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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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I once considered changing my name to Ben Abard but decided that the original Eliezer Yudkowsky sounded more like a scientist.
I've always been mildly annoyed that I don't have an eastern European last name. All the cool mathematicians seem to have eastern European last names.
You mean, a lot of cool mathematicians are eastern European. But Terry Tao and Shinichi Mochizuki are not.
Man, this is that thing I was talking about earlier when someone takes a colloquial phrase that sounds like a universal quantifier and interprets it as literally a universal quantifier.
Yeah, people do that all the time.
In ordinary language, all universal quantifiers are implicitly bounded.
Actually, what's at play here is not the implicit domain restriction of natural language quantifiers, because he obviously didn't restrict the domain of the quantifier to just those mathematicians that have an Eastern European last name; that'd make the statement trivial. Rather, the phenomenon we see here is what's self-explanatorily called "loose talk", where you can say things that are strictly true when they are close enough to being true, i.e. when the exceptions don't matter for current purposes.
A typical failure mode for computer scientists, who typically are trained to check statements against boundary cases / extreme values, to make sure an exception isn't thrown / that the result isn't out of bounds.