The internet has made defensive writers of us all

A great quote from the article:

"The defensive writing style also encourages another sort of ugliness, which is that “avoiding saying something wrong” becomes a primary focus of the writing, rather than communicating or exploring ideas which the author might himself be unsure of."

One thing that's great about Gwern Branwen's writing is that Gwern's essays are accompanied by a "belief tag". That tag gives the ability to say "This essay is exploratory; I don't have a high degree of confidence that it's canonically true." Details here: http://www.gwern.net/About#belief-tags

Having the option to dissociate ideas from one's person can give a lot of freedom to put contrarian ideas out there and spark debate in search of the Truth without fearing personal attack. Indeed, one of the things that I consider to make a healthy company culture is that ideas can be criticized without the people behind the ideas feeling criticized themselves.

I find internet writing to be stimulating in its own way precisely because it is a sort of dash-off writing that does not need to be as precise or exact as would be needed if you were seeking to meet professional standards.

To wit, in law, even in formal contexts, lawyers dish off all sorts of slop in legal briefs, etc. but this really is sub-standard lawyering. To do your job right, you need to meet standards of excellence in making sure you have sound analysis, careful factual recitation, and skilled application of law to facts as you make arguments or seek to achieve some other professional writing goal. This is true as well in less formal professional settings such as writing emails/letters to clients. It may not absolutely matter what you say in terms of precision if a client is not likely to pick up the fine points but it really does matter in terms of maintaining a consistent pride in your professional work. Slop is slop and, when people will evaluate you by how well you are representing a client, it is critical not to be slipshod in your writing.

When writing on the internet, in contrast, you of course want to avoid putting out slop there as well but a lot less precision is needed to make your points. If you make a legal point, it is implied by context that you are making a statement that may not be accurate down to the finest level of detail, that you may be simplifying, or generalizing, or simply venting an opinion that the law may or may not support. Law in itself will vary, even greatly, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and this means that much of what you may be saying is really setting forth broad principles while avoiding a specific application to a given case. For these purposes, there is no need to be defensive, not in the slightest. And I certainly try not to be. Am I ever wrong? Of course, on occasion, yes - I have had a doozie or two in my time, perhaps a number of them. But you try to feel secure about such lapses, knowing that we all err occasionally, and try as a whole to conform to an overall solid record of being as accurate and insightful as possible. While you get the occasional harsh attack, for the most part I have found that people will be charitable knowing that you may have spent no more than 10 or 15 minutes trying to address a sometimes complex topic. Better to give people the benefit of your insights if it is an area where you can do so than it is to leave something in the internet conversion that is wrong or off simply hanging out there. That is a great benefit of the internet. Back in the day, you had to dig deep to find out what people with expertise in their field were thinking and access to this was severely limited. The internet has changed all that. There may be a lot of slop out there but there are also many gems that are there for the taking. As writers, we should be ready to share, if not gems, at least our best thoughts on topics where people might find them helpful.

If I were to stray from my professional topics, then maybe I would be more defensive as well. But the author of this piece emphasizes how the internet may hinder academic writing and I see legal writing as at least broadly similar. So, my experience differs pretty markedly.

Just my two cents.

One of the common methods people use to attack posts with ideas they don't agree with is to take the prose literally. This is much like the "work to rule" form of protest that unions use, and the "letter of the law" rather than the spirit of it, and of course all those "zero tolerance" policies.

I am fairly new to Y-Combinators Hacker News. Unfortunately, I've run head-long into this very issue on this forum. It ruins the experience.

There is value in communicating figuratively and/or with metaphors. When creatively solving problems, looking for trends or drawing a hypothesis out of the ether, it is often desirable to avoid specifics.

In my opinion, one's inability to comprehend and respond to any given statement at multiple levels limits their upward mobility.

There is another perspective to this, which is to appreciate when others have put forth a well-considered argument, and to sometimes relish in the challenge of anticipating the rebuttals and shoring up leaks in your reasoning. Often I will write something out that is somewhat critical, and then I'll think about where people might attack it, and it ends up with a more measured position. I love David Foster Wallace because he was the king of considering all facets of an argument or idea so thoroughly that you can't tell which side he's on (and neither could he).

I would say that the people with the problem that this article describes are the good ones, and they are outnumbered and drowned out in our society by "loudmouths" who don't obsessively consider their statements and who do present their own thoughts and beliefs as factual and/or morally correct, so I would say please do keep qualifying everything and even promoting that type of "defensive" thinking. (The caveat is: don't cater to trolls and the willfully uncharitable, and you have to decide for yourself whether someone is trolling or genuinely trying to make an argument worth responding to [or both], it's tough these days!)

