Exaggeration for Grievance

One rhetorical device I’ll sometimes use is “exaggeration for effect.” It’s just another way of employing hyperbole, which is less about the precision of the description, but to create an outsized impression to make an acute point. Now, it’s a bit dangerous to do this outside of formal literary contexts, particularly when trying to communicate with a bunch of engineers who prize accuracy. Over the years, as I’ve gotten in trouble by making overly grandiose statements, I’ve learned to provide an up-front disclaimer; engineers know I’m not citing exact numbers, and it’s more about directionality than amplitude.

In online writings, this technique is being taken to its extremes. On some level, this is just clickbait by another name, but it has evolved beyond crafting titles to drive ad impressions. It feels like the main thrust of these articles is to invoke outrage with 10,000 words, substituting knowledge for postulation, facts for assumptions, which are inevitably interpreted in a negative light. If the mark of good argumentation is being able to articulate the best variation of the opposing perspective, this is pretty much the opposite of that—the aggressive argument strawman, kinda.

Some recent examples:

  • This blog post freaking out about the job market;
  • Most articles written by Ed Zitron, a tech industry observer;
  • The wave of laments that come from people griping about their crappy managers and why management itself is a sham.

The difference between strawmanning the opposition and this kind of over-the-top exaggeration is, I think, the extent of how much the author knows what actually goes on. It impacts what that exaggeration looks like in practice, and is a tell for whether the assertion is an exaggeration to make a point, versus a complete stab in the dark. If there’s a 6-month project on the list that needs to be prioritized, it’s one thing to ask the team how to do it in 3 months to force difficult conversations, but quite another to ask the team to get it done in a week.

Similarly, a lot of these online debates are caricatures of people and situations that are easy to get mad about, if they were indeed reality. “Nepo companies” that pay their employees $20k/day to do nothing, or to cite that a hallucination here and there renders all of GenAI worthless…it’d be funny if the authors weren’t also deadly serious about their charges of incompetence and foul play. Instead of just being angry and aggrieved, when it’s exaggerated with a nod and a wink—it’s like a McSweeney’s article or the old Colbert Report, comfortable in its absurd humor.

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