I have changed my mind, so I won’t try and explain it, if that’s OK?
I now hold to a more moderate but similar view; I will try and explain from scratch.
And I hope it will help me to notice it more often in my writing, so I can remove such statements.
So some words are biasing, and It may happen to be that for some concept, all relevant words are biasing. So “remove all biasing statements from my writing” is a bad heuristic where there are no unbiasing statements, so “remove all biasing statements from my writing when there is a less biasing statement I can use instead” is better.
Sure, that’s up to you. If you prefer to explain only your new viewpoint, that’s fine with me. But does your first statement cover the first three sentences of your previous post only, your initial response on bias only, or all of it? As I mentioned, I wasn’t clear on the first three sentences at all. Still, feel free to explain or not explain however you wish.
I was at first confused by your inclusion(again) of my statement about removing non-informative concepts from my writing. Since I was not talking about removing all biasing statements from my writing, I wasn’t sure why you interpreted it as such. Then I realized that lukeprog’s article was talking about non-informative statements that also happen to be good at biasing readers in a certain direction. However, removing all non-informative statements of this sort is different from removing all biasing statements, which is how I read your interpretation of it. All biasing statements belong to a different set than the set of all non-informative statements. For example, “Policy A causes the unnecessary deaths of 400 people every year” is a highly biasing statement, but also contains information (which may or may not be true, but that is an entirely different concern). On the other hand, “Neurological reasoning occurs using the left side of the brain” could be used as a biasing non-informative statement in the context of convincing someone about a certain brain function (as discussed in lukeprog’s article). Thus, the sets overlap but are not equal. I can see why you would think that removing all biasing statements is impossible. However, I think removing all non-informative statements (especially ones that happen to be strongly biasing) is not impossible, though perhaps difficult depending on the situation.
So it seems we essentially agree about non-biasing statements. They can be reduced, but not entirely eliminated. I am not sure what your position is on non-informative statements, however, as I don’t think you have addressed that. Thanks for the explanation of your views and upvoted for clarifying your position. I think I might understand some of what you are trying to say now. But feel free to let me know if you disagree.
I have changed my mind, so I won’t try and explain it, if that’s OK?
I now hold to a more moderate but similar view; I will try and explain from scratch.
So some words are biasing, and It may happen to be that for some concept, all relevant words are biasing. So “remove all biasing statements from my writing” is a bad heuristic where there are no unbiasing statements, so “remove all biasing statements from my writing when there is a less biasing statement I can use instead” is better.
Sure, that’s up to you. If you prefer to explain only your new viewpoint, that’s fine with me. But does your first statement cover the first three sentences of your previous post only, your initial response on bias only, or all of it? As I mentioned, I wasn’t clear on the first three sentences at all. Still, feel free to explain or not explain however you wish.
I was at first confused by your inclusion(again) of my statement about removing non-informative concepts from my writing. Since I was not talking about removing all biasing statements from my writing, I wasn’t sure why you interpreted it as such. Then I realized that lukeprog’s article was talking about non-informative statements that also happen to be good at biasing readers in a certain direction. However, removing all non-informative statements of this sort is different from removing all biasing statements, which is how I read your interpretation of it. All biasing statements belong to a different set than the set of all non-informative statements. For example, “Policy A causes the unnecessary deaths of 400 people every year” is a highly biasing statement, but also contains information (which may or may not be true, but that is an entirely different concern). On the other hand, “Neurological reasoning occurs using the left side of the brain” could be used as a biasing non-informative statement in the context of convincing someone about a certain brain function (as discussed in lukeprog’s article). Thus, the sets overlap but are not equal. I can see why you would think that removing all biasing statements is impossible. However, I think removing all non-informative statements (especially ones that happen to be strongly biasing) is not impossible, though perhaps difficult depending on the situation.
So it seems we essentially agree about non-biasing statements. They can be reduced, but not entirely eliminated. I am not sure what your position is on non-informative statements, however, as I don’t think you have addressed that. Thanks for the explanation of your views and upvoted for clarifying your position. I think I might understand some of what you are trying to say now. But feel free to let me know if you disagree.