That kind of statement is particularly annoying, above and beyond considerations of its truth value,
because it tends to come across as judgmental: “Real” men/women/rationalists/whatever do X or Y or Z,
so if I don’t, does that mean something’s wrong with me?
Yah; it comes across all too often like a retroactive attempt to patch an idea that might be compromised by bias. Especially because those minority of cases may be the real salient test of the idea—if your theory is predicated on the idea that all X are Y, and along comes an X purporting to be a Z but not a Y, then conditional on the truth of this statement your theory is wrong. It’s one thing to look at the failures of your original formulation and go, hmmm, clearly I missed something and need to patch or reject my theory; but in a context like this it’s usually more, well, a rationalization—“your counterexample doesn’t apply because my factual error can be retconned as a previous, weak definition of the scope of my statement!”
Yah; it comes across all too often like a retroactive attempt to patch an idea that might be compromised by bias. Especially because those minority of cases may be the real salient test of the idea—if your theory is predicated on the idea that all X are Y, and along comes an X purporting to be a Z but not a Y, then conditional on the truth of this statement your theory is wrong. It’s one thing to look at the failures of your original formulation and go, hmmm, clearly I missed something and need to patch or reject my theory; but in a context like this it’s usually more, well, a rationalization—“your counterexample doesn’t apply because my factual error can be retconned as a previous, weak definition of the scope of my statement!”