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Clarity comments on Open thread, Nov. 09 - Nov. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong
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Comments (175)
Is this a quote from something? Please rephrase in plain English so every user who reads it doesn't have to take time decoding it.
It's not a quote from something. It's very abstract and includes technical language that doesn't capture very well the concepts I'm trying to articulate. The absence of terminology to describe what I want makes it hard to understand. This isn't aimed at everyone.
I think it has other problems besides abstraction and technical language. Example 1: "for the continuous of character" doesn't appear to be grammatically correct and it's not clear what you actually mean by it (is one of the words an autocorrect error for something else?). Example 2: when you ask "is there [a] name for this?" it's not clear what "this" actually refers to.
(Also: the key virtue of technical language is its ability to capture certain concepts precisely. In cases where it fails to do this, you should at least seriously consider abandoning technical language.)
It seems like the point of your answer to Bryan-san is to say that your intended audience won't need to expend time and effort decoding what you wrote. I think you are wrong unless the intended audience is empty.
Since you apparently don't value your readers' time enough to make your meaning clearer, I'll have a go. I may well fail, for exactly the same reason as it seems like a paraphrase might be useful.
If something like that is the question you're trying to answer, I think it's obvious that the answer is: The question is much too vague to be answerable, in the same way as "Suppose I'm thinking of a number. Is it an odd number?". Some differences affect (or should affect, or could reasonably be expected to affect) some attitudes. Some don't. Without more information there's nothing more to say.
(Note: I do not myself generally consider trees dangerous or men sexy. Hypothetical examples are hypothetical.)
I think your paraphrase makes sense if Clarity was accidentally using the term effect instead of affect (in it's "feeling or emotion" definition). But that doesn't really fit with the last use of effect, so I would translate Clarity's use of effect as "property" or "trait". My paraphrase would be:
I would say that if this is the intended meaning, you should assume that it shares other properties, even though it differs, strictly speaking. Mostly this is because we are coding all properties in strictly binary terms rather than as probabilities. If you had extensively studied dangerous trees, then someone showed you grass, and then they asked you binary questions about its properties, you'll be correct in assuming the answer to the questions was identical for the tree and the grass. You'd get some of them wrong, but the vast majority you'd get right. Trees and grass are much more closely related than grass and petroleum, or grass and love, or grass and President Obama.
We do this in the real world. Most cleaning supplies are toxic, but none of them are carbonated. If someone handed you a bottle of some novel cleaning supply, and you saw it was carbonated and milky white, you'd be right to assume it was toxic even though it clearly has some properties different from all the other cleaning supplies you've seen. Of course it would be better to have a probability distribution about whether it's toxic.