I often think about qualifications like "I believe that...", "It is my opinion that...", "I think that...". Some people argue that they're not necessary, it's implied and obvious, it makes you seem weak, etc., but I disagree. I see so many conflicts created by people communicating their beliefs as facts, and it's not at all obvious that they acknowledge the viability of other opinions.

As engineers, we are hardwired to nitpick. Coming up with counter-examples is the default response. Instead, I try to say a supporting example first. This helps me learn from other people's point of view.

Edit: Though I admit I don't do the best job on HN. :/

Context is really important in communication. When speaking with someone face to face, you pick up on vocal intonations and body language to give you context to their speech. As well, knowing someone personally gives context to what they are saying.

On the internet, you have none of those things, only text. I think we are hitting a wall with our written languages because they can't adequately communicate context. Emoticons are a great evolution in this respect, because I can assign emotional context to some writing with a simple set of characters :).

I get the feeling a reactionary effect has been an increase of traffic on anonymous image boards like 4chan. There the only value you have is in your argument; there is no profile to judge.

People can say whatever they want there - and they certainly do - but if their argument is invalid or poorly constructed it is shot down or ignored, which serves as a lesson about the strength of a point made in a sterile environment. Of course there are plenty of trolls and people who argue the opposite point for the lulz, but that's just a cost of the medium.

There is no perfect form of communication. If there was, we'd all be using it.

For those interested in the Steven Pinker article, "Why Academics Stink at Writing", and are looking to avoid the paywall, here's the direct link to PDF from his website: http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_sti...

I feel compelled to write about race issues because I am a person of color. The issues directly impact my life. But I'm afraid because readers might be pissed off enough to get me fired. :/

Every YouTube creator has to do this now as well. They "apologize in advance" or qualify just about everything they say to make sure they don't get eviscerated in comments in case they make a mistake or were even just slightly wrong. It's becoming so common, I see it seeping into every day conversation in younger (like 13yo) kids. Not that everyone should go around spouting ignorant opinion, but being terrified of being incorrect isn't good either.

Different perspective: The cost of being wrong is overstated. The cost of offending someone is overstated. Being told you're wrong isn't the worst thing in the world. Being told you've said something offensive won't set you on fire.

I used to be afraid of being told I was wrong or offensive. I took it personally. Now I try to shrug it off and take it as legitimate feedback that doesn't compromise my self-esteem or integrity. Being told you're wrong is better than being wrong and never told you're wrong. Being told you're offensive is enormously better than never being told who you're putting off with your behavior. This holds even when you take into account the unjustified negative feedback.

I try to avoid thinking less of someone for thinking I was wrong, or being offended by what I've done. If I do that, I'm distorting my social reality: I am penalizing people for telling me negative things. I am penalizing people for caring that I'm wrong. I'm penalizing people for telling me that my behavior hurts them. By protecting my ego, I would be hurting my relationships with my peers and social groups.

This is not to say I'm not emotional about the responses I receive. I am quite emotional. If I'm writing in a dry tone, I probably just woke up and don't have access to all my senses yet. In fact I think writing without emotional color is a form of defensiveness: It is yet another way for a writer to hedge and separate themself from their opinion and their reader. I'd rather be close to my words and my listeners than safe from criticism.

The phenomenon of the nitpicky someone-on-the-internet-is-wrong type comment is so prevalent, I thing we need an acronym like tl;dr for it.

How about "willful misinterpretation; doesn't justify response"?

Wm;djr

I've been thinking about that quiet a bit lately. My two random thoughts:

1. I don't think it's strictly bad. More pressure to build coherent and precise arguments is good. It can indeed yield unnecessarily verbose language but I don't think it has to? Inserting qualifiers etc. everywhere is just the most naive way of approaching it, like a newbie programmer using too many nested if statements.

2. We should assume all comments are charitable as well. They are no different, they're just as likely to be misread.

I find this whole line of reasoning to be dubious, unimaginative, and sad.

Few people would call me a drab or unopinionated writer. Yet I write in a way that I believe protects me from those who would seize on any misstep to disparage me or even to sue for libel. And I've only slightly relaxed the safeguards I used in my earliest business writing, when I was a stock analyst subject to SEC regulation.

The keys to safe and ethical writing are:

1. Don't lie or deliberately mislead. 2. Be clear about the support for your stated opinions -- including doubts or lack of support.

Or, equivalently, adhere as best you can to The Golden Rule of Opinionated Non-Fiction Writing:

Give readers the tools to make informed decisions as to whether they should or shouldn't accept what you say.

