I agree this is quite bad practice in general, though see my other comment for why I think these are not especially bad cases.
A central error in these cases is assuming audiences will draw the wrong inferences from your true view and do bad things because of that. As far as I can tell, no one has full command of the epistemic dynamics here to be able to say that with confidence and then act on it. If you aren’t explicit and transparent about your reasoning, people can make any number of assumptions, others can poke holes in your less-than-fully-endorsed claim and undermine the claim or undermine your credibility and people can use that to justify all kinds of things.
You need to trust that your audience will understand your true view or that you can communicate it properly. Any alternative assumption is speculation whose consequences you should feel more, not less, responsible for since you decided to mislead people for the sake of the consequences rather than simply being transparent and letting the audience take responsibility for how they react to what you say.
I think people who do the bad version of this often have this ~thought experiment in mind: “my audience would rather I tell them the thing that makes their lives better than the literal content of my thoughts.” As a member of your audience, I agree. I don’t, however, agree with the subtly altered, but more realistic version of the thought experiment: “my audience would rather I tell them the thing that I think makes their lives better than the literal content of my thoughts.”
I agree this is quite bad practice in general, though see my other comment for why I think these are not especially bad cases.
A central error in these cases is assuming audiences will draw the wrong inferences from your true view and do bad things because of that. As far as I can tell, no one has full command of the epistemic dynamics here to be able to say that with confidence and then act on it. If you aren’t explicit and transparent about your reasoning, people can make any number of assumptions, others can poke holes in your less-than-fully-endorsed claim and undermine the claim or undermine your credibility and people can use that to justify all kinds of things.
You need to trust that your audience will understand your true view or that you can communicate it properly. Any alternative assumption is speculation whose consequences you should feel more, not less, responsible for since you decided to mislead people for the sake of the consequences rather than simply being transparent and letting the audience take responsibility for how they react to what you say.
I think people who do the bad version of this often have this ~thought experiment in mind: “my audience would rather I tell them the thing that makes their lives better than the literal content of my thoughts.” As a member of your audience, I agree. I don’t, however, agree with the subtly altered, but more realistic version of the thought experiment: “my audience would rather I tell them the thing that I think makes their lives better than the literal content of my thoughts.”