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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Love and Rationality: Less Wrongers on OKCupid - Less Wrong
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Rigor is not the issue. If you state something that readers already accept, then you don't need to argue, and statements that further describe the situation are not arguments, but further elements of the picture that readers already accept as well (but maybe didn't know to pay attention to themselves, or to arrange in the whole quite the same way).
On the other hand, if you present a statement which isn't evidently correct, then you have to argue its correctness. Statements that were properly part of further description in the first case are now expected to be arguments, something readers can agree with, and not further doubtful assertions. Thus, expected reasonable agreement, not rigor, is what's required.
That's a very sensible answer, and I'll accept it. The discrepancy, then, is that the contents of this post seem about as self-evident to me as the emotional nihilism advice does; I'm quite surprised to find that it's more controversial. Is there some common knowledge I'm contradicting?
I dislike presentation of emotional nihilism post for the same reason. No contradictions, just prior expectation that mere sensible advice often doesn't work in complicated social context, and empirical evidence is necessary to distinguish things that actually work from things that seem reasonable but don't.
I'm not sure that is the case. Sometimes people brainstorm; sometimes they suggest hypotheses; sometimes they share ideas. Any of these can look grammatically like a declarative statement, but they are not assertions. They are more like conjectures. They justify their presence in a conversation by being interesting and provocative, not by being supported by evidence and argument.
Very little of human communication transfers information about the external world. The bulk of it either transfers information about the speaker's mental state or is intended to focus the listener's attention on some thing, event, or idea.
When you argue correctness of a statement with which the interlocutor doesn't originally agree, and use a proof-like strategy for doing so, you don't transfer information about environment either, instead you focus their attention on a sequence of statements already accepted, that surprisingly leads to the originally unexpected conclusion.
When you brainstorm, then the observations you seek are exactly the ideas produced by intuition, so you are not asserting anything about something else, instead you are producing the basic observations. When you voice your opinion, assuming you are trustworthy, you communicate your state of knowledge, and your interlocutor believes that your state of knowledge is indeed as you state it.