For #1, I’m not sure I agree that not everyone in the room knows. I’ve seen introductions like this at conferences dedicated entirely to proteins where it assumed, rightly or not, that everyone knows the basics. It’s more that not everyone will have the information cached as readily as the specialists. So I agree that sometimes it is more accurate to say “As I’m sure most of you know” but many times, you really are confident that everyone knows, just not necessarily at the tip of their tongue. It serves as a reminder, not actually new knowledge.
I suppose you could argue: since everyone is constantly forgetting little things here and there, even specialists forget some basics some of the time and so, at any given time, when a sufficiently large number of people is considered, it is very likely that at least one person cannot recall some basic fact X. Thus, any phrase like “everybody knows X” is almost certainly false in a big enough room.
With this definition of knowledge, I would agree with you that the phrase should be “as most of you know” or something similarly qualified. But I find this definition of knowledge sort of awkward and unintuitive. There is always some amount of prompting, some kind of cue, some latency required to access my knowledge. I think “remembers after 30 seconds of context” still counts as knowledge, for most practical purposes, especially for things outside my wheelhouse. Perhaps the most accurate phrase would be something like “As everyone has learned but not necessarily kept fresh in their minds...”
For #2, I should have clarified: this was an abbreviated reference to a situation in an apartment complex I lived in in which management regularly reminded everybody that bears would wreak havoc if trash were left out, and people regularly left trash out, to the delight of the bears. So I think in that scenario, everybody involved really did know, they just didn’t care enough.
For #1, I’m not sure I agree that not everyone in the room knows. I’ve seen introductions like this at conferences dedicated entirely to proteins where it assumed, rightly or not, that everyone knows the basics. It’s more that not everyone will have the information cached as readily as the specialists. So I agree that sometimes it is more accurate to say “As I’m sure most of you know” but many times, you really are confident that everyone knows, just not necessarily at the tip of their tongue. It serves as a reminder, not actually new knowledge.
I suppose you could argue: since everyone is constantly forgetting little things here and there, even specialists forget some basics some of the time and so, at any given time, when a sufficiently large number of people is considered, it is very likely that at least one person cannot recall some basic fact X. Thus, any phrase like “everybody knows X” is almost certainly false in a big enough room.
With this definition of knowledge, I would agree with you that the phrase should be “as most of you know” or something similarly qualified. But I find this definition of knowledge sort of awkward and unintuitive. There is always some amount of prompting, some kind of cue, some latency required to access my knowledge. I think “remembers after 30 seconds of context” still counts as knowledge, for most practical purposes, especially for things outside my wheelhouse. Perhaps the most accurate phrase would be something like “As everyone has learned but not necessarily kept fresh in their minds...”
For #2, I should have clarified: this was an abbreviated reference to a situation in an apartment complex I lived in in which management regularly reminded everybody that bears would wreak havoc if trash were left out, and people regularly left trash out, to the delight of the bears. So I think in that scenario, everybody involved really did know, they just didn’t care enough.