How about if he had said that ” The Venus De Milo will still be beautiful”? Or “Jesssica Alba will still be beautiful”?
I personally would have put David fairly low on my list of things that I find beautiful, but I immediately got the intended meaning.
Wow, you certainly got a lot from “Women are alluring”! Thanks for clarifying, this is very interesting.
I would be very interested to hear what was your reaction to the phrase “Michaelangelo’s David will still be beautiful”. Was it anything similar?
Is this an expression of your prior about the size of the category, or your posterior? Have you updated your prior on learning (to your surprise) that people apparently do feel excluded/get distracted by this sort of thing?
Prior. I have updated very slightly towards Emily’s position, but this is balanced by the responses from every female I have personally asked about this, all of whom fell into the a) or b) response. Of course, we all know that comparing two very small samples is far from ideal :-)
As an aside, would it surprise you if people felt excluded by your telling them that you find their concerns “really annoying”?
No, but excluding people is certainly not the intent. Every time I write something I assume that someone, somewhere will find it really annoying.
But are “Women who would be annoyed by the statement ‘Women are alluring’” a large potential audience?
I would think that the audience for this specific sentence would break down into (roughly):
a) Those it directly applies to (hetro males, bi females, etc.), who immediately agree ‘Yes, women sure are alluring!’ b) Those it does not apply to , but who regard it as complimentary (e.g. hetro females), ‘Yes, I sure am alluring!’ c) Those it does not apply to, but who understand its intention without feeling that it marginalises them. ‘I don’t get what the big deal about women is, but I know LOTS of people who find women alluring’ d) Those it does not apply to, who feel actively excluded. ’I don’t find women alluring, the author is trying to exclude me—he really should change the text to something that I like.”
I would have thought that category d) is tiny.
Note to Emily: I am really not trying to exclude you or pick on you! I just find it really surprising you would feel excluded by a (positive, and relatively uncontroversial!) comment about women from a male author.
This certainly works for me. I find I can get a significant increase in performance at the gym when I use the machines that are facing towards the posters of attractive women, compared to the otherwise identical machines facing the windows. I know its a trick, and I know why it works, but that doesn’t stop it from working :-)
Sorry, the rather harsh ‘nitpicking’ should really have been addressed to the top comment in the chain that started this line of discussion. I placed it as a comment after your contribution because I wanted to point out that even your attempts to give a more generic and widely applicable example will be doomed to failure, because you will always end up making some assumptions about the audience.
I find this type of nitpicking really annoying. Surely everyone (no matter their gender / sex / preferences) understands the sentence ‘Women will be alluring’ to be a generalised example and can easily convert this to include their own specific preferences without the author having to jump through hoops to provide examples that apply to everyone.
“The touch of another person’s skin will still be wonderfully sensuous”—you can’t say that—you are discriminating against those without a sense of touch!
“sunsets”—you can’t say that, what about blind and/or extreme photo-sensitives
and so on.
If he had written ‘Football games will still be exciting’ I would have got the intended meaning and moved on, despite the fact that I have zero interest in football.
Agreed. I was very surprised to find Zen was discussed so much in GEB. Although in context it did serve to (slightly) illustrate some points being discussed, it seemed rather out of place, and I found it very tiresome to read.
It looks like there is no chance of enlightenment for me, but as there is no consistent definition of it, I find it hard to care :-)
I’m aiming for:
Some things are real, some are pretend
It can be hard to tell them apart, and even adults will disagree
Learning how to investigate and make up your own mind is more important than specific examples in either category
I’m about 1⁄2 way through. I am finding the chapters to be much more interesting than the dialogues. The style the dialogues are written in seems to be rather stilted/forced and grates somewhat. They do seem to be useful metaphors for understanding some of the trickier chapters, so I can see the merit in them.
My oldest child is six. She has always been taught to distinguish ‘real’ from ‘pretend’, and encouraged to decide which is which herself.
She seems to have no problem discovering that something she previously believed is false—at this age there is still so much to learn, and her world view is updating pretty constantly.
What does seem to be distressing for her is finding out that some adults believe things which she has placed solidly in the ‘pretend’ category. Her teacher’s belief in god is particularly perplexing for her.
Thanks for the thorough reply. Sorry if I appear to be missing the point here, but I am genuinely trying to understand your point of view.
Re. 4), yes, I worded that badly and it’s obvious that you get it!