Don't we all?
> In the summer of 1997, I was 28 years old, and I decided that after years of thinking about writing a novel, I was simply going to go ahead and write one. There were two motivations for doing so. First, I was simply curious if I could; I'd had up to that time a reasonably successful life as a writer, but I'd never written anything longer than ten pages in my life outside of a classroom setting. Two, my ten-year high school reunion was coming up, and I wanted to be able to say I'd finished a novel just in case anyone asked (they didn't, the bastards).
> In sitting down to write the novel, I decided to make it easy on myself. I decided first that I wasn't going to try to write something near and dear to my heart, just a fun story. That way, if I screwed it up (which was a real possibility), it wasn't like I was screwing up the One Story That Mattered To Me. I decided also that the goal of writing the novel was the actual writing of it -- not the selling of it, which is usually the goal of a novelist. I didn't want to worry about whether it was good enough to sell; I just wanted to have the experience of writing a story over the length of a novel, and see what I thought about it. Not every writer is a novelist; I wanted to see if I was.
The most noticeable similarity is that we both clearly have strong opinions about some things, and like to share information, but also like to be clear about our unknowns or opinions. So, lots of “sounds likes,” “probably,” “could be” and so on.
The downside is, I guess, this could be seen as a bit weasel-word-y or indirect.
Commonly called just “hedging” like hedging your bets.
I do think it is an under-emphasized aspect of honesty, though, that we should be clear about our level of experience/understanding. Especially online — people like to discuss things, even (especially?) when we are just getting started. So if we’ve picked up opinions through osmosis and we start repeating them without testing them, we’re really just amplifying some possibly-incorrect viewpoint (and if we’ve picked it up, there’s a good chance it is already widespread in the community, which is bad if it is wrong).
And I mean, more concretely a measurement is not complete without the error bars!
Often this doesn’t really matter, because it is just chit-chat anyway. But it is nice to keep in mind.
there are many languages that encode this info as mandatory grammatical affixes, it's called evidentiality.
I find it interesting that the first example they use in the Wikipedia article is Turkish. I’ve only met a couple Turks, but they were all quite good engineers. I wonder to what extent embedding this kind of information in the language helps organize your thoughts.
This was certainly eye-opening.
Update: It’s actually a little strange that reading through some of the matches it’s not just style that overlaps but perspectives in quite a few cases too. I’m definitely not the unique little snowflake that some others are finding themselves to be.
I’m pretty sure participation in HN is a 99% sure filter for being called this many times in one’s life.
I appear to be a well-educated, over-confident know-it-all.