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Have you ever met them in person? I've met Jason and David and they're both smart and understand nuance much more than their style of writing conveys. I've de

Have you ever met them in person? I've met Jason and David and they're both smart and understand nuance much more than their style of writing conveys. I've developed a mental filter with for their titles that turns absolutes into mostlys, so "You can't buy ideas or talent" turns into "Buying ideas or talent is rarely successful". "Acquisition Condolences" becomes "Sometimes a big payday includes a soul-crushing earnout where you lose your work environment and your product dies". Joel Spolsky wrote once about how if you're going to make an airtight argument, it takes so long to list all the caveats that all the power is out of it.

scott_s 16y ago
Having to apply a mental filter like that is tiresome. I'd rather just skip it.
- joshuacc 16y ago
  Personally, I find that it's the same mental filter I apply to just about any discussion outside of academic subjects. Very few of the people I know bother to use qualifiers like "usually," "often," etc. Those are just understood.
  - mbreese 16y ago
    I'm an academic, and I rarely use absolutes such as 'always' or 'never' (this sentence being a good case). It's just so ingrained in academia that there are very few absolutes, and that there are almost always edge cases. As such, I refrain from making those statements... But that doesn't make it any less tiring... my mental output filter requires a decent amount of effort to keep going and makes things more verbose...
    - derefr 16y ago
      In fact, since there are so few absolutes, both in and out of academia, it should be taken as a given that any time someone uses one, they are using it as a figure of speech; to actually come to their true, basically-now-jargon meanings of universal quantification, the speaker must add further words. It's basic Huffman encoding: the figurative use occurs much more frequently, so it gets the short means of expression.
  - scott_s 16y ago
    I do not find it's the same filter for me. As danilocampos points out in a cousin comment, I feel a difference between 37Signals essays and an essay where I feel the author is working with, and respecting the reader.
ams6110 16y ago
To quote Elements of Style, vigorous writing is concise. Clutter it up with a bunch of qualifiers and it becomes tedious to the reader and the point you're trying to make gets muted.

scott_s 16y ago

Having to apply a mental filter like that is tiresome. I'd rather just skip it.

joshuacc 16y ago
Personally, I find that it's the same mental filter I apply to just about any discussion outside of academic subjects. Very few of the people I know bother to use qualifiers like "usually," "often," etc. Those are just understood.
- mbreese 16y ago
  I'm an academic, and I rarely use absolutes such as 'always' or 'never' (this sentence being a good case). It's just so ingrained in academia that there are very few absolutes, and that there are almost always edge cases. As such, I refrain from making those statements... But that doesn't make it any less tiring... my mental output filter requires a decent amount of effort to keep going and makes things more verbose...
  - derefr 16y ago
    In fact, since there are so few absolutes, both in and out of academia, it should be taken as a given that any time someone uses one, they are using it as a figure of speech; to actually come to their true, basically-now-jargon meanings of universal quantification, the speaker must add further words. It's basic Huffman encoding: the figurative use occurs much more frequently, so it gets the short means of expression.
- scott_s 16y ago
  I do not find it's the same filter for me. As danilocampos points out in a cousin comment, I feel a difference between 37Signals essays and an essay where I feel the author is working with, and respecting the reader.

ams6110 16y ago

To quote Elements of Style, vigorous writing is concise. Clutter it up with a bunch of qualifiers and it becomes tedious to the reader and the point you're trying to make gets muted.