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

[Arch0wl]

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.

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.

[choof]

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.

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

[Arch0wl]

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.

[devonin]

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?

[xXOpkillerXx]

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).

[Arch0wl]

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.

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.

[xXOpkillerXx]

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.

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).

[Elmerz]

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.

[DaBackpack]

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).

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".

[aperson]

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...

[Funnygurl555]

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?

[Xiz]

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.

[xXOpkillerXx]

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...

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...

[xXOpkillerXx]

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.

[PrincessCaderpio]

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

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"

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!