As a matter of writing style, excessive use of hedging makes your writing harder to read. It’s better to hedge once at the beginning of a paragraph and then state the following claims directly, or to hedge explicitly at the top of your article. At SlateStarCodex Scott sometimes puts explicit “Epistemic Status” claims at the top of the article (I first saw this at another site in the LW sphere quite a few years ago, but I can’t remember where, and I’m glad to have seen it spread).
I am definitely guilty of excessive hedging when I write comments or essays, and I always have to go back and edit out “I think” and “it seems” from half my sentences.
While we’re at it, any other good blogs that are only available to read through the Internet Archive? Gabriel Weinberg’s old blog is the only one that comes to my mind.
The original site was muflax.com, but it’s robots.txt disallows the Internet archive. Someone has recovered some of the blog posts and they are posted here. There are also a number of articles at archive.is that have been captured at a later date, which actually show the epistemic status markers I was talking about, described here
As a matter of writing style, excessive use of hedging makes your writing harder to read. It’s better to hedge once at the beginning of a paragraph and then state the following claims directly, or to hedge explicitly at the top of your article. At SlateStarCodex Scott sometimes puts explicit “Epistemic Status” claims at the top of the article (I first saw this at another site in the LW sphere quite a few years ago, but I can’t remember where, and I’m glad to have seen it spread).
I am definitely guilty of excessive hedging when I write comments or essays, and I always have to go back and edit out “I think” and “it seems” from half my sentences.
I stole it from muflax’s since-deleted site (who AFAIK invented it), and I think SSC borrowed it from me.
Yes, Muflax’s site is the one I was thinking of. Sad that they deleted it, it had some very good articles on it as I recall.
What was the URL? Is it in the Internet Archive?
While we’re at it, any other good blogs that are only available to read through the Internet Archive? Gabriel Weinberg’s old blog is the only one that comes to my mind.
The original site was muflax.com, but it’s robots.txt disallows the Internet archive. Someone has recovered some of the blog posts and they are posted here. There are also a number of articles at archive.is that have been captured at a later date, which actually show the epistemic status markers I was talking about, described here