This may be a bit of a pedantic comment, but I’m a bit confused by how your comment starts:
I’ve done over 200 hours of research on this topic and have read basically all the sources the article cites. That said, I don’t agree with all of the claims.
The “That said, …” part seems to imply that what follows is surprising. As though the reader expects you to agree with all the claims. But isn’t the default presumption that, if you’ve done a whole bunch of research into some controversial question, that the evidence is mixed?
In other words, when I hear, “I’ve done over 200 hours of research … and have read … all the sources”, I think, “Of course you don’t agree with all the claims!” And it kind of throws me off that you seem to expect your readers to think that you would agree with all the claims.
Is the presumption that someone would only spend a whole bunch of hours researching these claims if they thought they were highly likely to be true? Or that only an uncritical, conspiracy theory true believer would put in so much time into looking into it?
I should have worded that better. I copied that sentence from a facebook post where I had a claim above that sentence that said something like, “I think this article is basically correct in its interpretation of the literature”. The disagreement is about claims the NY mag article made that weren’t backed up by sources / were the authors original speculation. I meant to convey “I think the NY article did a decent summarization of the articles he cited—that being said, while I agree with the general thrust of the article, I think there some points the author speculated about that are likely wrong”
This may be a bit of a pedantic comment, but I’m a bit confused by how your comment starts:
The “That said, …” part seems to imply that what follows is surprising. As though the reader expects you to agree with all the claims. But isn’t the default presumption that, if you’ve done a whole bunch of research into some controversial question, that the evidence is mixed?
In other words, when I hear, “I’ve done over 200 hours of research … and have read … all the sources”, I think, “Of course you don’t agree with all the claims!” And it kind of throws me off that you seem to expect your readers to think that you would agree with all the claims.
Is the presumption that someone would only spend a whole bunch of hours researching these claims if they thought they were highly likely to be true? Or that only an uncritical, conspiracy theory true believer would put in so much time into looking into it?
I should have worded that better. I copied that sentence from a facebook post where I had a claim above that sentence that said something like, “I think this article is basically correct in its interpretation of the literature”. The disagreement is about claims the NY mag article made that weren’t backed up by sources / were the authors original speculation. I meant to convey “I think the NY article did a decent summarization of the articles he cited—that being said, while I agree with the general thrust of the article, I think there some points the author speculated about that are likely wrong”
Got it, thanks for the clarification.