Agreed, but the idea still made me laugh :)

Bingo :)

Crowds typically react negatively to change no matter what postive effects it brings. Wizards of the Coast has a track record of making decisions that were necessary and beneficial to the long term health of their games, each of which brought in new players and which old players eventually adapted to, and every single one of them produced an uproar.

So I upvoted this comment and then saw when I looked at it again that it was now at zero. I'm deeply curious what in it someone thought deserved a downvote.

Would you agree that Luke communicated that it's fairly safe to assume that all women X?

It depends on the passage. For example, "Women want men to be better at making them laugh and feel good and get aroused and not be creeped out," applies to basically all women, and also applies to all men but the message from context is that it is generally more important to women than to men. So yes to "all women want X" and "women generally want X more than men want X" but no to "all women want X more than men want X".

If one leaves out the 'generally',

One has to assume something from context and insert either "generally", "exclusively", "equally", or whatever, if it isn't explicit. My assumption that the intention was best captured by "generally" was a) the charitable reading b) the most likely reading.

The argument that a sentence could be interpreted as offensive seems like it unfairly ignores the principle of charity.

a woman who has no desire to have children is in a different situation - there's no plausible way that the average degree of wanting-children in men is lower than that, so it's immediately obvious that she doesn't fit the speaker's definition of 'women'

Is it a definition?

does it change your perception

Not consciously.

This was a good example, but I think you probably missed a part of the message. Or maybe I am imagining a part that did not exist.

Generally, people are speaking imprecisely. To state one's opinion with a mathematical precision as you did, is rare. (For example, writing this paragraph I would have a problem to precisely define what "generally" and "rare" mean in this context.) And when normally speaking, people tolerate this. ...uhm, usually.

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.

Placing a burden of preciseness on some people or some opinions, provides their opponents cheap counter-attacks, when they don't have to discuss the argument, only point out the impreciseness.

Now, carefully crafting one's comments into precise sentences is possible, but has a non-zero cost. So by selectively asking people, whose opinion we don't like, to be more precise than usual, we make them pay for their dissent. All while pretending that we only care about the truth, without taking sides.

Of course, people learn that they are asked for higher precision only when expressing certain opinions, so if they want to avoid the costs of such speech, they avoid the sensitive topics. But that's the point, isn't it? By increasing standards of speech for certain opinion, we gradually make it disappear.

I think that people often feel when this is done to them, but it's kind of difficult for them to express what is happening, without seeming kind of paranoid. Also it's kind of difficult to express your feelings in a situation when an extra dose of preciseness is required.

Summary: It is possible to selectively use demands for precision as a form of censorship.

Do you have examples of people agreeing with what they believe to be a claim of the type "all men want x"?

So far I've only seen people a) disagreeing with what they interpret as such claims on the grounds they are unreasonable and b) saying that others will mistakenly agree with the unreasonable interpretation and find it reasonable.

It's tough to get exact numbers on the rate of intersex individuals per thousand, but I do know that the number of intersex individuals I've met and known for some time is far higher than that rate. No, I did not mean "genderqueer". This would be what you might call "too many digits beyond what's significant."

Oooh, perfect example! Because this is probably still not true for a plurality, if not majority of humanity,

[...]

Do you want to try again?

My statement wasn't ever meant to be representative of the whole. That should have been obvious. If I'd said "only for love" then that'd be a valid objection. As it stands, I have no such problem. Generalizations that are useful for a context need not be without exception or even universally comprehensive.

People in the past or in other cultures are irrelevant to me when discussing social habits I am familiar with.

So, no. My statement is fine as is. Did I leave out a great heaping swath of precisions, provisos, and details? Absolutely!! -- but that was the point from the outset.

When someone adds that proviso "asexual/homosexual" -- they are changing the relevant level of precision necessary to the conversation.

No, they are pointing out that in order to apply to a case they are interested in, the conversation must be made more precise.

I want you to understand that you just agreed with me while appending the word "No" to the beginning of your sentence. This is... a less than positive indicator as to whether I am being understood.

The last one isn't a distraction, it's a counterexample.

The statement doesn't allow for counterexamples because it's a statement of fact, at bare minimum: the fact is that men and women do marry because they love each other. Other shit happens too, but that itself is a factual statement. Its informational value as a statement can only be derived from within the text of a given conversation.

If you want to meaningfully say that men and women marry out of love, you must implicitly claim that loveless marriages are a small minority.

That doesn't follow. Where do you get this necessity of implication from? Certainly not from the principle I'm espousing here. (Note: "A small minority" is a different statement from "a minority". In several cities in the US, whites are a minority. And yet the second-order simulacrum of those populations would still be a white person -- because whites, while a minority, are the plurality [largest minority].)

This isn't a reductio, it's a strawman. When you add provisos to a statement that is really nontrivial, you do not turn "generally" into "may or may not." You turn "always" into "generally", or "generally" into "in the majority of cases".

If and only if you meant "always" in the first place and want to be less than perfectly accurate. "In the majority of cases" is an inaccurate method of expressing how S-O S's work -- as I mentioned above, with "the largest minority" being the representative entity of the body. So you'd be better able to most accurately express the situation by stating that X happens Y percent of the time, but that simply isn't language used in ordinary discourse.

