3 ms·

I dunno, it feels to me that people are too ready to tell "white half-truths" to simplify the message, and assume everyone else is too dense to understand nuanc

• bruce511 3y ago
  When educating anyone about anything we tell half-truths all the time. It's a necessary path to understanding. (For example, we teach kids the earth is round, then we tell them it's an oblate spheroid, then we tell them even that is a approximation. ) In a forum like this, the message is often distilled because one doesn't know the makeup of the audience. The simple rule is a good starting point for entry-levels. Nuance can be hard to convey, because its usually a combination of context and resources which determine how far down a rabbit hole you can go. I agree that this happens all the time, in every field. I'm dumb when it comes to my car, so my mechanic gives me simple rules to follow. Doctors tell everyone to eat less, exercise more, but in truth you can eat too little, and exercise too much. The -real- problem happens even a simplification becomes obsolete. We see this in security a lot. Someone wrote the company policies 20 years ago, and they're insisting on say no-paste-on-the-password field, because that's in the policy, even though its since been shown to weaken security.