I think I often display more confidence than I actually have when expressing things. It can also be a problem. It's not necessarily that I doubt what I'm saying, but most of what I say is ultimately personal opinion. I normally do have a reasonable level of confidence in my opinions, but I understand I could be wrong, and I welcome dissenting opinions as long as they're based on sensible reasoning and not just plain parroting or bad faith. It can be tiresome (and even ineffective, anyway) to repeatedly state the level of subjectivity that I understand to be embedded in what I'm saying (I mean, I guess pretty much half of all my sentences sound a lot like this one, or I assume they do, and it still doesn't really seem to be enough, from what I can tell at least.
). I think people often see me as arrogant or pretentious because of this. It has definitely contributed to my overall sense of alienation throughout life, both IRL and online.
I've heard there are languages where "level of subjectivity / source of information" is a grammatical feature just like plurals or verb conjugation. It would be nice if all languages had that.
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earth is just a tiny ball
Last edited by toadsnail on 30 Mar 2021, 1:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.