For whatever it’s worth, I think I also disagree with the sentence including the caveat of “be about culture and psychology”. I just know of a good number of universals, or almost-universals that seem to apply to humans at a cultural level, and I am usually quite interested when someone proposes a new one.
I think the comment you responded to was indeed wrong, but I currently also just honestly don’t know what it means, and I would appreciate a clarification by someone who has a more concrete interpretation of what the comment means. What is “A” referring to in the comment above?
Note that near-universals are ruled out by “everyone without fail.” I am in fact pointing, with my “helpful tip,” at statements beginning with everyone without fail. It is in fact not the case that any of the examples Zack started with are true of everyone without fail—there are humans who do not laugh, humans who do not tell stories, humans who do not shiver when cold, etc.
This point is not the main thrust of my counterobjection to Zack’s comment, which was more about the incentives created by various styles of engagement, but it’s worth noting.
Hmm, so I feel a bit confused here. I agree that the comment said “everyone without fail”, but like, I think there is a reasonable reading where that translates to something like “all the big social groups, which of course have individuals not fully participating in what the full group is doing, but where if you aggregate over all the people, the group will invariable tend to have this be more true than false”.
And because the number of big groups is so much smaller than the number of all people, and because the variance of the average among groups is often so much smaller than the variance between individuals (since averaging over many people reduces variance), it’s actually not that surprising to have a statement that is true about all big social groups.
I guess concretely, I have a feeling that “everyone” was referring to something like “all the big social groups”, and not “every single person”. Which is a much less grandiose claim.
If you’re going to apply that much charity to everyone without fail, then I feel that there should be more than sufficient charity to not-object-to my comment, as well.
I do not see how you could be applying charity neutrally/symmetrically, given the above comment.
I’m applying the standard “treat each statement as meaning what it plainly says, in context.” In context, the top comment seems to me to be claiming that everyone without fail sacrifices honor for PR, which is plainly false. In context, my comment says if you’re about to assert that something is true of everyone without fail, you’re something like 1000x more likely to be wrong than to be right (given a pretty natural training set of such assertions uttered by humans in natural conversation, and not adversarially selected for).
Of the actual times that actual humans have made assertions about what’s universally true of all people, I strongly wager that they’ve been wrong 1000x more frequently than they’ve been right. Zack literally tried to produce examples to demonstrate how silly my claim was, and every single example that he produced (to be fair, he probably put all of ten seconds into generating the list, but still) is in support of my assertion, and fails to be a counterexample.
I actually can’t produce an assertion about all human actions that I’m confident is true. Like, I’m confident that I can assert that everything we’d classify as human “has a brain,” and that everything we’d classify as human “breathes air,” but when it comes to stuff people do out of whatever-it-is-that-we-label choice or willpower, I haven’t yet been able to think of something that everyone, without fail, definitely does.
I am not really objecting to your comment. I think there are a good number of interpretations that are correct and a good number of interpretations that are false, and importantly, I think there might be interesting discussion to be had about both branches of the conversation (i.e. in some worlds where I think you are wrong, you would be glad about me disagreeing because I might bring up some interesting points, and in some worlds where I think you are right you would be glad about me agreeing because we might have some interesting conversations).
Popping up a meta-level, to talk about charity: I think a charitable reading doesn’t necessarily mean that I choose the interpretation that will cause us to agree on the object-level, instead I think about which of the interpretations seem to have the most truth to them in a deeper sense, and which broader conversational patterns would cause the most learning for all the conversational participants. In the above, my curiosity was drawn towards there potentially being a deeper disagreement here about human universals, since I can indeed imagine us having differing thoughts on this that might be worth exploring.
Agreement with all of the above. I just don’t want to mistake [truth that can be extracted from thinking about a statement] for [what the statement was intended to mean by its author].
there are humans who do not laugh [...] humans who do not shiver when cold
Are there? I don’t know! Part of where my comment was coming from is that I’ve grown wary of appeals to individual variation that are assumed to exist without specific evidence. I could easily believe, with specific evidence, that there’s some specific, documented medical abnormality such that some people never develop the species-typical shiver, laugh, cry, &c. responses. (Granted, I am relying on the unstated precondition that, say, 2-week-old embryos don’t count.) If you show me the Wikipedia page about such a specific, documented condition, I’ll believe it. But if I haven’t seen the specific Wikipedia page, should I have a prior that every variation that’s easy to imagine, actually gets realized? I’m skeptical! The word human (referring to a specific biological lineage with a specific design specified in ~3·10⁹ bases of the specific molecule DNA) is already pointing to a very narrow and specific set of configurations (relative to the space of all possible ways to arrange 10²⁷ atoms); by all rights, there should be lots of actually-literally universal generalizations to be made.
