even just a write a little devil's-advocate "please try to understand how it looks from that perspective" piece, not a properly deweaselified wikipedia entry. But i do like to think of my usage as an enabler for posting bold, speculative ideas. In scientific terms (i'm not a scientist) i would rather be wrong with an outlandish causality hypothesis than with misinterpreted correlation noise. Maybe the knowledge that i am a linguistic offender will help me making the use of defensiveness more deliberate and to the point.
Every YouTube creator has to do this now as well. They "apologize in advance" or qualify just about everything they say to make sure they don't get eviscerated in comments in case they make a mistake or were even just slightly wrong. It's becoming so common, I see it seeping into every day conversation in younger (like 13yo) kids. Not that everyone should go around spouting ignorant opinion, but being terrified of being incorrect isn't good either.
I am fairly new to Y-Combinators Hacker News. Unfortunately, I've run head-long into this very issue on this forum. It ruins the experience.
There is value in communicating figuratively and/or with metaphors. When creatively solving problems, looking for trends or drawing a hypothesis out of the ether, it is often desirable to avoid specifics.
In my opinion, one's inability to comprehend and respond to any given statement at multiple levels limits their upward mobility.
I think that HN is one of the rare forums where this article doesn't apply.
Usually the top comment in a particular thread contains the least hedges and most enthusiastically espouses a particular opinion. The comment is not usually overly bombastic (though it sometimes is). The comment almost always adopts the majority opinion on HN.
Posting a comment not aligned with the majority opinion carries a risk of at most -4 points. I assert that downvotes more often correlate with disagreement than failure to abide by the standards of discourse. Since the penalty is limited, that's okay.
Therefore, if visibility and replies are your goal (who wants to comment without interesting replies?), then it's best to write boldly and concisely with a minimum of hedges.
I do not know if this is true. I have read that, although it only shows up to -4, it can cost you more than that. I have no idea if that information is still true or not. A lot of the algorithms have changed.
It's not just the downvotes. They don't help, but it's also the responses.
There is a major psychological effect from getting attacked for stating an opinion you might hold to heart. As an avid reddit/hn commenter, I feel it often.
I don't really care if someone disagrees with me on something minor, but if it's something I truly believe is important and I see people disagreeing with it left and right and downvoting anything in line with that opinion, it makes me feel weakness and despair.
Weakness: I am overwhelmed by the people disagreeing with me. I can't answer everybody. Not because I don't have the arguments but because it's pointless, won't lead anywhere and will achieve nothing but make me look insane. The "hivemind" effects makes widely-held opinions even stronger and minority opinions even weaker. Alone, I am powerless to counter that.
Despair: Let's say someone thinks gays/black/women/whatever shouldn't [have some human right]. You truly believe that's wrong. If someone says to me "I think women shouldn't have the right to vote" and is impossible to convince, I feel pretty awful about it. I feel like that person is contributing in making the world worse, and I live in that world.
Now what if that's not about some minority-held opinion, but about something far more widespear? What if it's, for example, similarly insensitive and disgusting comments about islam/muslims? I don't just feel awful being around that person, I feel crushed by the amount of people who would agree with it. I'm quite afraid of what happens when such opinion is widely held. I feel like I'm looking at a lifetime of awful and I feel crushed by it.
My fiancée is a muslim. This is empathy kicking in. Not everything affects me that way, but I'm far less likely to comment on something I don't hold to heart.
But yes, I do enjoy HN because the hivemind effect is far more limited. The hidden downvotes and sorting algorithms are a million times better than Reddit's. It's not ideal, but it's still an excellent place to have discussion and a "good enough" place to have debates.
Yes, there is a psychological risk you take when you state an opinion on a topic that is important to you. The more important, the more disagreement hurts.
There isn't much one can do about opinions of others. We all try to keep things civil here, but it doesn't always work. Not immediately, at least. I remember the discussions after the last Paris attack; some comments were awful and literally heartbreaking, and I too was feeling a mix of anger and despair.
> What if it's, for example, similarly insensitive and disgusting comments about islam/muslims? I don't just feel awful being around that person, I feel crushed by the amount of people who would agree with it. I'm quite afraid of what happens when such opinion is widely held. I feel like I'm looking at a lifetime of awful and I feel crushed by it.
I recognize that feeling. Frankly, I prefer hanging on HN so much because it sometimes seems like one of the last few bastions of sanity on the planet. Back after Paris, my Facebook feed was literally breaking my heart, and it was HN that reminded me that not everyone holds harmful beliefs.
