(revised on Medium) On "yes, but..." (series: notes to myself)

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“I have not read [insert here your choice of document: article, comment, book, blog, reply, etc.] but …”.

THAT “but”, those 3 precious letters … 
that is your last chance to keep quiet and not behave like a fool.

Stop on the “but”. It's like a red light.
 
Hit the break. Think. Not twice, but for once. Use that little, last spark of awareness judiciously and … 

read the damn document first, before blathering about nothing, for BUT sake!

PS 
Not stopping at the BUT is linked to the bad linguistic habit of "howevering". 

Comments

  1. Graeme WallaceMon Mar 15, 10:42:00 am

    ...and yet, Master Floridi, while we all often enough and serially miss the mark of reBUTtal when we surf the headline, the anecdote, the aphorism and the hazardous shallows of plausibly misleading or indistinct abstracts - what are we to do when the Spirit of the Age is as of an abbreviated, hollow, reflexive and potentially meaningless utterance? (The more meaningless, the more valuable as though by some form of inverse economy, attribution or absurdity of contraband antithesis.) Is it possible to hold back this tide of cognitive, linguistic and information (or energy) compression?

    My own howevercraft hovers just above the surface, unanchored and drifting in a prevailing wind... it is the cultivation of constructive entropy, of a turn towards the proliferating high-dimensionality and degrees of freedom that envelop us. Fakes fly further and faster than facts for the same reason assertions haunt half-understood headlines without once ever dipping their toes into the semantic depths of substantive prose that (might) lie beyond. Entropy self-propagates (as salience, information) through us. We are not agents so much as we are transmission medium; a semiotic seance of vacuous subjectivity.

    Have I missed the point? That, sir, precisely *is* my point.

    ReplyDelete

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