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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 u
by 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 agoI'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 agoIn 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 agoI 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.