Anyway, when you see knee-jerk attacks and hurtful behavior, I recommend judicious use of the downvote and flag buttons. That's what they're for, and they seem to work pretty well at keeping the discourse at proper level.
You raise some excellent points. I have a few minority opinions and I have to essentially avoid some threads because I see how some brave souls who shared an unpopular opinion get vilified. It does hurt to be called names even on the internet. Thanks for replying!
> Posting a comment not aligned with the majority opinion carries a risk of at most -4 points. I assert that downvotes more often correlate with disagreement than failure to abide by the standards of discourse. Since the penalty is limited, that's okay.
A comment can have far worse consequences than the loss of a few karma points. If you say the wrong thing, your reputation and (potentially) your livelihood are at risk. That's why, for anything remotely controversial, I use pseudonymous accounts. It's simply not worth it to have my real-world reputation ruined. I can't imagine the deluge of hate that would descend upon me if some of my views were known; doubly-so for misconstrued versions of them. I can already hear the haters: "Chroma approves of torture!"[1][2], "Chroma is sexist!"[3][4], "Chroma is ageist!"[5] "Chroma hates muslims!"[6][7], "Chroma hates the Amish!"[8], "Chroma hates pilots!"[9], "Chroma wants to slaughter all lions!"[10], "Chroma thinks motorcycle riders are mentally ill!"[11] Etcetera.
That said, I agree with you on defensive writing. When expressing anything controversial, defensive writing is mostly a waste of effort. Simply holding the opinion is cause enough for others to downvote and denigrate. Unless it's something very close to your audience's views, you might as well aim for good prose and avoid hedges.
There is value in communicating figuratively and/or with metaphors. When creatively solving problems, looking for trends or drawing a hypothesis out of the ether, it is often desirable to avoid specifics.
I raised a couple of incredibly pedantic sons. I am someone prone to using metaphors and communicating figuratively. I learned to up my game and use more accurate metaphors that do not count on the audience already having a good idea of what I am talking about so as to let me get away with real hand-wavy, vague comparisons.
My oldest is pretty aspie. In trying to explain anger and social stuff to him, I once tried to talk about anger being like fire and explosions. He knew too much science and not enough social skills. It resulted in him leaping to bizarre conclusions (think: "If you rub two people together, they ignite" type conclusions). I was all "Uhhh. No. Forget I said anything. Let me think about this and get back to you."
If your figure of speech or metaphor is not horrendously sloppy, it can still be used here. If you are getting a lot of flack here for such things, consider the possibility that simply isn't a great comparison point and try to think more clearly about the subject and come up with a better means to express it.
HN can be kind of rough to adjust to at first. So I do have sympathy. But, in general, the overall intent of such practices here is to improve accuracy and level of discussion. It mostly isn't just asshattery.
Since others covered the topic of metaphors, let me give just a quick practical hint instead. Ignore the downvotes. That is, try and detach yourself emotionally from them.
Even the most controversial opinions get a fair hearing if you take little care to keep them civil. Not politically correct, not hedged every other word, just civil. Still, even if Jesus himself were to write a HN comment that goes agaist status quo, he could catch occasional downvotes. Because people are people. But what ultimately matters here is if people engage with your argument. Catching a few downvotes is totally worth it if it leads to a constructive discussion.
And yes, you can expect that even most benign comments will occasionally catch some random downvotes. Your comment may get down to negative karma for a while, but it usually settles back to a positive score within an hour or two. Karma system isn't perfect and people aren't perfect either; hell, it's easy to get downvoted by accident because up and down arrows are way too close to each other, especially on mobile :).
In regards to hedges and weasel words: I never used more weasel words and hedges than when I sold computers at Circuit City. I knew what the policies should be and how we should be able to help customers, but I had no power to actually make that happen so I used tons of should, may, probably, likely, etc.
I hated it and it took me a while to unlearn that way of talking.
I use a lot of what are called weasel words because the reality is that they are the most accurate words. For example, someone buying a lottery ticket will probably lose. I have trouble saying they definitely will because I know there is a slim chance they will win. And if 1 in a 100,000,000+ is enough to make me avoid saying definitely, imagine what chances such as 1 in a 1,000 or 1 in a 100 do to my word choice.
Different perspective: The cost of being wrong is overstated. The cost of offending someone is overstated. Being told you're wrong isn't the worst thing in the world. Being told you've said something offensive won't set you on fire.
