On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 09:42:08AM +0000, Yoav Nir wrote:
> To figure everything that was said out
[…]
>
> All that is readily available through Google and Wikipedia, but
> requires a lot of reading.
It would be disingenuous to pretend I didn't write as I did on
purpose. I was trying to illustrate as well as argue, because there's
a benefit to shorter communication over longer: we all get a lot of
mail, and really long mails consume time. If we give up the
expressive power of casual references, idiom, metaphor, and analogy
and instead explain everything at length, our communications are going
to take a _lot_ more time. It's just way faster to be able to go to
the mic (or send a mail) and say, "This is more heat than light. I
still don't get it," than to have to say, "I appreciate that there are
strong positions on both sides and that feelings are running very high
about this issue. People have expressed themselves in very strong
terms, but I still do not fully comprehend the details of the two
positions, and I can't really tell what the difference is. Would
someone please explain in detail what separates the different
positions?" I'm not even sure the second of those formulations is
clearer, though I suspect it's the one considered a polite
intervention in a certain kind of meeting.
Also, is it really the case that one needs to figure out everything
that was said? Who Mike O'Dell is, or what Lakoff and Johnson said,
and so on, is all maybe interesting embroidery, and it might be useful
in evaluating subtleties. But I think the main propositional
conclusion of my earlier message ("Maybe we should sometimes keep some
analogy and metaphor," will do, I suppose) is still plain without all
the additional references. Perhaps that's all I should have written,
but I think that would have been a poor argument. Only if you're at
all open to the possibility of the argument in the first place do you
need to start working on it.
Anyway, I still don't feel super strongly about this issue. But it's
clearly an important one for our culture, so I suppose we'll have to
face it again.
Best regards,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx