microblog

He’s hypothesizing, you know

Paul Ingraham • Sep 24, 2020 ARCHIVEDMicroblog posts are archived and rarely updated. In contrast, most long-form articles on PainScience.com are updated regularly over the years (see updates page).

I will scatter this meme around PainScience.com, placed under paragraphs that contain an unusual amount of educated guessing:

I think it’s extremely important to minimize speculation in my work, and to clearly identify it when I do indulge in it. I hope this meme will help make it more obvious, because it turns out many readers take my educated guesses very seriously! Often too seriously. Even when I thought I’d been clear that I was speculating or even joking, I get some readers treating my reckons like facts. So I’ve learned: can’t really be too clear about it. With great power…

P.S. My first idea was to use the Mad Max “that’s bait” meme, but it only works as a GIF (I avoid those on PainSci, to keep pages light). In stills, Max’s finger pointing is quite unclear, very low contrast. Morgan Freeman probably 100x more familiar to my readers anyway.