Comment by j-wags | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j-wags | Hacker News Reader

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I don't disagree with what you meant here, but this sentence threw my mind through a loop. It shows how "have to" is a real weak point in how we communicate and think.

Maybe we should rank our "have to"s on a scale from 1 to 5, where for example:

- "objects in motion have to (1) remain in motion unless acted upon by an external force"

- "humans have to (2) eat food to stay alive"

- "developed countries have to (3) maintain a scientifically literate populace"

- "university PR people have to (4) write like that to pay for food and shelter"

- "university PR people have to (5) write like that to afford a new sports car"

I think you meant something like the example for (4), but reasonable people might see it more like (5), and in both cases it's at odds with the more fundamental "have to" (3) for society.

This constitutes a loose extensional definition of a spectrum between the positive (1) and the normative (5), or between "is" and "ought".

In the original example, it is that university research PR has to be written this way to provide the grant substantiation its existence subserves, but arguably ought to be that the PR piece could just describe the research properly and without all the exaggeration.

To be clear, I would have no quibble with such an argument and also do not care how anyone else feels about it. The point is to help demonstrate that "ought" is the domain of that which is always arguable and which must always be argued. "Is," like the gravity which holds us to the bosom of this planet, is.

Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

Maybe we could invent some new verbs to delineate between the scenarios.

I could have wrote out why they have to do this. There's two reasons I think that are related. One is the readership is primed for such language and headlines. The other is I am guessing a lot of these university PR releases are written by early career people or even undergraduate interns themselves. These people are writers, they want to get a job writing and those employers expect them to talk a certain talk that their readers are primed for. University PR releases are in fact no more flowery than the sort of articles that get posted on /r/futurology for example. Its a good resume piece if your career is taking information and overembellishing and oversimplifying for people without any relevant experience to more easily digest.

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