I used to be afraid of being told I was wrong or offensive. I took it personally. Now I try to shrug it off and take it as legitimate feedback that doesn't compromise my self-esteem or integrity. Being told you're wrong is better than being wrong and never told you're wrong. Being told you're offensive is enormously better than never being told who you're putting off with your behavior. This holds even when you take into account the unjustified negative feedback.
I try to avoid thinking less of someone for thinking I was wrong, or being offended by what I've done. If I do that, I'm distorting my social reality: I am penalizing people for telling me negative things. I am penalizing people for caring that I'm wrong. I'm penalizing people for telling me that my behavior hurts them. By protecting my ego, I would be hurting my relationships with my peers and social groups.
This is not to say I'm not emotional about the responses I receive. I am quite emotional. If I'm writing in a dry tone, I probably just woke up and don't have access to all my senses yet. In fact I think writing without emotional color is a form of defensiveness: It is yet another way for a writer to hedge and separate themself from their opinion and their reader. I'd rather be close to my words and my listeners than safe from criticism.
Excellent bit of reflective writing and I'm certainly in agreement. For a moment I thought this might be the basic gist of an article I'm working up (re: message boards vs. article/content comments and notions of "community") but glad to see it's a different angle, and complimentary. Guiding over to Pinker's article is an immense help as well, because I'm really digging the term "intellectually unscrupulous" as a nice description of some behaviors I've seen online that are maddening.
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Was that ironic? It sure seems like defensive writing.
On the other hand, I am not adverse to changing my mind on a flip of a good argument.
If I get offended or defensive, it means that my beliefs aren't as ironclad as I thought.
There are some areas that I pretty much don't pay attention though.
Anything concerning creationism, global warming denialism, pro-smoking, god, etc.
I won't waste my time entertaining obviously wrong arguments.
Even such inconsequential things as, for example, pointing out the parent's incorrect choice of "adverse" instead of "averse," which has no bearing on the argument.
There's almost always a mistake, overgeneralization, or convenient shortcut in anything a person says. Holding people to an impossible standard just adds stress all around.
On the internet, you have none of those things, only text. I think we are hitting a wall with our written languages because they can't adequately communicate context. Emoticons are a great evolution in this respect, because I can assign emotional context to some writing with a simple set of characters :).
But when I write a blog post on the web, it's stapled to a bulletin board that has the eyes of the entire world. I have no idea who will read it today, tomorrow, or years from now. I don't know who will take pieces of it out of context and repost them elsewhere.
It is honestly scary. I was going through some old posts of mine a while back and felt like they were funnier and a more brave. Several years have slowly but surely toned me down, often for the worse.
I have to constantly remind myself to be courageous in my writing. I have to remember to focus on how the right reader will experience it, and tune out the wrong ones.
For most of the time, even on Twitter the social network / filter bubble works, if you're not a celebrity. But I am afraid of saying anything non-PC there.
No trawling needed. #hnwatch material is posted every day.
What is wrong with truly being charitable, assuming the absolute best intentions and giving writers the license to deviate a little to let them make a point?
What is wrong with not writing blatantly false statements or calling out wrong statements for being wrong (or, asking for a correction)?
There is a reason compilers cannot take arbitrary text and produce the program you are 'actually' thinking of.
We do get to skip over words and make up our own meanings of them, anyway. :)
"Babies" the group are smarter than any dog too :)
;).
What value is there in such a statement: This dog is at least as smart as this baby?
What does smart even mean?
Precisely. That's why it's better to stick with the principle of charity :).
One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.
To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).
It just seems a bit selfish to me.
One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.
To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).
It's ok. We'll wait.
They wanted me to add the word "more" to the title of the second point. Which makes sense, but that's literally a one minute conversation. My boss was like "Sorry for going behind your back. I didn't realize you were going to find out."
https://www.redfin.com/blog/2014/10/why-i-work-at-redfin-kev...
So really "Sorry you found out I went behind your back".
I know that university admissions PoC don't include Asians, in fact most admissions standards are stacked against them.
Edit: There is a long explanation of why Asians are sometimes excluded. The short answer is racism against Asians.
He thinks I'm racist for quoting wikipedia. I've met people like him at work. Overly sensitive people is exactly why I don't want to write about race issues.
I mean, I think you buy into and identify with a concept that is explicitly, by definition anti-white..
Is that not racist?
--
>This is exactly why I don't want to write about race issues.
Because everyone needs to agree with you about them 100%?
Sorry, what? Considered by whom? Because we should have a word with these people about how unimaginative they are.
