Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
This was probably me.
I see my use of the motte less as an attempt to argue and more as an attempt to find common ground with other posters.
I hate argument -- always have -- but love discussion. The difference between those is that the first requires a sort of overconfidence and seeks to win, while the second requires humility and seeks to understand. My goal on the motte is to state my personal experience and views and to find common ground with other people, not to assert that my perspective is universal or try to win an argument. I find arguments infuriating and soul-destroying, not energizing or engaging.
By using phrases like "I think" or "it seems to me" or "my feeling is" or "in my experience", my goal is to demonstrate that what I'm saying isn't something I believe is universal or without exception, but something that is directionally true, an opener for discussion rather than a closed epistemic case.
But I also know, just philosophically, I have a high bar for confidence in claims. The sort of evidence that would convice someone else to make a strong claim often only convinces me to make a weak one. This isn't due to a lack of intellectual confidence -- people who know me IRL would agree to that -- but due to my high degree of skepticism of grand claims. When someone makes a claim with a great deal of rhetorical confidence, the first thing that comes to mind isn't how insightful I think the claim is, but all of the myriad possible exceptions to the claim.
I myself find more argumentative or assertive conversation styles to be grating -- it sometimes demonstrates a brash overconfidence out of bounds of what the speaker actually has reason to believe. My impression of such styles is that they alienate rather than invite exceptions and alternative perspectives; they shut down friendly discussion and perpetuate unfriendly debate.
You notice I wrote "sometimes" there; I had a draft where I simply stated "it demonstrates a brash overconfidence..." and I found that to be itself overconfident. This is precisely because there are some times where such rhetorical strength in what one says is warranted; the "sometimes" doesn't hedge the claim (reflecting a lack of confidence in the claim) so much as demonstrate my belief that this is not a universal truth but one that is true only in a subset of situations.
When I wrote essays in college there would be a section of argument but then a much longer section where I walked through all the objections and exceptions. This got me a lot of points for being thorough. Obviously I put more rhetorical emphasis, as my claims were based on evidence or deductive argument. But it also reflected my view that the world is incredibly complex, and when we make claims about social processes or the human experience or the state of other people's minds, we're almost certainly mostly wrong, even if our point lands for a subset of experiences.
It's not that I'm not commited to what I'm saying, it's that I believe the claim is true insofar as my personal experience reveals, and even then for only a subset of things. I tend to use these phrases where I'm making claims about other people's mental states, the situations in far-off places, and broad social trends: precisely the areas where the evidence-to-supposition ratio leans the most towards supposition and speculation. And since I don't have omnipotence, I express a limited or perspectival claim because that's all I'm actually able to speak to.
The point is to express epistemic uncertainty and openness to alternative perspectives.
But I understand it can be grating as a writing style if it's done too often, so I'll work on moderating that.
I think I do the same, not infrequently—I don't want to give the impression that I'm more confident than I am when I'm not entirely sure, so I'll try to qualify things to convey the right level of confidence.
I like both discussions and arguments, if they're productive.
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It wasn't you. I don't exactly recall finding your posts grating to read. They are often long and could use some getting to the point, but are smooth to read. The grating ones have a sprinkling of off statements or stylisms that are plain jarring.
On the flip side. I'm a big believe in brevity. Which often reads as overconfidence and argumentative. But I truly do believe that just like code that is too long has a smell, so does text. Preciseness and efficiency with resources is a skill (if not virtue).
I auto append hedging qualifiers to any non factual statement anyways. The sky is blue, but is the state of modern political discourse grim? Of course not, I have already prepended nothing to the first statement and "I think that" to the second statement. No one ever could make an absolute assertion about the state of modern political discourse, by DEFAULT it's a "i think" statement. If you feel the need to spell that out, I think you ought to trust the reader (and yourself) more.
I wonder if this is a product of the type of writing you've trained yourself to do. Coding trains you to be clean and efficient, jettisoning words and phrases that are insufficiently information-dense. I imagine journalists who had the fortune of coming up back when newspapers still had editors have been similarly trained to cut out the fat in service of the almighty column-inch. As a lawyer, it was beaten into me by harsh editors that those kinds of qualifiers are "weasel words" undermining my credibility to the court, so I tend to assume any grammatically qualified statement to be a bad-faith attempt to imply something they don't have the facts to back up if called out on (if you had the goods, you wouldn't bother qualifying the statement and would have simply stated it as unalloyed fact). It's often hard for me to turn this instinct off and remember that most people do not have formal training in argumentative writing.
But for someone with more of a creative writing background, who is trying to write neither efficiently nor persuasively, the connotative difference between a "thought," a "feeling," and a "fact" may often be really important. While a scientist writing for academic journals needs to be careful not to overstate their conclusions, and so will see qualifiers like "I think" as nothing less than honesty and good form.
EDIT: re-reading this comment, I may have disproved my own theory. Unnecessary qualifiers were clearly not beaten out of me: I literally started this comment with a qualified "I wonder if" in order to insulate myself from pushback stemming from the fact I hadn't put all that much thought into the idea...
You would think, but you’d be wrong. Scientific writing has an immensely irritating (to me) convention of pretending that the writer doesn’t exist as a human being.
You can see lots of ‘it may be observed that’ and ‘it is apparent that’ and sometimes a ‘we conclude’ but never ever ‘I think’ or ‘I can’t be sure but’. It’s a combination of lingering Enlightenmeny pretensions of objectivity plus a desire to deflect professional criticism.
I hated writing like that, it felt deceptive and weaselly.
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That's fair. I appreciate the advice. I struggle terribly with limiting my length, which has a lot to do with the thing about pointing out exceptions that I noted above. I also think almost exclusively in text so when I express a view it's usually the culmination of a lot of actual words floating around in my head. When I write a short text it feels... unfinished, like I've left something important out. But, with effort, I'm able to do it, so informal activity like the motte gets the long bois and actual essays or professional writing gets edited-down stuff.
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