My posts vary a lot in how many qualifiers I have. So much so that I get a lot of feedback in both directions: for some posts people fume at how “overconfident” I sound, for others people complain about how all the qualifiers make it very hard to read.

I'm sure a lot of this is just a skill issue on my part but I think a lot of what ppl see as tonal mismatches just comes from me being someone who legitimately ( "genuinely") believes in the power of reason and evidence. It's very hard to demonstrate this within a single post.

I just have a lot of confidence based on careful reasoning and evidence that some very ex ante surprising claims are true: the recent papal encyclical is with very high probability AI-assisted, or that you can get better at board games via paying attention to a single heuristic.

People (especially people who object-level disagree with me) often get mad at me for how unreasonably confident I might sound on surprising claims. But imo it'd be more performatively dishonest for me to add qualifiers when I don't believe in them!

In contrast, I sometimes make arguments that I think are interesting and important but have a high chance of being wrong: anthropic explanation for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, or anti-ageing hopes being obviated by basic evolutionary theory.

For those posts, I add a lot of caveats, to the point that people DM me complaints for how annoying it is to read. Again, definitely partially a skill issue on my part! But I don’t how else to gesture at actually being uncertain, especially given practical time constraints!

I think other writers (and AIs) are drawn to a kind of milquetoast "charity" or mid degree of across-the-board performative humility. Or like the performed humility is correlated more with whether a claim "sounds surprising" than what the balance of reason and evidence should lead you to believe, or what the author actually believes. Or how humble you sound comes across as instantiation of your personality or “brand” (real or affected) as a public intellectual.

I find this variously imperceptive (in the sense that the writer does not have enough trust, or justified trust, in their own assessment of the truth), or dishonest.