For one thing, there are plenty of ways a member of group X could experience institutional racism in an X-majority country. Perhaps they live in a Y-dominated region of the country, or work for a Y-owned company, or group Y has more political/economic/cultural power in society despite being a minority, or they work for an organization whose policy is to hire and promote Y preferentially.
More generally, I don't see the purpose of desperately insisting that institutional racism can never affect group X. To say that group X can be harmed certainly doesn't mean that group Y isn't harmed more. It's a weird and pointless linguistic game that harms the purpose of achieving equality of opportunity by gratuitously driving away allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
The fact is, the occasional inconvenience on whites in America (as a convenient example) from occasional pockets of bigoted blacks is fundamentally different from the regular impact on blacks from the institutionalized racist tendencies in society.
White people can certainly experience this in countries where they are the majority. As an example taken directly from the wikipedia article, white people significantly underperform Asians on standardized tests, they are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, have worse health, and are disproportionately likely to be "targeted" by police (also they commit less crime).
Can you cite any piece of evidence in favor of institutional racism by whites against blacks that doesn't also support institutional racism by asians against whites?
There are contexts where Asians are underrepresented; political representation comes to mind. In those places "people of color" makes more sense.
When that happens, most of us respond with empathy and because we understand, support and activism to make it better and have one another's backs.
Progress happens, and things get better. I believe in all of that deeply. I've paid hard to stand for it too. More than once.
Some of us respond with rage, hate, and all manner of emotions, and that sucks. It's not like any of us actually picks these things, so how does it make any real sense to be held to account for them? (Color, gender, gay, etc...)
It is, like you say, a contact sport with very real implications for us all. To me, that contact is good. It helps to understand others and it can help to keep the worst in check for fear of consequences too.
But there is a lot of difficulty in that quiet response one just can't quite pin down... fired one day, for example.
I'm an ordinary white guy, and I've had this sort of thing happen when I've gone to bat for someone who needed it.
Making things better is expensive in this way, and I'm not entirely sure we can avoid it. We may blunt it some, but people remain exposed all the same.
I understand your fear. It has a real basis and all of us must weigh these things. At some points in life, maybe we can take the hit. At others, it may cost too much.
I don't have answers, other than to say there are a lot of us who get it.
Doing that hurts and it's scary, but it also rewards one with security and empathy needed to understand just how completely unacceptable bigotry, racism, etc... really are too.
The triggers for that so very often happen by another person, a target, sharing.
If you don't want to take the time to do that, that's fine. But don't churn. And don't blame other people.
I'm a white male and I feel totally confident expressing my opinions on race and gender, including opinions that go contrary to mainstream feminist and anti-racist positions. You might be surprised to learn that women and people of color are not unified in their beliefs about race and sex.
But that's only because I've taken the time to listen very carefully to criticism, to listen particularly carefully and gently when someone is telling me something that seems wrong, and do my own research. It's not just a matter of watching the world go by and having an opinion.
This is why there's a lot of avoidance of the topic. Frankly most people don't know what they are talking about. I frequent a forum that's filled with "PoC" and we have a lot of arguments in our ranks too.
the only 100% reliable solution is to completely remove their freedom of expression (eg, with an all-powerful moderator, whose interpretation of the rules is law).
People can say whatever they want there - and they certainly do - but if their argument is invalid or poorly constructed it is shot down or ignored, which serves as a lesson about the strength of a point made in a sterile environment. Of course there are plenty of trolls and people who argue the opposite point for the lulz, but that's just a cost of the medium.
There is no perfect form of communication. If there was, we'd all be using it.
I would much rather we have an anonymous set of opinions (because to be quite honest, I will never meet most of you, or be able to connect on a personal level, even if you are awesome) than a people looking to appeal to the crowd.
Unfortunately on 4chan et all this ends up making certain ideas the same as an established figure, ideas(memes in this community) which propagate whether or not they are good, just because they are established.
"The defensive writing style also encourages another sort of ugliness, which is that “avoiding saying something wrong” becomes a primary focus of the writing, rather than communicating or exploring ideas which the author might himself be unsure of."
One thing that's great about Gwern Branwen's writing is that Gwern's essays are accompanied by a "belief tag". That tag gives the ability to say "This essay is exploratory; I don't have a high degree of confidence that it's canonically true." Details here: http://www.gwern.net/About#belief-tags
Having the option to dissociate ideas from one's person can give a lot of freedom to put contrarian ideas out there and spark debate in search of the Truth without fearing personal attack. Indeed, one of the things that I consider to make a healthy company culture is that ideas can be criticized without the people behind the ideas feeling criticized themselves.
