Caveats

Here I try to preemptively address some of the most common objections (both valid and invalid) that I think people will have toward things I have said or will say on this site. These tend to be applicable across the entirety of my writing style, so it seems that a centralized page where I acknowledge and try to address them would be appropriate.

Everything said here is “in my opinion.”

I don’t know everything, and I am keenly aware of that fact. As mentioned in my article on truth, I hold that knowing anything for 100% certainty is impossible for the honest intellectual. I am, to the best of my ability, an honest intellectual, so that applies to me as much as anyone else. As such, everything I posit on this site is something that I believe with varying (but imperfect) degrees of certainty. However, it would be egregiously cumbersome to add that caveat - “in my opinion” - to every single sentence. Of course it is my opinion. My opinion is the only thing I can speak on. I don’t have a direct line to pure truth any more than any other person, so my opinion about what that truth might be is the only thing I could be speaking about. So it seems most expedient to just make this caveat once, and let’s all agree that it’s just understood that I’m not claiming absolute truth, just my best, most carefully constructed guess as to what that truth is.

The careful observer will also notice that on some occasions, you will see verbiage like “I think…” or “it seems like…” or “probably….” These are not verbal filler, but rather intentional clues as to the level of confidence I feel about that particular statement. I am wrong just as often as the next person, but where I excel is acknowledging and predicting where the probability of my own error is highest, and I am open about communicating that. I think if you keep score, you’ll see that I’m rarely wrong about things I’m confident in. But even then, it’s not never.

Human Language is imprecise.

Human language is designed/evolved to be an efficient carrier of ideas from one person to another. That is to say that when I’m saying something to you, the language center of my brain is constructing a series of words with the express purpose of letting you understand most of what I am I trying to say in the least amount of time possible. Even flowery or descriptive prose is only more verbose because of the sheer volume that is trying to be conveyed, and the most impressive and celebrated examples are those that convey meaning with as short a paragraph as possible.

My point is that perfect, lossless transmission of the idea in question is not a priority of normal human discourse. We have methods for perfect, lossless transmission of ideas. Computer languages focus on this, as do mathematical logical proofs. I could write each of these articles using those devices instead. In fact, I would probably prefer it, since it lines up more closely with how my mind thinks about things,. But it would be onerous to read, so I don’t think we’re going to do that. As such, I think we need to accept that there is going to be some slop inherent in the communication of thoughts and ideas. Human language is just not precise enough for zero errors in the transmission.

A good example of this might be where I claim in one article that there’s no such thing as laziness, and then in another article, I might claim “that’s just being lazy.” This can look like I’m contradicting myself, but that’s really just due to the looseness of the language itself. When I say “that’s just being lazy,” that is shorthand for everything I said in the first article. That there’s no such thing as lazy, and the thing we call lazy is really “X”. So, when I refer to something being lazy, I mean X, but X takes a lot longer to describe, so I just use the short-code, “lazy”. And since we’ve already discussed the nature of laziness, you know what I mean.

If it looks like I am contradicting myself, or holding two or more incompatible views, it’s possible that I am. If so, you should bring that to my attention, because I’ll want to correct that in one way or another. But before you assume that. See if there’s a way that the apparent contradiction could just be due to the imprecision of the medium, because that’s the more likely explanation.

There is a difference between a generalization and an absolute statement.

Similarly, or perhaps as a subset of the above, it is impractical for me to list every outlying exception to statements that I make, even if internally I acknowledge that they exist. “Basketball players are generally tall.” That’s a true statement, as least within the context that it’s intended. Obviously, there are kids’ basketball leagues, and wheelchair basketball leagues, and the participants of those leagues are every bit as much “basketball players” as those in the NBA. Yet obviously, the initial statement does not apply to them. I am not discounting them or saying they are not part of the sample set. I am only saying that the outliers are understood to be outliers.

That said, there are times when the exception breaks the rule. For example, if I made the statement that “all basketball players are tall,” that is an absolute statement. And absolute statements can be disproven by a single counter-example. If I am making an absolute statement, and there are exceptions that I am either not thinking of or discounting, then you are in the right to disagree and even call me on it.

However, due to the imprecision of language, sometimes a statement could be interpreted either as a generalization or as an absolute statement, such as “basketball players are tall.” In these cases, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to distinguish one from the other via the context of the argument being made.

Definitions are important

If we can’t agree on what our terms mean, it is impossible to formulate an effectively persuasive argument or thereby reach a consensus on what the truth is. I can’t tell you how many discussions or disagreements have come down in the end to the two opponents using different definitions for the same term. In fact, almost all arguments, especially the heated ones, come down to this. If you find someone who is dogmatically adhering to something that sounds ridiculous, you would be well advised to try to find the term or terms that you are defining differently from each other. Similarly here. If you find something I say to be absurd, try to dive deeper and find the word that I might be defining differently than you are. I will attempt to explicitly define any terms I’m using in a way that might not perfectly align with common parlance. But if I don’t, see if you can find some other way to figure out what I mean, or ask me directly if I’m available through chat channels or the Subreddit.

Pronouns and gender- or culture-specific wording.

I am of the old school of thought that says that the word “man,” when used in a certain context, refers to “mankind” and is intended to be gender-neutral. In addition, English in particular has no gender-neutral pronoun that is appropriate for a person, despite the obvious need for one. I do try to alternate using “he” or “she” when I can, but if you do a word-count and find that I use one more often than another, please don’t read anything into that. Unless I am specifically speaking about differences between genders (of which there are some) or between races or any other classifications, then it is assumed that my statements apply to all humans, equally, without bias or exclusion, regardless of any societal class or subclass they belong to.

That said, the vast majority of my life experiences (and thus my data collection) have been within western culture, specifically the eastern United States. So while most of my articles are about things that relate directly to the psychology and function of the human mind, and thus apply across cultures, at least some references to how society operates might be based on the culture that I live in, and might not be true in India or the Middle East, for example. I acknowledge that lack in my knowledge base, but I can only speak to what I know. So if I make a statement, and your response is “Well, that’s completely untrue in the Congo,” and assuming the statement in question is one relating to culture, then my response is going to be to shrug and say, “Ok. I can’t speak to that.” However, my guess is that any incidences of that type of impasse are only going to relate to things like example scenarios where I am trying to paint a picture to help demonstrate the underlying principle. The principle itself should be universal, even if my example is culture-specific.