Beyond that, I'd say -- and this is something else that goes back to my experience a stock analyst:

A. Your job isn't to tell readers what to decide. B. Rather, your job is to make the best contribution you can to your readers' decision processes.

Ultimately, their decisions are their own responsibility -- and if they forget that fact, then bad on them.

It comes back to what Marshall McLuhan said, "The Medium is the message": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

I've come to realize is that the expected audience is a crucial aspect of the communication requirements. On the internet, the audience is quite wide, and disagreement / outrage usually leads more responses / activity than does agreement and acceptance. I should say, in fact, that agreement leads to further sharing, whereas disagreement leads to comments. Thus, an article that some people agree with and some disagree with, gets re-shared and exposed to a lot of controversy. That eventually finds its way into other outlets, whereby each compelling article has a counter-article somewhere else in addition to all the substance-free vitriolic comments.

What the internet has really done is stop letting us get away with echo chambers, by breaking the walls between them. I think that is a good thing.

I should write a blog post on that :)

PS: This is not new. I think Bertrand Russell said: "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Now, those doubts are reinforced by the threat of being shown wrong. I think it's quite an art to articulate compelling arguments out of factually true statements, and even more of an art to think several steps ahead, choose which statements to focus on in order to draw certain reactions from an audience, and thus build receptivity to your next statements. Daniel Dennett said: You should be able to understand your opponent's arguments so well that you can say it back and they say "I wish I had put it that way". And of course, to do that, we shouldn't just write, we should also read, and all be exposed to the other arguments, instead of the echo chambers that social networks make money off of:

https://sealedministries.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/3-reasons-...

As an analyst, I perfected the art of defensive writing. We had to. Everyone has a vested interest in everything you say. Every way that situations were described, every opinion of what approaches or technologies will/won't work, every product rating, every everything. If not a financial vested interest, then an affinity interest. In the editorial process, we often talked about "hardening" or "bulletproofing" the writing so it could withstand the slings and arrows of relentless criticism.

We have conversations like we're bickering over the interpretation of a specification, and it's every bit as painful sometimes.

As the author says, wilful misinterpretation seems to be the name of the game, and we almost all seem to be guilty of it from time to time.

It's easy to be a dick when you're not looking someone in the eyes.

This is why I don't have comments on my own blog. I love discussion and appreciate it where it belongs, like hacker news and reddit, but if I'm writing it is my own outlet and I really don't want other people to see what other people think about what I write. I prefer people come up with their own opinions. If they want to discuss, they can message me.

The way I see it, defensive writing is also a kind of self-indulgent, narcissistic behaviour which seeks gratification from always being "correct" and never being proven "wrong".

It requires a certain dose of humility to admit that something you've said was wrong or to accept some parts of the opponent's opinion.

I think I have come to the conclusion "Don't feed the trolls". His post reminds me of everyone who would correct grammar mistakes and try to make your whole point look null because you missed a comma. I am not against correcting grammar but when you try to paint an idea/person as ignorant because of that I think it makes the attacker look foolish.

I engage the ones who have actual points to discuss or critique and just ignore the trolls. I want to engage with educated people anyway to enrich my own understanding, not bother defending myself from trolls. I figure and educated reader will see through the troll anyway.

They hate lack of attention and will starve off or be seen by the masses as annoying. I think the age of the troll is coming to an end. Society or at least the more educated are starting to see it for what it is.

So absolutely true. 2016 needs to be about taking it back a notch. Let's write how we want to write and say what we want to say and start ignoring the loudly offended. I'm serious here. Marginalize them instead of giving them power.

And I don't mean important things like racial or gender sensitivity, I just mean the fringe little things that people pick apart and whine about.

I decided a while back when I write opinion pieces for my blog, you're getting my opinion. Whine and complain, flame me in the comments, I don't care. You'll get over it.

Excellent bit of reflective writing and I'm certainly in agreement. For a moment I thought this might be the basic gist of an article I'm working up (re: message boards vs. article/content comments and notions of "community") but glad to see it's a different angle, and complimentary. Guiding over to Pinker's article is an immense help as well, because I'm really digging the term "intellectually unscrupulous" as a nice description of some behaviors I've seen online that are maddening.

I'm not sure I buy this argument at all. I've certainly heard the argument enough times that it's less critical to get everything right on the first pass on the Web because you can always update it. I'm not a particular fan of this mindset but it's out there. And I'd note it's the offline pubs that are far more likely to still have people in a fact checker role--however vestigial. And making errors of fact too many times was more than frowned upon at traditional newspapers.

Having said that, a lot depends on the person and the context. I'm sure we could all name columnists/bloggers who are more interested in being controversial than in being correct; some predate online publishing though. On the other hand, there are some contexts where you don't to state bald opinions that you can't back up. I'm not convinced any of this has to do with Web or non-Web.