Edit: in case you missed it, this was sarcastic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tndXr-oQxxA
I am optimistic the video has some relevance to this discussion.
https://mises.org/library/pc-about-control-not-etiquette-0
> It is very disheartening when you take the time to write something thoughtful and you get no response at all.
Scott Alexander explored this topic in [0]. He also laments the fact that the posts he considers most valuable are read the least, while his most controversial ones are also the most popular. He even has a nice graph of it[1].
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
[1] - http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/sschits.png
I mean that literally. These people have mental health issues and they want you to bend over backwards to accommodate them out of a sense of guilt or something. You shouldn't do it. You're just enabling the sickness. It's like those guys who keep running out for more Twinkies even after their partner has grown so large that they can't fit through the door of the bedroom and are trapped.
If someone is claiming that your use of regular English adverbs is triggering their PTSD then they are the ones with the problem, not you.
Those that ban people out of forums believe they are following same principle.
That could resolve a lot of issues that occur in text communication. /p7
This sort of matches the way I personally thing about information and my own opinions. Back in my head I always have this feeling of "degree of confidence", of how sure I am about what I'm saying, and it's often hard to express it in the speech itself. It fits perfectly as meta-data / qualification. Saying once, "this is a thought I'm playing with, I'm not sure either way" beats having to qualify every sentence with "maybe".
Also, I have most fun reading arguments that sound totally convincing to me but are tagged by author as something he doesn't have high confidence in. I end up having to figure out how this smart guy just convinced me of something he himself isn't sure about.
[0] - http://webcitation.org/6DuYcqyQ3
It seems that many people who I would call "intellectually honest" end up developing speech patterns to avoid (1) speaking in absolutes; and (2) making statements of opinion articulated as statements of fact. An example of (1) is to use the words "many" or "most" instead of "all". An example of (2) is to start opinions with "I think".
Those speech patterns, though, can lead to writing which is bland and less than forceful, full of justifications with no interesting assertions to be found. One huge plus of this belief metadata, as you note, is that it frees the author to make bold and daring statements (and hopefully back them up) without committing to the truth of those statements. I think it can make for great writing – the style of strong and passionate assertion mixed with (via the disclaimer) the sensibilities of a reasoned opinion.
It's Obama vs. Trump.
Write down the answers in a few words, then slap them in brackets at the beginning, and there, you've created your first belief tag :).
The real problem is that if you put your ideas out there, and someone says something like that, and you don't respond, they've gotten the last word, and your silence is a patent acceptance of their point (as it would be in a face-to-face debate). So we try to guard our opinions with "This is just my opinion" (duh, whose else opinion would it be?), or try to beat others to the counterpoints, and when you are constantly setting up defenses to your ideas, your idea loses a lot of potency and clarity.
As the author says, wilful misinterpretation seems to be the name of the game, and we almost all seem to be guilty of it from time to time.
It's easy to be a dick when you're not looking someone in the eyes.
Edit: Though I admit I don't do the best job on HN. :/
This is just not true. You are not 'hard wired' to react in such a specific manner, and being an engineer does not mean ripping things apart.
You may be an engineer and choose to make a joke about something. You may be an engineer and something may make you go off and learn about something you didn't know about before. You may be an engineer and react in all sorts of ways to soemthing, nitpick is only one possible outcome.
Maybe it's not true for engineering in general, but it certainly is true in software development. When writing code, I am continuously guarding for the totality of my implementation. When reviewing code, I am mainly looking for ways it can fail, corner cases that have been missed, non-total evaluations, etc.
Maybe it's not exactly hardwired, but my nitpicking skills are carefully and purposefully honed.
I like what you did there. Not just you, it seems many of the comments are coming up with nitpicks or counterexamples. I don't know what that means, I just found it ironic.
1. I don't think it's strictly bad. More pressure to build coherent and precise arguments is good. It can indeed yield unnecessarily verbose language but I don't think it has to? Inserting qualifiers etc. everywhere is just the most naive way of approaching it, like a newbie programmer using too many nested if statements.
2. We should assume all comments are charitable as well. They are no different, they're just as likely to be misread.
Depending on the situation, some "weasel words" (may, could, probably, etc.) or other ways of adding some fuzz to your arguments are appropriate. But formulating cogent and precise arguments with defensible data and references is better when possible.
