what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

are insults true?

can insults be relevant to arguments?

how is an insult different than a personal attack?

consider:

you're fat

how does this differ from

your BMI indicates you're morbidly obese

when both can be saying the same thing?

or, take this:

A: you're unreliable

B: you have missed rent three times this year, and flaked on plans several times.

it seems that, for every insult, e.g.

"you're stupid"

this can just be expanded on, to e.g.

"you're stupid" --> "you're being stupid" --> "you're being thoughtless" --> "you have not given this issue due diligence"

few people would consider "you have not given this issue due thought" an insult, but "you're stupid" is almost always considered one.

where do you draw the line for insults?

what is an insult to you?

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

I don't usually post in Critical Thinking but here we go.

Insults can be both true and false, but whether it's classified as a personal attack, an insult, or truth in my opinion depends on how informatively or derogatorily it is delivered. It also depends on how insecure someone is to receive such information as well. Some people can shrug it off as "Yes, I know I'm fat. Can't do much about it because of xxxxx/not number one on my list as of right now" or take it offensively as "BMI is a myth, how dare you say I'm morbidly obese I'm going to live another 50 years I aint dying anytime soon you are off your rockers mate".

Personally, I draw the line at when it goes from informative information from an outside perspective, to intentionally derogative to either inflict mental harm, or to damage reputation/character and the opinion of you from others. I would be okay with people acting in a derogative manner towards me, as long as it stays informative and there's some level of acknowledgment prior, or after that they didn't have the best choice of words.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

The former is relevant because you ask for personal, subjective content.

The latter isn't because you're basically asking people to define "insult" the way they want, which leads to nothing unless you actually want to redefine the word.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

To be receptive to insults implies that one has an emotional soft spot. Insults cause people to try harder, either to change or assert themselves. At the moment of insult there's a reaction that is usually kinda uncomfortable.
Theoretically, the insult and the reaction could be independent of each other and coincidental, which is what I like to believe, because I hold being different in the highest regard.
Often to give an insult implies that you are, in fact, insecure, even if your heart's in the right place.
Even the maddest situation, when one deserves insult and is a problem or nuisance, can be attributed to coincidence. A buildup of brain chemicals in this increasingly kooky world. An example would be, let's say, if someone bogarted all your Doritos when you left the room and now you seek vengeance. Why my friend? Flesher's theorum clearly states that the social world is purely divine and the Dorito's aren't actually Doritos.
I hope you found this interesting and remember that all things good and evil are real.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

A personal attack is to criticize without reason. an insult is to take offense.
Truth follows reason.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

When you're offered both from a random person on the street who intends to make you feel bad/guilty/negative about your weight? There is no difference. They are both insults, and they are both personal attacks because the insults are about something to do with the person themselves.

When you're offered both from a doctor that you went to see to evaluate your overall physical health including your weight? The former is certainly delivered without tact, and they are maybe being insensitive, but since you -asked for information on that subject- from somebody -qualified to give it- it stops being insulting.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

I think something like "you're an ass" would be an insult.

"You stopped emotionally developing in middle school" rides the line between insult and informative.

And "get a therapist" is just good advice.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Not if 0 legit reasoning can be brought up.

Get a life

Vs

Get a life, you dont work, you're in good shape and not mentally ill. Do something productive.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Here's a personal attack fuk u archowl more like barn owl cuz u STINK

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Also most people know they're fat as fuck u don't gotta rub it in

Edit: in serious it's simply the motive - insulting someone is just taking an aspect of them you find negative and using it to cause guilt, so ya

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

read: denotation vs connotation

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

In early cultures, being fat was a sign of nobility. A show that one could afford more food than they needed was expressive of the status quo

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

We may have better technology and medicine, but we're no more or less human now than we were then.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

I'm surprised no one just said: "the intentions".

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

This topic of discussion is inane. An insult can be an untrue statement and furthermore can even be totally irrelevant to truth. Example: "fuck you" is an insult which is totally unconcerned with truth. "You're fat" or "you're a piece of shit" still counts as an insult even if it's untrue.

