ThisSpaceAvailable comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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Comments (893)
I think there's something missing there.
If someone were to put me in imminent fear for my life, I would feel justified in killing them. Now that you know that, would you be able to spend time with me without a massive cognitive burden of making sure that you don't put me in imminent fear for my life?
And it's not even like Chris is saying he'd kill anyone. He didn't say "shunned and outcast". He'd just lie to them. You consider being lied to such a horrifying prospect that you would devote massive cognitive resources to making sure it didn't happen?
you've completely misread what I said
To be fair, the sentence he's quoting is ungrammatical or at least weirdly phrased ("person is like learning", I had to read that twice), and that may make it more confusing.
Fairness has nothing to do with whether someone is able to accurately read what someone else means.
When being faced with weirdly phrased writing in most cases the effective thing is to simply ignore the point or be open about the fact that you don't understand what someone means and if you care about understanding it, ask for clarification.
It's a figure of speech.
And confusion sometimes takes the unfortunate shape of someone thinking they understood and not realizing that they didn't - they can't ask to clarify then, can they? Since I believe that, purely as a matter of cause and effect, avoiding poorly formed sentences leads to this happening less often (even in cases when after the fact we would blame the reader more than the writer) I offered that remark as possibly helpful, that's all.
Do you really believe that someone doesn't already know that avoiding poorly formed sentences improves understanding of messages? If you don't then why do you consider it worth saying?
Not really, but then again I'm not sure why you started arguing with me after I gave drethelin feedback on his poorly formed sentence, which he might have not been aware of. So I endevored to explain to you as clearly as I could why I did that. What are you trying to do here exactly?