NancyLebovitz comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - Less Wrong

54 Post author: lukeprog 04 October 2011 02:45AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 08 October 2011 04:00:03PM *  4 points [-]

Asking people to be precise is also a signal of something. We usually don't demand perfect clarity for every sentence we ever read or hear, even on LW. I suppose we usually demand it when we disagree with one's opinion.

I don't want "perfect clarity* from people, I want for the people on this site who make declarative statements about groups of people they're not in (especially when the implications shape their behavior toward members of that group) to be factually-accurate and not misleading in their implications. This is not a complex or censorious idea.

I don't want "politically correct", I want actually correct. Do you see the difference? What I want to see is people not committing the ecological fallacy (Population X is statistically Y on average, ergo more members than not will be Y) and nobody pointing it out just because the conclusions are agreeable to a majority on this site.

I do not have the power, let alone the desire, to censor you or any other poster on this site (other than by means of downvoting a comment, and I only get the one downvote).

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 08 October 2011 05:05:38PM 9 points [-]

Precision is a way of fighting availability bias-- if all you see is "women are shorter than men" because most women are in fact shorter than most men, then it can be hard to remember that there are women who are taller than most men.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 October 2011 05:32:08PM 3 points [-]

Agreed; this is also important.

It also seems to lead to treating actual examples (say, of taller women) as irrelevant, simply because they're in a numerical minority.