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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

The phrases that the study treats as overgeneralizing are:

all of the time, all of them, all the time, always happens, always like, happens every time, completely, no one ever, nobody ever, every single one of them, every single one of you, I always, you always, he always, she always, they always, I am always, you are always, he is always, she is always, they are always

It's not always overgeneralizing to use one of these. "Every single one of them wore black" is (potentially) completely factual. A large increase in their use in books, however suggests that authors are overgeneralizing more than they did previously.

Phrase list: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2021/07/22/210206111...

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I call this talking in superlatives. It probably isn't exactly the same as the article is talking about but it is related. Especially the youth today prefers talking (and thinking?) in black and white. I think it is the effect of two things:

* Media which tries to sell rather mundane news as sensational (exaggerating) * Management literature which tried the last 30 years hard to push people to the limits, to walk the last mile, to strive for the best, greatest, mediocrity is the evil.

Folks who overgeneralize like that are incredibly easy (and unsatisfactory, due to the predictability of a negative response) to troll. Merely be pedantic, provide a counter example, or suggest a thought experiment in which their generalization may not be true.

Well who is trolling who - if their overgeneralization prompts you to correct them or provide a counterexample, maybe you're already feeding the troll.

Was I trolled into pedantry by your comment?

It’s trolls all the way down. This is why forms of trolling that aren’t blatant flaming get under people’s skin: it’s taking normal good-faith but ignorant user behavior and sending it into the uncanny valley. One troll shutting down a whole community is more often the case of the community having a pre-existing affinity to develop a digital autoimmune disease: once the users start treating good-faith users as potential trolls, the community turns irredeemably toxic.

>>Merely be pedantic, provide a counter example, or suggest a thought experiment in which their generalization may not be true.

It solves one problem but walks right into another. Your counterexample would be observed as so-called sealioning[1], "concern trolling", or one form of the ever-expanding nebulousness of "gaslighting". How does one diffuse obstinate hypocritical crusaders while proving one's own point? The solution doesn't seem to be making a well-made statement. Disagreeing is considered making a "bad-faith" arguments. The answer isn't pointing out their fallacies and thought-terminating clichés. You'll be accused of co-opting an dog-whistling. The only solution I've seen is to do or say as one will as though others don't exist. A lesson learned in one of Aesop's fable, The Miller, His Son and His Ass.

[1]https://wondermark.com/1k62/

Or that the meaning of these phrases has changed over time.

Word. In fact, most of these phrases, to me at least, imply sarcasm.

To say "social science studies are bullshit" implies a more generalized claim to me than "social science studies are always bullshit"

People use overt generalization words like these, in my experience, to indicate generalization with obvious exception.

This study is selecting for precisely the wrong thing, imo, or is not properly interpreting what they've selected.

I'd like to see their analysis of the phrasing on a forum such as this, where one would have to outline the myriad of corner cases and exceptions lest we get speared by the pedantic knights of the internet.

From the abstract:

> This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample

My mom does this a lot. Daily, in fact. Has been doing so for decades. She's not self aware enough to do any better. I've tried. She doesn't care. She's not a particularly reasonable, rational person.

Are you overgeneralizing her as someone who is always irrational?

Nope. Unlike you I know her.

No one is particularly rational. Reasonable is maybe 50/50 at best. We can strive though.

As an exception I must certainly agree. People not only aren't being very rational in general, they also really suck at being irrational. Most people are closer to animals than humans.

This is a common theme in these kind of analyses (even used in economics!) but often the ratio of false positives is sufficiently low for it to not matter enough.

You can find these exaggerations in Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

The authors need to understand the difference between rhetoric and factual reporting.

It's not unusual to say "This is the worst thing in the world" to make a point without believing that it literally is absolutely the worst thing in the entire history of human experience.

Alternatively, none of those bad things are happening to me, so this is literally the worst thing in the world.

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