It matters a lot who your audience is, and what are your goals in a specific interaction. Fluttershy’s points about status-signaling are a great example of ways that precision can be at odds with effectiveness.
Also, you’re probably wrong in most of your frequency estimates. Section III of this SlateStarCodex post helps explain why—you live in a bubble, and your experiences are not representative of most of humanity.
Unless you’re prepared to explain your reference set (20% of what exactly?) cite sources for your measures, it’s worth acknowledging that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and perhaps just not talking about it.
Rather than caveat-ing or specifying your degree in belief about percentage and definition of of evil men, just don’t bother. Walk away from conversations that draw you into useless generalizations.
In other words, your example is mind-killing to start with. No communication techniques or caveats can make a discussion of how much you believe what percentage of men are evil work well. And I suspect that if you pick non-politically-charged examples, you’ll find that the needed precision is already part of the discussion.
It matters a lot who your audience is, and what are your goals in a specific interaction. Fluttershy’s points about status-signaling are a great example of ways that precision can be at odds with effectiveness.
Also, you’re probably wrong in most of your frequency estimates. Section III of this SlateStarCodex post helps explain why—you live in a bubble, and your experiences are not representative of most of humanity.
Unless you’re prepared to explain your reference set (20% of what exactly?) cite sources for your measures, it’s worth acknowledging that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and perhaps just not talking about it.
Rather than caveat-ing or specifying your degree in belief about percentage and definition of of evil men, just don’t bother. Walk away from conversations that draw you into useless generalizations.
In other words, your example is mind-killing to start with. No communication techniques or caveats can make a discussion of how much you believe what percentage of men are evil work well. And I suspect that if you pick non-politically-charged examples, you’ll find that the needed precision is already part of the discussion.