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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

I just ran into that recently at my local $ethnicity grocery store. The bottle at the entrance looked like a bulk bottle of Purell/etc brand (though unlabeled), but then I squirted it out and it was a thick, slimy liquid that smelled of lavender. Instantly grossed out and mistrusting the grocery store's hygiene after that.

edit: I find it amusing that people are downvoting me for saying "ethnicity". As if I'm privileged and looking down on some ethnicity.

I'm of that ethnicity, you dolts. I thought I made that clear with the $ sign, following on the OP's use of it. But I guess that was too subtle.

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Interestingly, this is a language phenomenon where applying a restrictive adjective in front of a noun is generally perceived as ascribing importance to it. That's just how English is read by most people. I suspect that it applies even if you use a variable to denote absence of importance.

Just trying it out for myself: "My $k-wheeled car in San Francisco is much better than public transit", I automatically read that the number of wheels as having some importance and also assume that the number of wheels is not 4.

Of course, this may seem unusual in that k is a free variable and I may be implying that it doesn't matter what its value is, but it doesn't read that way.

I think this comes from a natural form of information compression. Very cool.

Another fun example of implicit information is: "They met on the streets of San Francisco. She was homeless and he was homeless and dirty." Does this imply that she wasn't dirty? Yes. But that's actually unknown.

Yes, thanks for that linguistic observation!

Pointing out the ethnicity make it appear as if you think that is the root cause of the problem.

why point out "ethnicity" at all? all it shows is that you personally were predisposed to be less trusting of something different. and that probably you're white and don't view whiteness as an ethnicity.

your readers may not be the same race as you. maybe to them "different less-trustworthy ethnicity" is white.

or maybe you only wanted to talk to other white people so you could reconfirm to yourselves that "ethnic" cultures are "backwards" and "exotic" and "less trustworthy."

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