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This is on my mind fairly often, as someone who talks a lot about What Worked For Me and What Really Really Didn’t Work For Me, And also as someone who’s default mode of speaking & listening is: everyone is speaking from their own limited experience, don’t take it too seriously https://t.co/mqB89NH5wd
I can only spend so much time saying things like “in my experience,” “for me” “to my mind,” “this is what worked for me personally but please sense through for yourself” and so on before it gets tiresome and distracts from what I’m actually saying
As a listener, it’s good to have a bone-deep direct awareness that NO ONE IS SPEAKING IN UNIVERSAL TRUTHS and almost no one is even trying to Everyone’s words come from their own specific perspective and experience. There are coordinates to it. Figure out if it applies to you
When I say “x is amazing and has these effects,” I’m speaking from the best of my ability to articulate the coordinates I stand at and trajectory behind me. I have zero desire for anyone to mistake that for The Ground Floor of The Universe.
When I say “x doesn’t work, leads to bad shit, etc” I’m talking from where I stand and what I see. I can either add a few pages of caveats about it—or you can get used to listening to people as always speaking partially, relatively, and from a specific vantage point https://t.co/BCOMWYVb97
@the_wilderless I think it's important as a speaker/writer etc to have some awareness of how much certain topics and audiences need caveating. If I speak to rationalists I will caveat differently to when talking to my mom and that's good. Out of that follows a "as a teacher know your students".