Policy debates (at any level—household to global) are orders of magnitude more complex than simpler examples, and there’s probably no avoiding both rhetorical tactics and model compression that intermix as ambiguity, with implicature as a common way of dealing with that ambiguity.
I’m not really against rhetorical tactics in the sense of being strategic with one’s words; I’m against shortsighted rhetorical tactics which stop the speaker themselves from realizing the truth, or burn the commons by inserting lies into the public discourse, etc. Most rhetorical tactics are actually quite transparent if you take a moment to try and apply logically similar arguments to politically-different examples, etc. (I’m not saying rhetorical tactics are automatically OK if they don’t fit into that category; but I am saying that most rhetorical tactics just wouldn’t work at all in a world where they were uncommon and listeners applied ordinary truth standards to discourse rather than applying the current rhetoric-friendly rules.) Or to put it a different way: imho, all one needs to do to (mostly) eliminate (most) empty rhetoric is establish common knowledge (or close to common knowledge) about those rhetorical patterns.
(On the other hand, I agree that it’s practically impossible to eliminate all ambiguity, particularly what’s due to model compression.)
I’m not really against rhetorical tactics in the sense of being strategic with one’s words; I’m against shortsighted rhetorical tactics which stop the speaker themselves from realizing the truth, or burn the commons by inserting lies into the public discourse, etc. Most rhetorical tactics are actually quite transparent if you take a moment to try and apply logically similar arguments to politically-different examples, etc. (I’m not saying rhetorical tactics are automatically OK if they don’t fit into that category; but I am saying that most rhetorical tactics just wouldn’t work at all in a world where they were uncommon and listeners applied ordinary truth standards to discourse rather than applying the current rhetoric-friendly rules.) Or to put it a different way: imho, all one needs to do to (mostly) eliminate (most) empty rhetoric is establish common knowledge (or close to common knowledge) about those rhetorical patterns.
(On the other hand, I agree that it’s practically impossible to eliminate all ambiguity, particularly what’s due to model compression.)