I think your meaning would be clear, but “everyone knows what this straightforwardly false thing that I said really meant” is insufficient for a subculture trying to be precise and accurate and converge on truth. Seems like more LWers are on your side than on mine on that question, but that’s not news. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s a strawman to pretend that “please don’t say a clearly false thing” is me insisting on “please include all possible qualifiers.” I just wish you hadn’t said a clearly false thing, is all.
Natural language is not math, it’s inherently ambiguous and it’s not realistically possible to always be precise without implicitly assuming anything about the reader’s understanding of the context. That said, it seems like I wasn’t sufficiently precise in this case, so I edited my comment. Thank you for the correction.
insufficient for a subculture trying to be precise and accurate and converge on truth
The tradeoff is with verbosity and difficulty of communication, it’s not always a straightforward Pareto improvement. So in this case I fully agree with dropping “everyone” or replacing it with a more accurate qualifier. But I disagree with a general principle that would discount ease for a person who is trained and talented in relevant ways. New habits of thought that become intuitive are improvements, checklists and other deliberative rituals that slow down thinking need merit that overcomes their considerable cost.
I think your meaning would be clear, but “everyone knows what this straightforwardly false thing that I said really meant” is insufficient for a subculture trying to be precise and accurate and converge on truth. Seems like more LWers are on your side than on mine on that question, but that’s not news. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s a strawman to pretend that “please don’t say a clearly false thing” is me insisting on “please include all possible qualifiers.” I just wish you hadn’t said a clearly false thing, is all.
Natural language is not math, it’s inherently ambiguous and it’s not realistically possible to always be precise without implicitly assuming anything about the reader’s understanding of the context. That said, it seems like I wasn’t sufficiently precise in this case, so I edited my comment. Thank you for the correction.
The tradeoff is with verbosity and difficulty of communication, it’s not always a straightforward Pareto improvement. So in this case I fully agree with dropping “everyone” or replacing it with a more accurate qualifier. But I disagree with a general principle that would discount ease for a person who is trained and talented in relevant ways. New habits of thought that become intuitive are improvements, checklists and other deliberative rituals that slow down thinking need merit that overcomes their considerable cost.