JoshuaZ comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - LessWrong

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

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Comment author: lessdazed 03 October 2011 12:48:44AM *  5 points [-]

"Pointer" dogs are not the only dogs that point, many others do or can be trained to. What's more, not every dog of that breed will grow up to be a hunting dog or ever point! Even those that hunt frequently will spend a very, very small portion of their lives pointing. They will spend far more time eating, sleeping, having four legs (most anyway, some will have accidents or birth defects) and most time of all having warm blood.

We do not call the breed "warm-bloods" because this would not go far in distinguishing them among animals. We latch onto this tiny difference of action, which they spend a tiny portion of their lives doing, which is an even tinier amount more than other dogs do it, and name them by what they distinctly do. It's fine to discuss differences without spending every sentence on similarities. The similarities are the background assumption.

It's entirely appropriate for Luke to speak in generalities with his group as a base case for comparison, and to in writing ignore exceptions and outliers as we know there are always some. He doesn't just mean "some women want", one could construct many, many different true sentences about what "some women want" and it would not be at all useful.

We know men and women are of the same species and are similar. We are interested in differences, it is these differences that the males will fail to correctly model when they mentally model females' minds using their own, as if those minds were like exactly their own.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 03 October 2011 12:51:25AM *  4 points [-]

If Zeb had requested that he use the word "many" rather than "some" would you consider his point to be more valid?

Comment author: lessdazed 03 October 2011 12:55:18AM 2 points [-]

Less invalid, but Luke did a fine Gricean job saying that the mean and mode and median woman differs from her counterpart man in the described ways.