...I don’t think the issue here is nuance. My attempt at a non-nuanced non-unfriendly version would be more like “It feels like CYA because those nuances are obvious to you, but they aren’t actually obvious to some other people.” or maybe “It feels like CYA because you are not the target audience.”
As someone who is perhaps overly optimistic about people’s intentions in general, I don’t really like it when people make assumptions about character/values (e.g. don’t care about truth) or read intent into other people’s actions (e.g. you’re trying to CYA, or you’re not really trying to understand me). People seem to assume negative intent with unjustifiable levels of confidence when there can be better alternative explanations (see below), and this can be very damaging to relationships and counterproductive for discussions. I think it might be helpful if we move away from inferring unknowable things and focus more on explaining our own experiences instead? (e.g. I liked the part where DirectedEvolution shared about their experience rewriting the section, and also Duncan’s explanation that writing nuance feels genuinely effortless).
Example of an alternative interpretation:
...basically, if you find the distinction tedious, it’s strong evidence that you’re either blind to the meaningfulness in the first place, or you just don’t care.
There is a third possibility I can think of: something may be meaningful and important but omitted because it is not relevant to our current task. For example, when we teach children science, we don’t teach them quantum mechanics simply because it is distracting when learning the basics, and not because quantum mechanics is irrelevant or unimportant in general. I personally would prefer it if teachers made this more explicit (i.e. say that they are teaching a simplified model and we would get to learn more details next time) but I get the impression that this is already obvious to other people so I’d imagine it comes across as superfluous to them.
...I don’t think the issue here is nuance. My attempt at a non-nuanced non-unfriendly version would be more like “It feels like CYA because those nuances are obvious to you, but they aren’t actually obvious to some other people.” or maybe “It feels like CYA because you are not the target audience.”
As someone who is perhaps overly optimistic about people’s intentions in general, I don’t really like it when people make assumptions about character/values (e.g. don’t care about truth) or read intent into other people’s actions (e.g. you’re trying to CYA, or you’re not really trying to understand me). People seem to assume negative intent with unjustifiable levels of confidence when there can be better alternative explanations (see below), and this can be very damaging to relationships and counterproductive for discussions. I think it might be helpful if we move away from inferring unknowable things and focus more on explaining our own experiences instead? (e.g. I liked the part where DirectedEvolution shared about their experience rewriting the section, and also Duncan’s explanation that writing nuance feels genuinely effortless).
Example of an alternative interpretation:
There is a third possibility I can think of: something may be meaningful and important but omitted because it is not relevant to our current task. For example, when we teach children science, we don’t teach them quantum mechanics simply because it is distracting when learning the basics, and not because quantum mechanics is irrelevant or unimportant in general. I personally would prefer it if teachers made this more explicit (i.e. say that they are teaching a simplified model and we would get to learn more details next time) but I get the impression that this is already obvious to other people so I’d imagine it comes across as superfluous to them.
This is good comment but I’m already sort of at my limit; going to try to focus just on DirectedEvolution.
Noted, and I appreciate the response.