Also, "You're fat" vs "your BMI etc" are really different if you spend even one second barely thinking about it. The second statement includes a step in logic, uses BMI, and morbidly obese is a different concept from being fat. However they can both be either insulting or not, it depends on the purpose.

Come on, if you gave this even one second of thought you would have realized this. The differences are very obvious.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

this doesn't seem good enough to me, because imagine this scenario:

A: I am not trying to insult you. your BMI indicates you're morbidly obese.
B: yes you are!
A: no I'm not
[repeat]

how, exactly, do you prove intent here beyond just stating what your intent is? I don't think it's possible.

in this scenario, there's no way for B to know A's intent. the person hearing the remark just has to have some vague feeling of whether there's an insult or not. but this doesn't actually make it one.

it seems like to say something is an insult or personal attack you have to be able to point to information about the sentence that makes it one and that indicates intent.

"you're 150lb" is completely neutral without context -- it could be weight loss for one person or weight gain for another person. whether it's an insult or not depends on how the person interprets the information, but the claim itself is not inherently insulting.

so e.g. "you're a fucking idiot" would be a clear insult, but "you're thoughtless" is very possibly not.

the factor for me seems to be the counterfactual. there is a better, less biased version of "you're a fucking idiot", like "you're being thoughtless", but there isn't really any way to say "you're being thoughtless" more accurately without merely telling someone something about themselves that they don't want to hear.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

it's pretty obvious what the intent is if this scenario occurs in a doctor's office
it's also pretty obvious what the intent is if this scenario occurs on the streets of new york city
exception: literal autism

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

what you are doing is giving the two most extreme circumstances, and saying that due to these extreme circumstances, there can't be any ambiguity as to intent, and that people who see ambiguity are autistic or something. that's clearly false.

many if not most comments between people about themselves or their actions will be situations without such clear-cut extremeties as an unprovoked street remark and a doctor's office, so that doesn't help resolve the ambiguity.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Why does person A feel they have any business commenting on person B's weight in the first place? How do they have access to person B's BMI?

What we're talking about is a random stranger saying "Not an insult BUT" and then saying something none of their business about another person personally, outside any setting where that is a reasonable interaction to assume the other party wants to have.

The other problem with your example is that we don't have Person A's motive. They saying "No I'm not" is meaningless if they actually are, and just lying defensively.

Sure Person -B- won't have their true motive to hand necessarily in the actual interaction, but you invented both of these people so tell me, why does Person A think an appropriate thing to say to Person B out of nowhere is a comment on their being morbidly obese?

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Arch idk if you realize this but you're basically asking for a solution to the unsolved problem that is pragmatics analysis in natural language processing. If we could prove the intent of someone by simply analysing the language (syntax, vocabulary, etc) we'd revolutionize that whole field. So yeah, you use context to infer intentions that hopefully the receiver will understand, and if they dont believe your intentions after you explicitely mentionned them, then something else needs to happen (stop the discussion, try to convince, rephrase your message, etc).

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

had no idea this existed, no. completely unfamiliar with NLP as a field.

I'm concerned with the application to language rules / speech codes, such as the vagueness in policies that prohibit insults -- because for every policy that prohibits insults, it also seems to prohibt neutral, but displeasing information about other people.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Well, that would be a very hard task and here's why:

1. You have to define a logical structure from a grammar and most likely use some probalistic analysis on words. See this for info on NLP grammars. See that for probabilistic parsing.

2. When backing up your claim that x structure tends to be content that prohibits insults, you Must stay objective in your definition of "prohibiting insults". You also need to somehow label many policies (prohibits insults y/n, prohibits neutral displeasing y/n, etc) or find such a dataset. Labeling that is a massive task because you can probably hardly remain objective, unless you come up with a thorough labeling system that is accepted.

3. Same thing kinda for vagueness; that is probably a badly defined metric of language and would need a strong logical definition (in terms of NLP grammar, at least).

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Well considering English is one of the most broken languages in terms of logic in existence, good luck determining anything.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Building off what OpKiller said, computationally (read: procedurally) this task is currently unsolved.

