[jackcviers3]

As one teacher and several profs told me, "You don't need to say, 'I think', because the fact that you are saying or writing it means that you think it". In other words, if you are uncertain, don't express the idea, because no amount of verbal hedging will protect you if you express something that is incorrect.

However, the best way to get the correct idea if you are wrong and unsure is to confidently propose your idea as if it is correct - Cunningham's law applied to everything.

[gryn]

writing 'I think X', 'there a chance that X' instead of 'X is', 'I know that X'

> if you are uncertain, don't express the idea, because no amount of verbal hedging will protect you if you express something that is incorrect.

The problem with this is with the target audience of your writing, if you're assuming an adversarial audience vs a cooperative one. the bigger and less self-filtered the audience is the more likely it is to become of the first kind.

> the best way to get the correct idea if you are wrong and unsure is to confidently propose your idea as if it is correct - Cunningham's law applied to everything.

Personally when I see someone being confidently incorrect consistently I just filter them out and their opinions instead of correcting them because a lot of time it's a lost cause.

for example Reddit and twitter, the sheer amount of people that are overly confidently incorrect, it made conversations not worth having there so I just stopped many years ago.

[jackcviers3]

Everyone has their threshold for how many times you are allowed to be incorrect within a given context, sure.

> adversarial audience... Yes. Even if the audience you target is small and on your side today, a successful piece of writing will gain an adversarial audience, eventually.

> If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. - Cardinal Richelieu (apocryphal paraphrase from hearsay apparently but still a great quote).

[rcxdude]

And yet one of the best ways to lose respect in a technical context, especially as a junior, is to be confidently incorrect. Showing humility helps a hell of a lot for all concerned if you've in fact misunderstood something.

[makeitdouble]

> if you are uncertain, don't express the idea

A better interpretation is to express the uncertainty at its core, and not wrapped into your subjectiveness.

For instance if you read it in a publication and kinda agree but don't fully trust it, instead of "I think X" you could go with "Publication Y exposes the possibility of X"

The real point of the advice is to get rid of fluff, not remove nuance or valuable information.