3 ms·

I hear you, but I'm also the type of person to admit my own uncertainty. And the people around me get way more uptake of their ideas by just leaving out those w

• hackerlight 4y ago
  It's a cultural thing. The cultural norm in academic or technical circles is extreme precision as well as fear of being held to account by enforcers of that norm. It's a spillover of rigorous academic publishing norms into general conversation. It's a fool's errand given that speech is intrinsically imprecise, and given that everyday speech is just a communication tool and not a vehicle for perfect applied epistemology. We should hedge statements depending on whether the context makes it self-explanatory that there's uncertainty. Any less, and we're being deceptive. Any more, and we're adding words without adding information. You know what would be a cool? Some notation to denote the level of certainty that doesn't take up horizontal space in the sentence. Or an API to a fine tuned GPT-3 that can strip out caveats and hedges from text on a screen.
  • maxbond 4y ago
    I know very little about it, but it's my understanding the conlang Láadan has ways to express degrees of certainty and degrees of "handedness" to the information (first-hand, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1adan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1adan Check out the tenses, things like, "Known to speaker because perceived by speaker, externally or internally" vs "Assumed true by speaker because speaker trusts source". https://laadanlanguage.com https://laadanlanguage.com