Agreed, but the idea still made me laugh :)

If your point is that going on about evolutionary psychology adds to the obfuscation but not to the insensitivity, I disagree. There are often ways of more or less sensitively coming clean about (what one takes to be) one's true reasons for breaking up. Maybe you wouldn't go so specific as "you're too fat," but you could talk about lack of physical chemistry or whatever without uttering a falsehood or being too misunderstood. But there is no way of sensitively taking your devastated ex aside and handing him/her a Tooby and Cosmides paper to read for homework.

Agreed that the ev-psych was bad. But...

If your true and actual reason for breaking up with someone is that her breasts are too small, consider that (a) saying "It was because you were too clingy" may cause them to try and mess with an aspect of their personality that doesn't even need fixing, and (b) total silence, which you may fondly imagine to be mercy, may result in her frantically imagining dozens of possible flaws all of which she tries desperately to correct, just on the off-chance it was that one. As opposed to, say, looking for a guy who's into smaller breasts next time.

Maybe I'm just being inordinately naive, but telling someone honestly, softly, and believably, your true reason for rejecting them, seems like it really should have certain advantages for them, if not for you. I mean, compared to either silence or lying. Calling it "grossly insensitive" is too quick a rejection of the possibility of telling a truth.

In spite of this, piling up the karma on this comment makes me feel better about LW. When no one else had made this point on the original post, and then the points were slow to show up on this comment, I was beginning to wonder about the cluefulness level.

I haven't felt this way about any of my other comments.

I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't) is a book about women and shame, with a little about men. I'd been wondering why such a high proportion of insults (to both men and women) are about sexual attractiveness, but the book points out that the most stinging insults are about failure to fulfill gender expectations. At the time, I hadn't thought about men being accused of homosexuality, but that fits the pattern from the book.

If I were to get evolutionary about this, cutting down one's rivals' mating potential would make sense as a fundamental attack.

On the other hand, I don't think the author was collecting cross cultural material, so I don't know what insults/shame looks like in cultures where religious prejudice is a larger factor.

None of this is intended as an attack on lukeprog (2007)-- it's clear he had no idea what he was doing. My guess is that he was trying to be less insulting by making the breakup less personal.

I don't see any evidence that suggests that she would draw any conclusion about evolution from a breakup like that. Is that in the text or your own conclusion?

(and I must add that though I didn't write a 20 page document for my first breakup, I arguably did no better.)

Only the good stuff! :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Or meant to distinguish males, females and intersex persons rather than men, women and intersex persons.

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.