I hear a lot of scorn for the rationalist style where you caveat every sentence with “I think” or the like. I want to defend that style.
There is real semantic content to me saying “I think” in a sentence. I don’t say it when I’m stating established fact. I only use it when I’m saying something which is fundamentally speculative. But most of my sentences are fundamentally speculative.
It feels like people were complaining that I use the future tense a lot. Like, sure, my text uses the future tense more than average, and future tense is indeed somewhat more awkward. But future tense is the established way to talk about the future, which is what I wanted to talk about. It seems pretty weird to switch to present tense just because people don’t like future tense.
Probably this isn’t the exclusive reason, but typically I use “I think” whenever I want to rule out the interpretation that I am implying we all agree on my claim. If I say “It was a mistake for you to paint this room yellow” this is more natural if you agree with me; if I say “I think it was a mistake for you to paint this room yellow” this is more natural if I’m informing you of my opinion but I expect you to disagree.
This is not a universal rule, and fwiw I do think there’s something good about clear and simple writing that cuts out all the probably-unnecessary qualifiers, but I think this is a common case where I find it worth adding it in.
Hmm, my usage seems more like: “I think that…” means the reader/listener might disagree with me, because maybe I’m wrong and the reader is right. (Or maybe it’s subjective.) Meanwhile, “I claim that…” also means the reader might disagree with me, but if they do, it’s only because I haven’t explained myself (yet), and the reader will sooner or later come to see that I’m totally right. So “I think” really is pretty centrally about confidence levels. I think :)
I think of “It seems” as coming from the view from nowhere. I say “It seems to me” to own it, unless I mean to make the active claim that I believe it will seem this way to everyone.
“Arguably” feels super weak to me. I would only use it if I actively wanted to distance myself from a view. Almost anything is ‘arguable’ in principle.
Some languages allow or even require suffixes on verbs indicating how you know what you’re stating (a grammatical feature called ‘evidentiality’) - eg ‘I heard that X’, ‘I suppose that X’.
I suspect this is epistemically good for speakers of such languages, forcing them to consider the reasons behind every statement they make. Hence I find myself adding careful qualifications myself, e.g. ‘I suspect’ (as above), ‘I read that’, etc.
I hear a lot of scorn for the rationalist style where you caveat every sentence with “I think” or the like.
I think e.g. Eliezer (in the sequences) and Scott Alexander don’t hedge a lot, so this doesn’t necessarily seem like a rationalist style. I do it a lot though, but I fairly sure it makes readability worse.
A general tip when editing pieces is that if you ctrl+f for “I think” and you cut out 90-95% of them, it makes the piece better. The (respected) reader knows that everything you write is what you think, and a good piece should make the hedging explicit for a claim that needs deeper consideration—not every claim.
What about readers you don’t respect? Well, who cares what they think.
The reader knows that, certainly. But they don’t know that you know that; that’s why you have to clarify that you do. (And yes, you have to! Most people in fact do not know that their opinions aren’t fact).
a lot of people say “I think” reflexively because they’re used to making themselves small. it wouldn’t be surprising to me if such people said “I think” more often than most even in situations where the caveat is unnecessary.
Saying “I think” isn’t making yourself small but making yourself the appropriate size; frequently stating opinions as fact is an unwarranted status-grab and pollutes the epistemic commons.
There are languages out there in which the epistemic status is a mandatory part of a sentence (“I’ve seen”, “so I have been told”, “I think”, etc.)
Is this true? Examples?
Yes, this is absolutely true! These grammatical features are called evidentials or evidentiality markers, and they’re mandatory in many languages around the world.
Examples:
Turkish is a classic example. It has two past tenses that encode evidentiality:
-di (direct/witnessed past): “I saw it happen”
-miş (indirect/inferred past): “I heard/inferred it happened”
So “geldi” means “he came” (and I witnessed it), while “gelmiş” means “he came” (but I didn’t see it—I heard about it or saw evidence of it).
Quechua (Andean languages) has several evidential markers:
-mi: direct knowledge
-si: reported/hearsay
-chá: conjecture
Tibetan has a rich evidential system distinguishing personal knowledge, inference, and hearsay.
Japanese has evidential markers too, though they’re sometimes considered less grammaticalized:
rashii: hearsay (“I heard that...”)
yōda: inference based on evidence
sōda: reported information
Bulgarian and other Balkan languages have “renarrative” mood marking information learned from others rather than directly experienced.
The key point is that in these languages, you often cannot make a statement about a past event without indicating your epistemic basis for the claim. Leaving it out would be grammatically incomplete, like forgetting to conjugate a verb in English. This forces speakers to constantly track and communicate their source of knowledge.
Hmmph. If he wants to push people to do more research so that they can make statements without any such qualifiers—or to shut up when they haven’t done enough research to have anything useful to say—then I may sympathize. If he wants them to make themselves sound more certain than they are, then I oppose.
I hear a lot of scorn for the rationalist style where you caveat every sentence with “I think” or the like. I want to defend that style.
There is real semantic content to me saying “I think” in a sentence. I don’t say it when I’m stating established fact. I only use it when I’m saying something which is fundamentally speculative. But most of my sentences are fundamentally speculative.
