Conversational Overhead

A woman of wisdom once told me to heed Paul Graham's advice to notice the things you can't say and then don't say them, which stance I'm updating slightly towards, because even when you're only making a perfectly reasonable point along the lines of Policy debates should not appear one-sided; I don't think that your Argument A actually supports Policy X (although I agree that X could be desireable for reasons independent of A) and everyone is charitable and no one bites, there's still a huge amount of emotional overhead incurred just by being in the conversation at all, because even when and you and your interlocutors are honest, you almost never have common knowledge of that honesty, so your interlocutors aren't necessarily sure that you're not just disagreeing with A out of secret enmity towards X, and you're not sure that they're sure that you're not, all of which drama is a drain on mental energy that could otherwise have been allocated to entirely grown-up concerns like JavaScript and money.

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