okay maybe i’ll ask more directly for opinions on this: sometimes i write tweets stripped of nuance for rhetorical effect, like “X is Y” when my true opinion is closer to “in many cases X may be mostly Y”. i could see arguments that this is bad. thoughts?
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partly this is a rebellion against rationalist speech norms where you have to caveat everything so much to avoid accusations of overconfidence that you end up not saying anything. and partly it is more fun. but perhaps i ought not contribute to loss of nuance in the discourse 🤔
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there’s a specific way i want my writing to be received - as suggestions, hypotheses, thought-provoking shitposts, material for brainstorming - certainly not as any kind of “truth”. but admittedly this is not always clear from how i write, and maybe it’s unrealistic to expect
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(also i’m still in like jail so just assume i’m liking your replies. i’m in some kind of strange variant where i can like once every few minutes or something)
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thanks for the replies everyone. i think the main thing i want here is a certain quality of playfulness that i can aim for without needing to do any caveating (which feels anti-playful to me). like i can make everything sound more like a shitpost instead
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i feel like there are at least two types of useful "caveat-ing" that can be done
there's the rationalist style of caveats, which you well know
and there's also a style a bit more akin to "from a certain perspective, it's like this"
i'm not quite sure how to fully describe it
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i think it's possible to express "this is just one, but an interesting perspective, consider it" without having to explicitly enumerate caveats as if one were a programmer describing the behavior of an API
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There are innumerable ways to avoid misusing "is" the way you describe. Exploring that space could make your writing more poetic, interesting and evocative. Don't be lazy.
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well I'm sorry to whoever I'm not citing but I think what you said was so important. I feel like centralized social media pressures ideas to be as *widely true* as possible, even if that truth is watery or has 'on the other hand' statements & disclaimers shooting out all over it
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yeah i like the first tweet here. i am aiming to write in a way that is at least memorable. there is a style of caveating that makes what you actually have to say impossible to remember
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right, at some point you've built up enough caveats that the only thing you can say is something like "it's complicated. it's difficult to know things. embrace the mystery."
Or at least, good conversation can. The Discourse might not, but it'll take something stronger than waffle words to fix that.
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