WhyAsk comments on Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: polymathwannabe 04 January 2016 01:06PM

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Comment author: WhyAsk 07 January 2016 10:05:14PM 0 points [-]

Thanks, it'll take me some time to digest this link. Can you suggest a better definition and would this anecdote be included or excluded? If excluded, how would you define this odd exchange?

Comment author: Viliam 08 January 2016 12:53:20PM *  1 point [-]

I am not a linguist -- maybe there is a more appropriate label for this thing, but I don't know it.

The idea of the link is: you shouldn't say things like "the conclusion seems senseless" but rather "the conclusion doesn't make any sense to person X (but it could make sense to some other person Y)". Otherwise you get the implicit assumption that things make or don't make sense equally to all listeners; that is that "not making sense" is an inherent property of the conclusion, instead of a relation between the conclusion and the listener.