But humans can do this, albeit inconsistently, because we are exceptionally good at building heuristics on-the-fly. So I don't think it's not worth discussing, but a lot of the answers you'll find for specific cases is "because that's just how it is".

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

I think most societies have a pretty consensus-driven view of what is an insult or not. You could use a population sample to review conversations and determine if there is much of a consensus on whether an insult occurred or not. If this is the case, you can use the responses to train a supervised neural network (see: backpropagation).

The more interesting question becomes what sort of richness do you need in the dataset to make the evaluation? Do we need information on the surrounding scene? Speaker and audience relationship? What happens on different media like video vs text transcripts? Etc...

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

personal attack: arch0wl has a bad face

insult: arch0wl has a bad face

true statement: arch0wl has a bad face

i don't see a difference?

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

There was a time a few years ago when I thought arch0wl was just a bunch of different ffr people who would all post together on one account.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

If there was such a dataset, you'd need contextual information. Otherwise, you'd only pick up insults with very strong words/n-grams such as "fuck you", "bitch", etc. Pretty sure a PCA would show some interesting relationships between the vocabulary and the various contextual data, but then there is just So much info that can be needed to understand an insult...

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Imagine the following:

- Someone (person P) knows someone else (person Q) very well. P tells Q a certain insult X. A population reads X and determines it most likely isn't an insult, because they don't know Q (and P) at all. In this case, X will probably always be misclassified.
- Same scenario but P means no insult to Q. However, the population believes it is one. Also problematic.

Therefore, you cannot possibly have a classifier that performs on anything else than non-pragmatic analysis and since we (as humans in a society) communicate by using a whole lot of contextual information, that classifier would most likely do nothing interesting.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Buddha washed life down enough to say that all suffering stems from ignorance. Furthermore, the dhammapada describes many ignorant actions as ones done by fools. It basically says 'you're foolish' which could easily be the same as 'you're stupid' and it's a well-renowned religious text for like, one of the most pacifistic religions around, and it literally has insults embedded in it. In it's case though, the insults are of a general, non-directed nature, and intended to make people think things through more as a general matter of course. Nor is there anything about them actually being -right-

I seem to one of those people that can be insulted from literally anything. I'm specifically remembering that 1 TWG I played on here where I chewed someone's head off for being too nice to me because I perceived I was being treated differently due to not having a dick and it fucked up the game royally because it wasn't clear, due to it being in a game setting, that that was my actual intention for ranting. Good times!

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Why imagine it when you can real-life live it every goddamn day of your life for months?

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Are you ok?

--

Anyhow, the way I see it is that there is no difference between a personal attack, an insult, or a true statement, when just looking at the words alone. After all, these labels are applied after someone receives the message and judges as such. I don't think there's any reason to figure out the difference because determining if it's an insult or a statement is done with so much more context than just the words alone.

TL;DR - there's no difference if trying to analyze solely on the words

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

It takes a fool to know a fool. So when someone calls you one, take it to heart; it may serve you well into the future.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Eww u don't have a dick wtffff that's gross

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

twg

who you?

edit: i took a fun trip down memory lane and realized who you were. that game was a ride.....

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Personal attacks and insults are meant to offend.
True statements are not meant to offend.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

let this thread die

edit: since this is """critical thinking""" and I don't want to get banned I'll add that the distinction in the OP is """critically""" useless

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

*yawn*

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Yeah I never liked you before, still don't like you now. You should be in jail or helping put the person who told you to write that, in jail.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

surprised that you have an opinion of me at all really. unfortunately that's not mutual.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

I know you're having a stressful time but attacking others won't make it any easier.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Where in the world is this coming from?

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Ya, that alone killed the thread. Simple as that.
Doesn't really need to get much further in depth as you're just picking out specific scenarios.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Glad you're not in on stalking me Charu.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

Its for the best you don't think of yourself as a piece of shit.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

That's where you're wrong.

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

jesus christ

Re: what's the difference between a personal attack, an insult, and a true statement
 

funnygurl is neither a girl or funny