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chaosmage comments on The value of ambiguous speech - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: KevinGrant 30 November 2015 07:58AM

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Comment author: chaosmage 01 December 2015 10:46:00PM 1 point [-]

Ambiguity has its uses. In flirting for example, where the offer of intimacy is made implicitly so rejection can be given implicitly (by pretending not to have heard the offer) in order to avoid the pain of explicit rejection.

And in all sorts of situations where explicit statements of particular facts or opinions are punishable, the ability to make them in ambiguous, i.e. deniable form, can be crucial.

But I find the baseline of unintentional ambiguity in most forms of human-to-human communication to be a problem, not an asset, most of the time.