Defensive writing is the straightforward consequence of increased exposure to assholes. While in real life assholes are marginalized, and mainstream discussions involve only reasonable people, Internet media enable assholes to masquerade as normal people (they hide behind an ordinary appearance, with little chance to know they will become irritating), increase their reach (they can pick on anyone, anywhere and at any time, rather than irritating a limited circle of acquaintances) and reduce social defenses against them (for instance, they can easily return with a pseudonym after being banned from a forum, which in itself is a much milder consequence for antisocial attitudes than, say, being beaten up or losing their job in real life).

I'm unclear on whether the author is yearning to become blase about whether his ideas are valid, criticizing his own writing, blaming his pandering statements on imbeciles, or being cleverly ironic.

He laments having to tone down something he thinks might be interpreted "uncharitably", and in the very next sentence blames it on those who commit "uncharitable actions".

> At times I’ve been tempted to just turn off comments entirely on my blog, and just flat out avoid participating in comment threads on the web

I can relate to internet commenting frustrations, but this conveys real issues with hearing any dissenting opinion. Turning off comments altogether on your blog is like fearfully plugging your ears with your fingers to drown out anything that might be valid criticism.

It's sort of tangential, but knowing anything I write can be found by Googling my real name has certainly made me write defensively. It's why my main Twitter account is not public.

Since integrating shutup.css [0] in my browsers, my experience on websites with comments sections has been much more pleasurable. It's very good at recognizing comments sections and completely removing them.

I wish more sites disabled them and instead opened their blogs up to well-thought out letters to the editor.

[0]https://stevenf.com/shutupcss/

In regards to hedges and weasel words: I never used more weasel words and hedges than when I sold computers at Circuit City. I knew what the policies should be and how we should be able to help customers, but I had no power to actually make that happen so I used tons of should, may, probably, likely, etc.

I hated it and it took me a while to unlearn that way of talking.

The internet has made offensive writers of many.

on the other side, that guaranteed exposure to unexpected and harshest criticism is a great beauty of the Internet (it is like street fight with no rules vs. strictly regulated fights under rules of some league) - if you're not afraid (which is easily achieved by for example staying anonymous :) you may explore many ideas much more boldly, deeply and widely and be able to hear arguments and criticism of them not available otherwise elsewhere. As a result, Internet taught me that i may be sometimes [fortunately very infrequently] not right and/or just plainly mistaken. That was a huge personal discovery :) , a bit painful, yet it is percolated even into offline life - whenever i hear some crap at the meeting, etc. i now sometimes give myself a second or even 2 to entertain the very improbable idea that that crap may be worth something what i just don't see right at the moment :)

Programmers do, because you are exposed to ambiguous, badly written specifications for features all the time.

This is a startup opportunity and can be solved through UX and richer moderation tools. UX influences user behavior. One small example, a richer moderation system that captures -1 because violation of HN guideline #6 "avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them could short circuit entire flamewar threads. I think a psychologist could probably build the right UX to get top 1% expertise to generate incredible discussions reliably and funnel the 99% peanut gallery off to the side where they can happily contribute too. I would have liked to see reddit build this but they have had years and years to do something interesting, i guess they are too big to innovate now

I notice this the most on tech people, I think it's related that we read a lot of stories about people getting fired for a tweet or a post...

I dunno, man. I write defensively as a default and consequentially nitpick every argument made for a position.

On the other hand, I am not adverse to changing my mind on a flip of a good argument.

If I get offended or defensive, it means that my beliefs aren't as ironclad as I thought.

There are some areas that I pretty much don't pay attention though.

Anything concerning creationism, global warming denialism, pro-smoking, god, etc.

I won't waste my time entertaining obviously wrong arguments.

There should be a tool to which you could say: here's an idea, please rewrite it into defensive form.

Another possibility is that the writer doesn't actually know if something is certain or not.

So, about a week ago, I wrote a piece that I feel has a solid point and I posted it on Hacker News. It hit 39 karma and had 54 comments. Not impressive for Hacker News overall, but, hey, decent for my own personal blog's track record.

The top voted comment on it is incredibly dismissive, completely dismissing my 6-ish years of college, more than 5 years working in insurance, etc. over one detail that wasn't thoroughly researched and was, in fact, framed to admit that it was kind of hand-wavy. I don't think what I said was entirely wrong and stupid, but it wasn't 100% accurate.

