Thursday, June 05, 2008

Overcoming Bias: Against Disclaimers

Overcoming Bias: Against Disclaimers:
Blog posts are short and have a broad audience. One of the worst things about writing them is having to make disclaimers. Not just legal disclaimers mind you - those are only the tip of an iceberg.

Writing is hard in part because words have many associations that vary among readers. Even when we use carefully choose our words to signal certain associations, we know some readers will instead hear other associations. So in addition to saying what we do mean, we sometimes have to say explicitly what we do not mean.

Note that one of the associations that people should not presume is:
If you quote someone you agree with everything they've said.

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