To wit, in law, even in formal contexts, lawyers dish off all sorts of slop in legal briefs, etc. but this really is sub-standard lawyering. To do your job right, you need to meet standards of excellence in making sure you have sound analysis, careful factual recitation, and skilled application of law to facts as you make arguments or seek to achieve some other professional writing goal. This is true as well in less formal professional settings such as writing emails/letters to clients. It may not absolutely matter what you say in terms of precision if a client is not likely to pick up the fine points but it really does matter in terms of maintaining a consistent pride in your professional work. Slop is slop and, when people will evaluate you by how well you are representing a client, it is critical not to be slipshod in your writing.
When writing on the internet, in contrast, you of course want to avoid putting out slop there as well but a lot less precision is needed to make your points. If you make a legal point, it is implied by context that you are making a statement that may not be accurate down to the finest level of detail, that you may be simplifying, or generalizing, or simply venting an opinion that the law may or may not support. Law in itself will vary, even greatly, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and this means that much of what you may be saying is really setting forth broad principles while avoiding a specific application to a given case. For these purposes, there is no need to be defensive, not in the slightest. And I certainly try not to be. Am I ever wrong? Of course, on occasion, yes - I have had a doozie or two in my time, perhaps a number of them. But you try to feel secure about such lapses, knowing that we all err occasionally, and try as a whole to conform to an overall solid record of being as accurate and insightful as possible. While you get the occasional harsh attack, for the most part I have found that people will be charitable knowing that you may have spent no more than 10 or 15 minutes trying to address a sometimes complex topic. Better to give people the benefit of your insights if it is an area where you can do so than it is to leave something in the internet conversion that is wrong or off simply hanging out there. That is a great benefit of the internet. Back in the day, you had to dig deep to find out what people with expertise in their field were thinking and access to this was severely limited. The internet has changed all that. There may be a lot of slop out there but there are also many gems that are there for the taking. As writers, we should be ready to share, if not gems, at least our best thoughts on topics where people might find them helpful.
If I were to stray from my professional topics, then maybe I would be more defensive as well. But the author of this piece emphasizes how the internet may hinder academic writing and I see legal writing as at least broadly similar. So, my experience differs pretty markedly.
Just my two cents.
I would say that the people with the problem that this article describes are the good ones, and they are outnumbered and drowned out in our society by "loudmouths" who don't obsessively consider their statements and who do present their own thoughts and beliefs as factual and/or morally correct, so I would say please do keep qualifying everything and even promoting that type of "defensive" thinking. (The caveat is: don't cater to trolls and the willfully uncharitable, and you have to decide for yourself whether someone is trolling or genuinely trying to make an argument worth responding to [or both], it's tough these days!)
I often think about qualifications like "I believe that...", "It is my opinion that...", "I think that...". Some people argue that they're not necessary, it's implied and obvious, it makes you seem weak, etc., but I disagree. I see so many conflicts created by people communicating their beliefs as facts, and it's not at all obvious that they acknowledge the viability of other opinions.
I've come to realize is that the expected audience is a crucial aspect of the communication requirements. On the internet, the audience is quite wide, and disagreement / outrage usually leads more responses / activity than does agreement and acceptance. I should say, in fact, that agreement leads to further sharing, whereas disagreement leads to comments. Thus, an article that some people agree with and some disagree with, gets re-shared and exposed to a lot of controversy. That eventually finds its way into other outlets, whereby each compelling article has a counter-article somewhere else in addition to all the substance-free vitriolic comments.
What the internet has really done is stop letting us get away with echo chambers, by breaking the walls between them. I think that is a good thing.
I should write a blog post on that :)
PS: This is not new. I think Bertrand Russell said: "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Now, those doubts are reinforced by the threat of being shown wrong. I think it's quite an art to articulate compelling arguments out of factually true statements, and even more of an art to think several steps ahead, choose which statements to focus on in order to draw certain reactions from an audience, and thus build receptivity to your next statements. Daniel Dennett said: You should be able to understand your opponent's arguments so well that you can say it back and they say "I wish I had put it that way". And of course, to do that, we shouldn't just write, we should also read, and all be exposed to the other arguments, instead of the echo chambers that social networks make money off of:
https://sealedministries.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/3-reasons-...
It requires a certain dose of humility to admit that something you've said was wrong or to accept some parts of the opponent's opinion.
Which is one reason many people prefer anonymity and pseudonyms!
Nothing about me can be found by Googling my real name. As far as the internet is concerned - I don't actually exist.
