As a rough heuristic: “Everything is fuzzy; every bell curve has tails that matter.”
It’s important to be precise, and it’s important to be nuanced, and it’s important to keep the other elements in view even though the universe is overwhelmingly made of just hydrogen and helium.
But sometimes, it’s also important to simply point straight at the true thing. “Men are larger than women” is a true thing, even though many, many individual women are larger than many, many individual men, and even though the categories “men” and “women” and “larger” are themselves ill-defined and have lots and lots of weirdness around the edges.
I wrote a post that went into lots and lots of careful detail, touching on many possible objections pre-emptively, softening and hedging and accuratizing as many of its claims as I could. I think that post was excellent, and important.
But it did not do the one thing that this post did, which was to stand up straight, raise its voice, and Just. Say. The. Thing.
It was a delight to watch the two posts race for upvotes, and it was a delight, in the end, to see the bolder one win.
As a rough heuristic: “Everything is fuzzy; every bell curve has tails that matter.”
It’s important to be precise, and it’s important to be nuanced, and it’s important to keep the other elements in view even though the universe is overwhelmingly made of just hydrogen and helium.
But sometimes, it’s also important to simply point straight at the true thing. “Men are larger than women” is a true thing, even though many, many individual women are larger than many, many individual men, and even though the categories “men” and “women” and “larger” are themselves ill-defined and have lots and lots of weirdness around the edges.
I wrote a post that went into lots and lots of careful detail, touching on many possible objections pre-emptively, softening and hedging and accuratizing as many of its claims as I could. I think that post was excellent, and important.
But it did not do the one thing that this post did, which was to stand up straight, raise its voice, and Just. Say. The. Thing.
It was a delight to watch the two posts race for upvotes, and it was a delight, in the end, to see the bolder one win.