In any case, what about "People who marry generally do so out of love?" This retains the substance of the original statement while incorporating the provisos.

That the statement can be revised in this manner does not obviate the example I was pointing to with the previous example. I used an explicit reductio ad absurdum to make the mechanism explicit. From zero to one hundred, as it were.

In a more 'realistic' example for your revision: what is meant by "generally"? What is meant by "love"? What is meant by "people who marry"? These are all imprecise statements. Is "generally" "a large majority"? Is "generally" "a small majority"? Is "generally" "the largest minority"? Etc., etc.. You chose not to go to that level of precision because it was not necessary. And that's just for one sentence. Imagine an entire conversation with such provisos to consider.

As for the cognitive load, why not state assumptions at the beginning of an essay where possible,

I just now caught this, and... this is, I believe, where we have our fundamental disconnect.

By restricting the dialogue to essays the overwhelming majority of the meaningfulness of what I'm trying to say is entirely eliminated: my statements have been aimed at discussing the heuristic of measuring the cognitive burden per "unit" of information when communicating. The fact is that in a pre-planned document of basically any type one can safely assume a vastly greater available "pool of cognition" in his audience than in, say, a one-off comment in response to it, a youtube video comment, or something said over beers on a Friday night with your drinking-buddies.

I am struck by the thought that this metaphorically very similar to how Newton's classical mechanics equations manifest themselves from quantum mechanics after you introduce enough systems, or how the general relativity equations become effectively conventional at "non-relativistic" speeds: when you change the terms of the equations the apparent behaviors become significantly different. Just like how there's no need to bother considering your own relativistic mass when deciding whether or not to go on a diet, the heuristic I'm trying to discuss is vanishingly irrelevant to anything that one should expect from a thought-out-in advance, unrestricted-in-length, document.

I was generally taught to carry significant figures further than strictly necessary to avoid introducing rounding errors.

Which is why I also discussed error propagation, which compounds.

Propagation of uncertainty is not a reason to drop qualifiers. It's a reason to use them.

I can only say that you are reading the metaphor too literally given the examples I've given thus far.

If I want an answer to three significant figures, I do not begin my reasoning by rounding to two sigfigs, then trying to add in the last sigfig later.

Of course!!! This isn't applicable to dialogue, however, as it has the opposite problem: the degree of cognitive burden to retain the informational value of a statement increases with the increased complexity. There is a limit on how much of this can be done in a given conversation.

Increasing complexity of statements to increase their accuracy can cause the ability to comprehend a statement to be reduced.

If the reader does NOT share the assumptions, then relieving them of the cognitive burden of being aware of disagreement is not a service.

This statement carries a specific assumption of depth of dialogue which may or may not be valid.

Not adding those statements also has a cost.

This is trivially true. What does adding them add to a conversation to which they are not relevant or significant?

Honestly, you don't know how many potential rationalists may find a post seemingly making unchallenged sweeping generalizations about women, and decide that these so-called rationalists are just a group of bigoted idiots that are less rational than your average person-in-the-street.

This is uncontestably true. But the opposite is also true; you don't know how many potential rationalists may find a post filled with provisos and details and, upon discovering a massive gulf of an inferential gap, give up on even attempting to understand.

[Re: Pi "is" 3.14] In short if there's actual transparency, not a double illusion of such.

Certainly.

But if they don't know that, if every post of yours may be perceived as an indication of complete positions (not hasty approximations thereof)

This is a gross misrepresentation of my statements, to the point of being nothing remotely like what I advocate. I have repeatedly advocated not the elimination of precision but the application of only the relevant degree of precision to the nature of the discourse at hand.

it costs less to do things like say "most women" instead of "women" (or add a general disclaimer at the beginning) rather than not do it.

My point is not restricted to '''"most women" instead of "women"'''. It is a generalized principle which happens to apply here. For any given conversation there are thousands of such details we must choose to parse for relevance to a conversation. Demanding unerring accuracy beyond relevance is simply damaging to dialogue.

Seems is the key here. Any instance where you would use that sort of language, the relevant threshold of significance was such that it was a proper statement to make.

Consider a context where you were making that statement to a Jehovah's Witness trying to hand you a flyer as your 10 o'clock bus was stopping in front of you. You could still make the statement, but if you were being honest with yourself you'd realize that your words would be gibberish, whereas "I'm not Christian" would be contextually appropriate: you would convey a statement with non-zero informational value. "The probability that 'Christianity is correct' is epsilon" on the other hand would not in such a context, quite likely, actually convey any meaning to the audience.

It might be possible that flirting is more useful for negotiating short term sexual encounters, but I think there are still applications for long term relationships. For example, flirting can help determine whether your senses of humor are compatible, which could important for a long-term relationship.

Although you might not care much about the information conveyed through flirting, your prospective partners very much might. Flirting will give them a lot of information about your character and social experiences, which they could find useful for determining their desire for a relationship of any length.

All long-term relationships start off being short-term.

And this too.

Only the good stuff! :)