army1987 comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2012 10:44:52PM 2 points [-]

This seems like a good "control" thought experiment to determine whether people are just being contrarian.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 April 2012 05:13:11PM 2 points [-]

More like, to determine whether people are paying any attention. (I once took an online personality test which included questions such as “I've never eaten before” to prevent people from using bots or similar to screw up their data.)

Comment author: ciphergoth 20 April 2012 06:51:41AM 2 points [-]

It's hard to get people to answer such things straightforwardly. I once included "Some people have fingernails" in a poll, as about the most uncontroversially true thing I could think of, and participants found a way to argue that it wasn't true - since "some" understates the proportion.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 April 2012 12:42:36AM 2 points [-]

Well... Some people does usually implicate ‘not all people, and not even all people except a non-sizeable minority’, but if we go by implicatures rather than literal meanings, X has fingernails (in contexts where everyone knows X is a human), in my experience at least, usually implicates that X's fingernails are not trimmed nearly as short as possible, since the literal meaning would be quite uninformative once you know X is a human.

Comment author: shokwave 20 April 2012 08:08:16AM 1 point [-]

"There exists at least one X that ..." is what logicians have settled on as the most easily satisfiable and least objectionable phrasing.