It feels like people were complaining that I use the future tense a lot. Like, sure, my text uses the future tense more than average, and future tense is indeed somewhat more awkward. But future tense is the established way to talk about the future, which is what I wanted to talk about. It seems pretty weird to switch to present tense just because people don’t like future tense.
Probably this isn’t the exclusive reason, but typically I use “I think” whenever I want to rule out the interpretation that I am implying we all agree on my claim. If I say “It was a mistake for you to paint this room yellow” this is more natural if you agree with me; if I say “I think it was a mistake for you to paint this room yellow” this is more natural if I’m informing you of my opinion but I expect you to disagree.
This is not a universal rule, and fwiw I do think there’s something good about clear and simple writing that cuts out all the probably-unnecessary qualifiers, but I think this is a common case where I find it worth adding it in.
Hmm, my usage seems more like: “I think that…” means the reader/listener might disagree with me, because maybe I’m wrong and the reader is right. (Or maybe it’s subjective.) Meanwhile, “I claim that…” also means the reader might disagree with me, but if they do, it’s only because I haven’t explained myself (yet), and the reader will sooner or later come to see that I’m totally right. So “I think” really is pretty centrally about confidence levels. I think :)
By the way, “It seems” and “arguably” seem a bit less defensive than “I think” (which is purely subjective). Arguably.
I think of “It seems” as coming from the view from nowhere. I say “It seems to me” to own it, unless I mean to make the active claim that I believe it will seem this way to everyone.
“Arguably” feels super weak to me. I would only use it if I actively wanted to distance myself from a view. Almost anything is ‘arguable’ in principle.
Some languages allow or even require suffixes on verbs indicating how you know what you’re stating (a grammatical feature called ‘evidentiality’) - eg ‘I heard that X’, ‘I suppose that X’.
I suspect this is epistemically good for speakers of such languages, forcing them to consider the reasons behind every statement they make. Hence I find myself adding careful qualifications myself, e.g. ‘I suspect’ (as above), ‘I read that’, etc.
I think e.g. Eliezer (in the sequences) and Scott Alexander don’t hedge a lot, so this doesn’t necessarily seem like a rationalist style. I do it a lot though, but I fairly sure it makes readability worse.
A general tip when editing pieces is that if you ctrl+f for “I think” and you cut out 90-95% of them, it makes the piece better. The (respected) reader knows that everything you write is what you think, and a good piece should make the hedging explicit for a claim that needs deeper consideration—not every claim.
What about readers you don’t respect? Well, who cares what they think.
The reader knows that, certainly. But they don’t know that you know that; that’s why you have to clarify that you do. (And yes, you have to! Most people in fact do not know that their opinions aren’t fact).
a lot of people say “I think” reflexively because they’re used to making themselves small. it wouldn’t be surprising to me if such people said “I think” more often than most even in situations where the caveat is unnecessary.
Saying “I think” isn’t making yourself small but making yourself the appropriate size; frequently stating opinions as fact is an unwarranted status-grab and pollutes the epistemic commons.
There are languages out there in which the epistemic status is a mandatory part of a sentence (“I’ve seen”, “so I have been told”, “I think”, etc.)
Asking Claude for examples
Is this true? Examples?
Yes, this is absolutely true! These grammatical features are called evidentials or evidentiality markers, and they’re mandatory in many languages around the world.
Examples:
Turkish is a classic example. It has two past tenses that encode evidentiality:
-di (direct/witnessed past): “I saw it happen”
-miş (indirect/inferred past): “I heard/inferred it happened”
So “geldi” means “he came” (and I witnessed it), while “gelmiş” means “he came” (but I didn’t see it—I heard about it or saw evidence of it).
Quechua (Andean languages) has several evidential markers:
-mi: direct knowledge
-si: reported/hearsay
-chá: conjecture
Tibetan has a rich evidential system distinguishing personal knowledge, inference, and hearsay.
Japanese has evidential markers too, though they’re sometimes considered less grammaticalized:
rashii: hearsay (“I heard that...”)
yōda: inference based on evidence
sōda: reported information
Bulgarian and other Balkan languages have “renarrative” mood marking information learned from others rather than directly experienced.
The key point is that in these languages, you often cannot make a statement about a past event without indicating your epistemic basis for the claim. Leaving it out would be grammatically incomplete, like forgetting to conjugate a verb in English. This forces speakers to constantly track and communicate their source of knowledge.
Interesting.
Yep! Another angle is it helps with variable scoping of conversational info-packets, NVC-style, to reduce collisions between psychological content in the receiver.
Funnily enough, just yesterday I read Steven Pinker heaping paragraph upon paragraph of scorn on writers who keep hedging with claims like “I think”.
Yeah, Pinker is specifically kinda annoyed/outgroupy at LW Rats I think.
I’d be surprised if he had LW Rats in mind when he wrote that, but it’s not impossible.
Hmmph. If he wants to push people to do more research so that they can make statements without any such qualifiers—or to shut up when they haven’t done enough research to have anything useful to say—then I may sympathize. If he wants them to make themselves sound more certain than they are, then I oppose.