(disclaimer: IRC is any number of very different places so your experience may vary - oh, how meta-on-topic! And while we're at it: "on IRC, all talk is offensive, not defensive, IRC is part of the internet, therefore the whole post is wrong")
Personally, this whole idea that excessively hedging arguments can be seen as a bad thing is completely new to me. I do it all the time, from a simple AFAIK to explicitly stating all the givens that might be attacked, just in case. I state my opinion, or even just a write a little devil's-advocate "please try to understand how it looks from that perspective" piece, not a properly deweaselified wikipedia entry. But i do like to think of my usage as an enabler for posting bold, speculative ideas. In scientific terms (i'm not a scientist) i would rather be wrong with an outlandish causality hypothesis than with misinterpreted correlation noise. Maybe the knowledge that i am a linguistic offender will help me making the use of defensiveness more deliberate and to the point.
There is value in communicating figuratively and/or with metaphors. When creatively solving problems, looking for trends or drawing a hypothesis out of the ether, it is often desirable to avoid specifics.
In my opinion, one's inability to comprehend and respond to any given statement at multiple levels limits their upward mobility.
Usually the top comment in a particular thread contains the least hedges and most enthusiastically espouses a particular opinion. The comment is not usually overly bombastic (though it sometimes is). The comment almost always adopts the majority opinion on HN.
Posting a comment not aligned with the majority opinion carries a risk of at most -4 points. I assert that downvotes more often correlate with disagreement than failure to abide by the standards of discourse. Since the penalty is limited, that's okay.
Therefore, if visibility and replies are your goal (who wants to comment without interesting replies?), then it's best to write boldly and concisely with a minimum of hedges.
It does apply. Maybe less so years ago, but it still applies. I've seen it often enough, and recognized the problems as ones I routinely see here.
I do not know if this is true. I have read that, although it only shows up to -4, it can cost you more than that. I have no idea if that information is still true or not. A lot of the algorithms have changed.
There is a major psychological effect from getting attacked for stating an opinion you might hold to heart. As an avid reddit/hn commenter, I feel it often.
I don't really care if someone disagrees with me on something minor, but if it's something I truly believe is important and I see people disagreeing with it left and right and downvoting anything in line with that opinion, it makes me feel weakness and despair.
Weakness: I am overwhelmed by the people disagreeing with me. I can't answer everybody. Not because I don't have the arguments but because it's pointless, won't lead anywhere and will achieve nothing but make me look insane. The "hivemind" effects makes widely-held opinions even stronger and minority opinions even weaker. Alone, I am powerless to counter that.
Despair: Let's say someone thinks gays/black/women/whatever shouldn't [have some human right]. You truly believe that's wrong. If someone says to me "I think women shouldn't have the right to vote" and is impossible to convince, I feel pretty awful about it. I feel like that person is contributing in making the world worse, and I live in that world.
Now what if that's not about some minority-held opinion, but about something far more widespear? What if it's, for example, similarly insensitive and disgusting comments about islam/muslims? I don't just feel awful being around that person, I feel crushed by the amount of people who would agree with it. I'm quite afraid of what happens when such opinion is widely held. I feel like I'm looking at a lifetime of awful and I feel crushed by it.
My fiancée is a muslim. This is empathy kicking in. Not everything affects me that way, but I'm far less likely to comment on something I don't hold to heart.
But yes, I do enjoy HN because the hivemind effect is far more limited. The hidden downvotes and sorting algorithms are a million times better than Reddit's. It's not ideal, but it's still an excellent place to have discussion and a "good enough" place to have debates.
Yes, there is a psychological risk you take when you state an opinion on a topic that is important to you. The more important, the more disagreement hurts.
There isn't much one can do about opinions of others. We all try to keep things civil here, but it doesn't always work. Not immediately, at least. I remember the discussions after the last Paris attack; some comments were awful and literally heartbreaking, and I too was feeling a mix of anger and despair.
> What if it's, for example, similarly insensitive and disgusting comments about islam/muslims? I don't just feel awful being around that person, I feel crushed by the amount of people who would agree with it. I'm quite afraid of what happens when such opinion is widely held. I feel like I'm looking at a lifetime of awful and I feel crushed by it.
I recognize that feeling. Frankly, I prefer hanging on HN so much because it sometimes seems like one of the last few bastions of sanity on the planet. Back after Paris, my Facebook feed was literally breaking my heart, and it was HN that reminded me that not everyone holds harmful beliefs.
