No it is not a fallacy to use abbreviations correctly. I don’t think anyone said it was.
It can be a failure of communication to use even correct abbreviations the audience is not familiar with. And invoking the Mind Projection Fallacy, implicitly pointing out that the ignorance is in the mind of the reader who doesn’t get it, misses the point that the communication failure lies in the failure to account for the probable ignorance of some portion of the audience, and communicate the point anyways by using full English words, which is rightly assigned to the commenter that used the abbreviation.
Of course, I understand that you did not get all that from the phrase “deliberately obscure”, which itself is the sort of vague accusation I think we should avoid. (And I also doubt the obscurity was deliberate.)
I think the fallacy Nominull committed was the assumption that any complaint that something is confusing is committing the Mind Projection Fallacy because the confusion is really in the mind, when really, the complaint is about actual properties of the “confusing” thing that contributed to the confusion in the mind.
Though this is not quite the issue I was talking about in the post. It is more like what PhilGoetz was describing (which is not surprising, as that was a response to Nominull’s comment). That is, Nominull did state how a detail of the fallacy described Phil’s comment, but I think that explanation missed the point.
No it is not a fallacy to use abbreviations correctly. I don’t think anyone said it was.
It can be a failure of communication to use even correct abbreviations the audience is not familiar with. And invoking the Mind Projection Fallacy, implicitly pointing out that the ignorance is in the mind of the reader who doesn’t get it, misses the point that the communication failure lies in the failure to account for the probable ignorance of some portion of the audience, and communicate the point anyways by using full English words, which is rightly assigned to the commenter that used the abbreviation.
Of course, I understand that you did not get all that from the phrase “deliberately obscure”, which itself is the sort of vague accusation I think we should avoid. (And I also doubt the obscurity was deliberate.)
I apologize for using the phrase “deliberately obscure”.
Do you agree that Nominull was right? I got the impression from this that you thought a genuine fallacy had been committed.
I think the fallacy Nominull committed was the assumption that any complaint that something is confusing is committing the Mind Projection Fallacy because the confusion is really in the mind, when really, the complaint is about actual properties of the “confusing” thing that contributed to the confusion in the mind.
Though this is not quite the issue I was talking about in the post. It is more like what PhilGoetz was describing (which is not surprising, as that was a response to Nominull’s comment). That is, Nominull did state how a detail of the fallacy described Phil’s comment, but I think that explanation missed the point.