Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/hedging/

Hedging.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_%28linguistics%29

Examples:

• Men are evil 
  
• All men are evil 
  
• Some men are evil
  
• most men are evil
  
• many men are evil
• I think men are evil
  
• I think all men are evil
  
• I think some men are evil 
  
• I think most men are evil

"I think" weakens your relationship or belief in the idea, hedges that I usually encourage are the some|most type. It weakens your strength of idea but does not reduce the confidence of it.

• I 100% believe this happens 80% or more of the time (most men are evil) 
  Or 
  
• I 75% believe that this happens 100% of the time (I think all men are evil) 
  Or
  
• I 75% believe this happens 20% of the time (I think that some men are evil) 
  Or 
  
• I 100% believe that this happens 20% of the time (some men are evil)
  Or
• I (Reader Interprets)% believe that this happens (Reader Interprets)% of the time (I think men are evil) 
  

They are all hedges.  I only like some of them.  When you hedge - I recommend using the type that doesn't detract from the projected belief but instead detracts from the expected effect on the world.  Which is to say - be confident of weak effects, rather than unconfident of strong effects.

This relates to filters in that some people will automatically add the "This person thinks..." filter to any incoming information.  It's not good or bad if you do/don't filter, just a fact about your lens of the world.  If you don't have this filter in place, you might find yourself personally attached to your words while other's remain detached from words that seem like they should be more personally attached to.  This filter might explain the difference.  

This also relates to Personhood and the way we trust incoming information from some sources.   When we are very young we go through a period of trusting anything said to us, and at some point experience failures when we do trust.  We also discover lying, and any parent will be able to tell you of the genuine childish glee when their children realise they can lie.  These experiences shape us into adults.  We have to trust some sources, we don't have enough time to be sceptical of all knowledge ever and sometimes we outsource to proven credentialed professionals i.e. doctors.  Sometimes those professionals get it wrong.

This also relates to in-groups and out-groups because listeners who believe they are in your in-group are likely to interpret ambiguous hedges in a neutral to positive direction and listeners who believe they are in the out-group of the message are likely to interpret your ambiguous hedges in a neutral or negative direction.  Which is to say that people who already agree that All men are evil, are likely to "know what you mean" when you say, "all men are evil" and people who don't agree that all men are evil will read a whole pile of "how wrong could you be" into the statement, "all men are evil".

Communication is hard.  I know no one is going to argue with my example because I already covered that in an earlier post.

Meta: this took 1.5hrs to write.

The results for these have been stable for a while now; I'm posting them a bit late. 95 people took the survey after I modified it to add two questions. For the public version, I removed the pre-change data (10 data points).

One text response included identifying information, which I removed in the public version of the data. If you participated and there is any information you provided that you would like removed from the public version, PLEASE tell me as soon as possible and I will remove it.

P.S. To the person who predicted an 80-90% significant difference between different parts of California: I predict with at least 90% confidence that there will be no significant difference, because of the wide spread of locations and smallish sample size of this survey.

(The original post about the survey.)

EDIT: After some comments that it was unethical for me to post the data (in particular the text), I removed public access from the link provided earlier. Given my precommitment to post the data, I assumed it was clear enough to respondents that it would be public. I'm not convinced that this has hurt anyone, but given that others seem to disagree, it seemed prudent to remove it. Please feel free to continue this discussion; I'm interested in your thoughts.

At Reason Rally a couple of months ago, we noticed that a lot of atheists there seemed to be there for mutual support - because their own communities rejected atheists, because they felt outnumbered and threatened by their peers; the rally was a way for them to feel part of an in-group. Reason Rally is definitely an event that selects for people who feel excluded by their communities most of the time. But there may be a different concentration of people who have had this sort of experience on LessWrong, and we wondered what that concentration was.

Hence, this survey: LessWrong Members and their Local Communities.

If I get a decent sample size, I will post the data for all to enjoy.

EDIT: I added two questions about current and previous religious views to the poll. If you took it before 11:30PM EST 5/2, I'd appreciate it very much if you would take the time to retake it. :)