As I’ve grown older I have developed a heuristic, which is that people who talk/write like this, i.e. being completely convinced that one way of doing things is always wrong and one way of doing things is always right, and that people doing things the other way are just ignorant/stupid/wrong, usually have no idea what they are talking about.
I used to think this way but I have become frustrated at my inability to intentionally convey interesting thoughts. I now strive to minimize ambiguity.
My point is that the heuristics in the list are so general as to be useless. They fit somewhere in a category between tautology, platitude, and plain old stream-of-consciousness nonsense.
This sounds like descriptivism vs prescriptivism. In English (native language) I’m a descriptivist, in all other languages I have to tell myself to be a prescriptivist while I’m actively learning and then switch back to descriptivism to notice when the lessons were wrong or misleading.
To me this looks similar to rubber-ducking or technical writing. All three involve mentally modeling the perspective of someone who may not share your knowledge or assumptions.
> And the word "heuristics" is as meaningless to real knowldge as "pincarpion", by the way.
And there you have it. pfortuny has declared"heuristics" in quotes and meaningless. Let's all black out that word with a felt tip marker in our dictionary. If you didn't have enough reasons to already not find pfortuny as credible, well now you have another.
You know there is something wrong with an idea when someone feels compelled to argue for it by giving a word a different meaning than it usually has, but not explaining he is doing that.
I had a boss who liked to use a similar idea, but with a twist; he'd sometimes repeat the idea back but intentionally get a key nuance wrong, with the intention of getting feedback on that part. If the person corrected it, he'd be much more confident in both his own and the other person's understanding of the idea. If they didn't, he'd dig in more to figure out why his original understanding was actually _not_ correct. The idea behind this was to look to _disprove_ what he thought he understood rather than to confirm it; he would only feel confident in his mental model if he couldn't disprove it after exhausting all of the ways he could think of. His strategy was pretty effective, from what I could tell; he'd often uncover subtle flaws or questionable assumptions in ideas or plans where he was not as knowledgeable in the domain as the person presenting it due to not only being willing to say something incorrect, but going out of this way to embrace it. Importantly, this was never used as a way to try to trick or test people; he would never criticize anyone for failing to correct him when he said something wrong, because the whole point of the technique was that he wasn't even sure whether he needed to be corrected or not, and he was still trying to figure it out.
Prescriptivism is dumb. I think everyone here gets that.
However, I like tools in my arsenal that enable me to express myself precisely. Prescriptivist rants often open my eyes to subtle shades of possible meaning that I otherwise would not have seen.
I understand how you do it but I don't understand why that is eloquent and poetic. I wouldn't want someone to constantly choose related but incorrect concepts. That wouldn't really be a good communication, it seems to me.
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