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by vorpalhex 1790 days ago
It would be harmful to add such a disclaimer. It would not assuage those who would take offense and it would hurt reader trust.

All writing is from a present understanding.

1 comments

If all writing is from a present understanding, how could it hurt reader trust to acknowledge that explicitly?
I would expect the following kind of writers to use that that disclaimer:

* The writer expresses poorly considered opinions, loosely holds them. They won't bother defending them.

* The writer expresses anodyne opinions that might one day become controversial, they won't bother holding onto them when the rest of society moves on from them.

In both cases, I wouldn't bother reading what they had to say. I could open the opinion section of any newspaper to get the same content with twice the conviction.

Nothing wrong with hedging your opinions in-text. But if you're hedging everything you say before you've even bothered to say it, you either have nothing interesting to say or probably censor yourself enough already.

Interesting. It sounds like we value very different kinds of writing.