3 ms·
>I would say that he leaves out a critical detail: the nonsense of which is not obvious _and also not important_. Not important to whom? Strongly disagreeing
by romwell 3y ago
>I would say that he leaves out a critical detail: the nonsense of which is not obvious _and also not important_.
Not important to whom?
Strongly disagreeing with you here, because misleading is a thing that is quite important to people that carefully manufacture nonsense.
And if it's not important to you, you're helping them reproduce it.
For further reference, I direct you to one of the best (in my opinion) essays of all time: Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"[1].
Like no other, this essay illustrates how harmful the critical flaw Dijkstra pointed out is if we aren't careful enough about how we use our "natural" language.
I put "natural" in quotes, because something like Google's press release on any given matter is anything but natural, and yet it's this kind of language that both sticks around and is deliberately used to create non-obvious nonsense.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- killthebuddha 3y agoI think you might have committed a straw man error. My point is not that approximate or vague language is always good, it's that it's sometimes good. Sometimes imprecise communication is good and useful, sometimes it's doublespeak.