It's why i occasionally send replies to facebook posts via IRC. Technically quite the opposite of private, but there's a bit of a social convention that it's OK

It's why i occasionally send replies to facebook posts via IRC. Technically quite the opposite of private, but there's a bit of a social convention that it's OK to be a jerk on IRC and that is not only liberating, but also surprisingly detrimental to the xkcd:386 pissing contests that are the root of the defensiveness pchiusano is complaining about. (disclaimer: IRC is any number of very different places so your experience may vary - oh, how meta-on-topic! And while we're at it: "on IRC, all talk is offensive, not defensive, IRC is part of the internet, therefore the whole post is wrong") Personally, this whole idea that excessively hedging arguments can be seen as a bad thing is completely new to me. I do it all the time, from a simple AFAIK to explicitly stating all the givens that might be attacked, just in case. I state my opinion, or even just a write a little devil's-advocate "please try to understand how it looks from that perspective" piece, not a properly deweaselified wikipedia entry. But i do like to think of my usage as an enabler for posting bold, speculative ideas. In scientific terms (i'm not a scientist) i would rather be wrong with an outlandish causality hypothesis than with misinterpreted correlation noise. Maybe the knowledge that i am a linguistic offender will help me making the use of defensiveness more deliberate and to the point.