Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

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> IMO It serves a useful purpose!

I have to disagree! I simply do not understand what useful purpose it serves—IF we are allowed to assume that our readers have a proficient level of prose literacy. The default assumption, when someone is talking or writing, is that they are communicating their own opinions and thoughts, experiences, anecdotes.

I don’t know about you, but when I think back to taking writing classes in school, if I wrote something like “I've seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been part of” in my paper, any good writing teacher I’ve ever had would cross it out. Same as “it is my opinion that” or “I have recently started to form some beliefs in the matter at hand after reviewing some materials that came into my possession” or other… filler. It pads out the document and only tells us things that we should already know, or be able to figure out.

The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from factual claims and evidence is… well… something you’d expect from a proficient reader!

I feel like I'm missing something here.

> The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from factual claims and evidence is… well… something you’d expect from a proficient reader!

How does a proficient reader separate facts from opinions if good writing doesn't disambiguate facts and opinions? Do they just assume?

e.g.: Butter is about as healthy as vegetable oil. Arugula is healthier than lettuce.

I can cite a meta-analysis for one of the above statements. The other is just my opinion, and I have done no research into the topic. How would a proficient reader tell them apart if there's no calibrating for uncertainty?

Side note: I went through the original blog post again, and there are lots of examples of Dan Luu doing exactly what I'm writing about, to the point where I'm confused why the original commenter thinks he's not using a different tone based on uncertainty.

Examples:

"I once watched, from the inside, a company undergo this cultural shift"

"I've both worked at companies that have tried to contract this kind of thing out as well as talked with many people who've done that"

> How does a proficient reader separate facts from opinions if good writing doesn't disambiguate facts and opinions? Do they just assume?

Facts and opinions are not different qualities of the same claim, but different claims to begin with. “Butter is about 18% water, by weight” is a factual claim and “butter is about as healthy as vegetable oil” is probably opinion because the word “healthy” is, well, often vague and not something people agree on, at least in this context.

> Side note: I went through the original blog post again, and there are lots of examples of Dan Luu doing exactly what I'm writing about, to the point where I'm confused why the original commenter thinks he's not using a different tone based on uncertainty.

Yes, I get a sense that there may be some more cogent complaint that the original commenter has, a complaint which provoked the comment, but I can’t figure out what that complaint is from the comment.

Just that people who complain about tone often have something else to complain about, but tone is more obvious.

Nothing in Dan Luu’s writing is ever ambiguous. Quite the opposite.

He just writes in the same voice for both researched facts/studies and personal anecdotes. But it’s always very clear which is which, and an informed reader should (IMO) not have a problem differentiating.

The commenter you’re replying to is objecting to unnecessary couching and cloaking of opinion/anecdote. And I think there’s very, very little of that in Dan Luu’s writing — and it comes off as a “matter-of-fact tone.”

I disagree. it sometimes gives me that feeling as well even though I like the guy and his blog. i don't know if it's a cultural thing. i'm no native english storage

People hold beliefs of different levels of confidence. I have some opinions I’m very confident in and others that are merely vague hunches. My level of confidence in something is the signal I’m trying to convey, not merely the fact that it is my thought at all.

It can also be useful to communicate brief info about why I have a particular confidence level. “I had a friend who…” vs “I’ve seen several times…” vs “Several studies have found…”

> when I think back to taking writing classes in school

Yeah I think most of that stuff was bullshit. Or, being more charitable, they were trying to convey a general idea like “don’t overly hedge” with a coarse rule like “never use hedging language”.

I think most writing “rules” tend to be coarse approximations at what good writing really is. Another example is “give your essays a general structure, introduce your main point, etc.” => five paragraph essays.

I hedge a lot in HN comments. Uncharitably, because I’m thinking defensively about how people respond to my comments. Charitably, because it’s more accurate that way.

Long-form content suffers from hedging more that HN comments do. As a writer, you may think highly of your confidence level, and you may want to communicate the difference between a claim that you’re confident about and a claim that you are unsure about, but the right way to do that is to provide the information necessary for other people to come to the same conclusion. If that’s not possible, or it’s not germane, or you’re just busy doing something else, then you don’t do it, and that’s okay. It’s often just irrelevant for people to understand how much you believe something.

The tradeoff I see here is between clarity and precision. If you focus too much on precision, the clarity of whatever you’re trying to say suffers.

"The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from factual claims and evidence is… well… something you’d expect from a proficient reader! "

The ability to communicate the level of confidence in a statement is something I hope for in proficient communicators.

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