I agree that the proposed fixes in your list would help to reduce hedge drift. But the whole point is that many scientists, probably the majority, possibly the vast majority, do not want to do that. They are, to paraphrase the British politician Peter Mandelson, intensely relaxed about the possibility of hedge drift. They positively welcome it, and indeed they may well have selected their words strategically precisely in order to provoke it. That, rather than some unfortunate accidental default setting when writing that happens to favour hedge drift, seems like a pretty parsimonious explanation of why it’s so common.
PS: You have a typo: “if not ouright [sic] intellectually dishonest”.
I agree that the proposed fixes in your list would help to reduce hedge drift. But the whole point is that many scientists, probably the majority, possibly the vast majority, do not want to do that. They are, to paraphrase the British politician Peter Mandelson, intensely relaxed about the possibility of hedge drift. They positively welcome it, and indeed they may well have selected their words strategically precisely in order to provoke it. That, rather than some unfortunate accidental default setting when writing that happens to favour hedge drift, seems like a pretty parsimonious explanation of why it’s so common.
PS: You have a typo: “if not ouright [sic] intellectually dishonest”.