Anyway, when you see knee-jerk attacks and hurtful behavior, I recommend judicious use of the downvote and flag buttons. That's what they're for, and they seem to work pretty well at keeping the discourse at proper level.
Best wishes to you and your fiancée. Stay strong!
A comment can have far worse consequences than the loss of a few karma points. If you say the wrong thing, your reputation and (potentially) your livelihood are at risk. That's why, for anything remotely controversial, I use pseudonymous accounts. It's simply not worth it to have my real-world reputation ruined. I can't imagine the deluge of hate that would descend upon me if some of my views were known; doubly-so for misconstrued versions of them. I can already hear the haters: "Chroma approves of torture!"[1][2], "Chroma is sexist!"[3][4], "Chroma is ageist!"[5] "Chroma hates muslims!"[6][7], "Chroma hates the Amish!"[8], "Chroma hates pilots!"[9], "Chroma wants to slaughter all lions!"[10], "Chroma thinks motorcycle riders are mentally ill!"[11] Etcetera.
That said, I agree with you on defensive writing. When expressing anything controversial, defensive writing is mostly a waste of effort. Simply holding the opinion is cause enough for others to downvote and denigrate. Unless it's something very close to your audience's views, you might as well aim for good prose and avoid hedges.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531577
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8725500
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10443021
4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321440
5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889897
6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9530853
7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879389
8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280711
9. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10417447
10. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10476699
11. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569078
Yes, I agree. I don't use my real name though I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to doxx me.
By the way, those 11 examples were great comments! Thanks for sharing.
I raised a couple of incredibly pedantic sons. I am someone prone to using metaphors and communicating figuratively. I learned to up my game and use more accurate metaphors that do not count on the audience already having a good idea of what I am talking about so as to let me get away with real hand-wavy, vague comparisons.
My oldest is pretty aspie. In trying to explain anger and social stuff to him, I once tried to talk about anger being like fire and explosions. He knew too much science and not enough social skills. It resulted in him leaping to bizarre conclusions (think: "If you rub two people together, they ignite" type conclusions). I was all "Uhhh. No. Forget I said anything. Let me think about this and get back to you."
If your figure of speech or metaphor is not horrendously sloppy, it can still be used here. If you are getting a lot of flack here for such things, consider the possibility that simply isn't a great comparison point and try to think more clearly about the subject and come up with a better means to express it.
HN can be kind of rough to adjust to at first. So I do have sympathy. But, in general, the overall intent of such practices here is to improve accuracy and level of discussion. It mostly isn't just asshattery.
And welcome to HN!
Since others covered the topic of metaphors, let me give just a quick practical hint instead. Ignore the downvotes. That is, try and detach yourself emotionally from them.
Even the most controversial opinions get a fair hearing if you take little care to keep them civil. Not politically correct, not hedged every other word, just civil. Still, even if Jesus himself were to write a HN comment that goes agaist status quo, he could catch occasional downvotes. Because people are people. But what ultimately matters here is if people engage with your argument. Catching a few downvotes is totally worth it if it leads to a constructive discussion.
And yes, you can expect that even most benign comments will occasionally catch some random downvotes. Your comment may get down to negative karma for a while, but it usually settles back to a positive score within an hour or two. Karma system isn't perfect and people aren't perfect either; hell, it's easy to get downvoted by accident because up and down arrows are way too close to each other, especially on mobile :).
I hated it and it took me a while to unlearn that way of talking.
I used to be afraid of being told I was wrong or offensive. I took it personally. Now I try to shrug it off and take it as legitimate feedback that doesn't compromise my self-esteem or integrity. Being told you're wrong is better than being wrong and never told you're wrong. Being told you're offensive is enormously better than never being told who you're putting off with your behavior. This holds even when you take into account the unjustified negative feedback.
I try to avoid thinking less of someone for thinking I was wrong, or being offended by what I've done. If I do that, I'm distorting my social reality: I am penalizing people for telling me negative things. I am penalizing people for caring that I'm wrong. I'm penalizing people for telling me that my behavior hurts them. By protecting my ego, I would be hurting my relationships with my peers and social groups.
This is not to say I'm not emotional about the responses I receive. I am quite emotional. If I'm writing in a dry tone, I probably just woke up and don't have access to all my senses yet. In fact I think writing without emotional color is a form of defensiveness: It is yet another way for a writer to hedge and separate themself from their opinion and their reader. I'd rather be close to my words and my listeners than safe from criticism.