I tried tabooing “should” from my thinking a few years back, and it went quite well. The worst type of “should” I started to notice is one which I don’t think is on that list—it falls on a spectrum between the just world fallacy and the planning fallacy. It’s “should” used epistemically.
It comes up a lot in group discussions at work. Examples:
“As long as we <do thing we probably won’t actually do>, it should be fine.”
“We haven’t tested it much, but it should work.”
“We followed <unreliable documentation>, so it should work.”
In each of these examples, if you substitute “will” or even “will probably” for “should”, then the implicit claim sounds a lot more questionable. But “should” shoves off responsibility, makes it feel like its ok to rely on something, because it’s not our fault if it’s wrong. Even if it’s really likely to be wrong.
To me, this form of “epistemic should” doesn’t feel like a responsibility-dodge at all. To me, it carries a very specific meaning of a particular warning: “my abstract understanding predicts that X will happen, but there are a thousand and one possible gotchas that could render that abstract understanding inapplicable, and I have no specific concrete experience with this particular case, so I attach low confidence to this prediction; caveat emptor”. It is not a shoving off of responsibility, so much as a marker of low confidence, and a warning to everyone not to put their weight down on this prediction.
Of course, if you make such a claim and then proceed to DO put your weight down on the low-confidence prediction without a very explicit decision to gamble in this way, then you really are shoving responsibility under the carpet. But that is not how I have experienced this term being used, either by me or by those around me.
I tried tabooing “should” from my thinking a few years back, and it went quite well. The worst type of “should” I started to notice is one which I don’t think is on that list—it falls on a spectrum between the just world fallacy and the planning fallacy. It’s “should” used epistemically.
It comes up a lot in group discussions at work. Examples:
“As long as we <do thing we probably won’t actually do>, it should be fine.”
“We haven’t tested it much, but it should work.”
“We followed <unreliable documentation>, so it should work.”
In each of these examples, if you substitute “will” or even “will probably” for “should”, then the implicit claim sounds a lot more questionable. But “should” shoves off responsibility, makes it feel like its ok to rely on something, because it’s not our fault if it’s wrong. Even if it’s really likely to be wrong.
To me, this form of “epistemic should” doesn’t feel like a responsibility-dodge at all. To me, it carries a very specific meaning of a particular warning: “my abstract understanding predicts that X will happen, but there are a thousand and one possible gotchas that could render that abstract understanding inapplicable, and I have no specific concrete experience with this particular case, so I attach low confidence to this prediction; caveat emptor”. It is not a shoving off of responsibility, so much as a marker of low confidence, and a warning to everyone not to put their weight down on this prediction.
Of course, if you make such a claim and then proceed to DO put your weight down on the low-confidence prediction without a very explicit decision to gamble in this way, then you really are shoving responsibility under the carpet. But that is not how I have experienced this term being used, either by me or by those around me.