(HN item in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819091)

But I think I have two choices here:

I can be completely bummed that one person chose to completely dismiss everything based on one not perfect remark in the piece and others upvoted that. Or I can value the upvotes the item got, the amount of meaningful discussion it did generate, the page views it got, and the constructive feedback that tells me that if I want to write more on this topic, I need to do a bit more research and firm up my ability to defend my points or random asshats are going to say "Well, based on one single detail, nothing she says can possibly have any merit."

But, hey, I have done similar things myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10828054 So, maybe people doing that isn't all asshattery. Maybe it is more complicated than that and when someone tells you "x detail makes me not read/believe/whatever any of it", then that is constructive feedback that you can choose to try to learn something from so you can improve your writing -- or not, as you see fit.

I have spent a lot of years trying to figure out how to express myself effectively online. I think part of the challenge is that a) your audience is incredibly diverse, so lazy writing habits that are rife with unquestioned assumptions which may be racist, sexist, etc are going to get called out online even though your personal circle of friends wouldn't have a problem with it (because they are also kind of racist, sexist, whatever) and b) you are talking to people who may know more than you about some piece of it and/or can google up info, either to fact check or just to rebut because they don't like you, don't agree with your point, just got dumped, are IUI (Internetting Under The Influence) or for any damn reason.

So, in addition to readers perhaps needing to try to "find the insight, not the error," authors can also try to focus more on the metrics that make them feel positive about having written it rather than focusing on the comments that make them cringe.

It took some self control at first, but I am finding that my experience of the Internet is much better now that I focus more on counting the positives and, as much as possible, ignoring the negatives. It does involve some judgment calls. You can't just turn the other cheek on everything. There are situations where you need to correct people or clarify your meaning or defend your statement. But if you are getting traffic and getting comments, even if some of them are ugly, then you accomplished something.

I am trying harder to decide what I want to accomplish, keeping my eye on evidence that I am moving that goal forward, and not expecting some "perfect" experience (for lack of a better way of saying that, as I have other things to do and this comment has gone on long enough).

I'm seeing way, way, waaaaaay too many commenters here who apparently came away from this thinking that "defensive writing", as described by the author, has anything to do with not offending people. That's totally orthogonal to what the author is talking about. He's talking about the tendency some people have to take everything as literally as possible, finding some logical hole in an argument based on a very literal (and often wrong) interpretation, and then start stupid inflammatory debates in comment threads about it. As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with political correctness, although people saying so really deliciously proves his point.

The root of it is sometimes that an author didn't express something very well. In general though, it's because some readers are predisposed to find the most literal and uncharitable interpretation of something they read, which they then use as an excuse to try to show up the author in the comments. These types of commenters are the types of people who don't assume good faith on the part of other people, and when they see something that doesn't make sense to them their first thought is that the person who wrote it is an idiot, rather than to step back and take a moment to think about what the author might've meant. These types of commenters are looking for excuses to publicly disagree with someone, they're not trying to participate in an exploratory discussion in which the participants don't automatically assume the worst about each other.

For example, what if someone made an offhand comment about C being the de facto standard for systems programming for the last few decades? On certain forums, it is pretty much guaranteed that someone will chime in about all of the various kernels, research OSes, etc. that have been and are currently being written in languages other than C, and proceed to argue with the poster about this fact. Of course, they're right in a sense- it's true that C accounts for < 100.000% of systems programming. But it's pointless to argue about as it's based on a strawman from an overly literal interpretation of the original statement.

And it pretty much goes downhill from there. Overly Literal Internet Guy #2 then has to chime in and attack Overly Literal Internet Guy #1 over some other strawman based on an uncharitable interpretation of what #1 wrote.

Point being, the entire discussion gets derailed by a handful of people who refuse to give each other the benefit of the doubt and just really want to argue. We could have been talking about why C is such a juggernaut in the systems programming world, or what other languages might make sense for systems programming, or any number of other interesting digressions. But noooooo, we can't have nice things because a few people just want to scream at the author and each other about willful, overly literal misinterpretations of what was written. As a result, many writers will warp their style to put hedges and defensive qualifiers around every single statement to avoid all discussion getting derailed by Overly-Literal-Internet-Guys-Who-Think-Everyone-Is-Else-Is-An-Idiot. By the time all of those qualifiers and hedges go in, it's possible that the point of the original statement is diluted or lost entirely.

And of course, in what I've just written, I myself am no doubt guilty of assuming bad faith on the part of other people and am just as guilty of the behavior I'm complaining about. I get it, I really do. This is a type of cognitive bias that everyone has, including myself. There are no easy answers when it comes to understanding human interactions or our own mental processes, we can only try our best. I only take issue with people who think they are infallible and don't even try to play devil's advocate with themselves when thinking about things they care about.

Not me.

(please no downvote)