Joey Hess wrote: > > Cobblers. Any reasonable person can see I was only asked for the > > argument in one direction and I didn't yet know the contrary arguments > > well enough to summarise them. You should have seen that, as it was in > > the message you replied to! > > I consider myself a reasonable person, and it was not obvious to me.
More accurately, one tactic is to try to give the appearance of giving some kind of summary of arguments for and against a position, and understate the argument one disagrees to to the point that it looks absurdly weak. For a number of reasons, it's quite easy to read your original mail as an attempt to do that, which is why I asked if you were really trying to do an impartial summary. If one is really trying to summarise both sides of something, one needs to keep in mind that this tactic exists, and that one's readers will be aware of it, and if one can only summarise one side of an argument in such a weak way, then it's best to either get more information about it, or think about whether one can really be impartial on the topic. Often it's best to give up on the summary at that point. -- see shy jo
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