For whatever it’s worth, I think I also disagree with the sentence including the caveat of “be about culture and psychology”. I just know of a good number of universals, or almost-universals that seem to apply to humans at a cultural level, and I am usually quite interested when someone proposes a new one.
I think the comment you responded to was indeed wrong, but I currently also just honestly don’t know what it means, and I would appreciate a clarification by someone who has a more concrete interpretation of what the comment means. What is “A” referring to in the comment above?
Note that near-universals are ruled out by “everyone without fail.” I am in fact pointing, with my “helpful tip,” at statements beginning with everyone without fail. It is in fact not the case that any of the examples Zack started with are true of everyone without fail—there are humans who do not laugh, humans who do not tell stories, humans who do not shiver when cold, etc.
This point is not the main thrust of my counterobjection to Zack’s comment, which was more about the incentives created by various styles of engagement, but it’s worth noting.
Hmm, so I feel a bit confused here. I agree that the comment said “everyone without fail”, but like, I think there is a reasonable reading where that translates to something like “all the big social groups, which of course have individuals not fully participating in what the full group is doing, but where if you aggregate over all the people, the group will invariable tend to have this be more true than false”.
And because the number of big groups is so much smaller than the number of all people, and because the variance of the average among groups is often so much smaller than the variance between individuals (since averaging over many people reduces variance), it’s actually not that surprising to have a statement that is true about all big social groups.
I guess concretely, I have a feeling that “everyone” was referring to something like “all the big social groups”, and not “every single person”. Which is a much less grandiose claim.
If you’re going to apply that much charity to everyone without fail, then I feel that there should be more than sufficient charity to not-object-to my comment, as well.
I do not see how you could be applying charity neutrally/symmetrically, given the above comment.
I’m applying the standard “treat each statement as meaning what it plainly says, in context.” In context, the top comment seems to me to be claiming that everyone without fail sacrifices honor for PR, which is plainly false. In context, my comment says if you’re about to assert that something is true of everyone without fail, you’re something like 1000x more likely to be wrong than to be right (given a pretty natural training set of such assertions uttered by humans in natural conversation, and not adversarially selected for).
Of the actual times that actual humans have made assertions about what’s universally true of all people, I strongly wager that they’ve been wrong 1000x more frequently than they’ve been right. Zack literally tried to produce examples to demonstrate how silly my claim was, and every single example that he produced (to be fair, he probably put all of ten seconds into generating the list, but still) is in support of my assertion, and fails to be a counterexample.
I actually can’t produce an assertion about all human actions that I’m confident is true. Like, I’m confident that I can assert that everything we’d classify as human “has a brain,” and that everything we’d classify as human “breathes air,” but when it comes to stuff people do out of whatever-it-is-that-we-label choice or willpower, I haven’t yet been able to think of something that everyone, without fail, definitely does.
I am not really objecting to your comment. I think there are a good number of interpretations that are correct and a good number of interpretations that are false, and importantly, I think there might be interesting discussion to be had about both branches of the conversation (i.e. in some worlds where I think you are wrong, you would be glad about me disagreeing because I might bring up some interesting points, and in some worlds where I think you are right you would be glad about me agreeing because we might have some interesting conversations).
Popping up a meta-level, to talk about charity: I think a charitable reading doesn’t necessarily mean that I choose the interpretation that will cause us to agree on the object-level, instead I think about which of the interpretations seem to have the most truth to them in a deeper sense, and which broader conversational patterns would cause the most learning for all the conversational participants. In the above, my curiosity was drawn towards there potentially being a deeper disagreement here about human universals, since I can indeed imagine us having differing thoughts on this that might be worth exploring.
Agreement with all of the above. I just don’t want to mistake [truth that can be extracted from thinking about a statement] for [what the statement was intended to mean by its author].
Are there? I don’t know! Part of where my comment was coming from is that I’ve grown wary of appeals to individual variation that are assumed to exist without specific evidence. I could easily believe, with specific evidence, that there’s some specific, documented medical abnormality such that some people never develop the species-typical shiver, laugh, cry, &c. responses. (Granted, I am relying on the unstated precondition that, say, 2-week-old embryos don’t count.) If you show me the Wikipedia page about such a specific, documented condition, I’ll believe it. But if I haven’t seen the specific Wikipedia page, should I have a prior that every variation that’s easy to imagine, actually gets realized? I’m skeptical! The word human (referring to a specific biological lineage with a specific design specified in ~3·10⁹ bases of the specific molecule DNA) is already pointing to a very narrow and specific set of configurations (relative to the space of all possible ways to arrange 10²⁷ atoms); by all rights, there should be lots of actually-literally universal generalizations to be made.