Social Presuppositions

Would a perfectly rational B be offended at all by an incorrect guess?

I eventually come out with a contingent "yes" to this question, but it took me a while to get there, and I don't entirely trust my reasoning.

As stated, I wasn't sure how to go about answering that question.

But when A guesses about B, this reveals facts about A's priors with respect to B. So this question seemed isomorphic to "Would B be offended by A believing certain things about B?" which seemed a little more accessible.

But I wasn't exactly sure what "offended" means, at this level of description. The best unpacking I could come up with was that I'm offended by an expressed belief when I subconsciously or instinctively choose to signal my strong rejection of that belief.

If that's true, then I can rephrase the question as "Would a perfectly rational B subconsciously or instinctively choose to signal strong rejection of certain beliefs about B?"

If B has saliently limited conscious processing ability (limited either by speed or capacity) then my answer is a contingent "yes."

For example, a perfectly rational B might reason as follows: "Consider the proposition P1: 'B is willing to cheat'. Within a community that lends weight to my signaling, there is value to my signaling a strong rejection of P1. Expressing offense at P1 signals that rejection. Expressing offense successfully depends on very rapid response; if I am seen as taking time to think about it first, my offense won't signal as effectively. So I do better to not think about it first, but instead instinctively express offense without thinking. In other words, I do better to be offended by the suggestion of P1. OK, let me go implement that."

In this example, B's conscious processing speed forms the salient limitation, but what's important here is the general condition that an unconscious result has value relative to a conscious one.

The specific value provided in this example is less important; there are lots of different equivalent examples.

Depends on B's preferences. If B is selfish or cares about their group disproportionately, then yeah, it may be perfectly rational to take offense.

I'm not an aggregate utilitarian - I believe it's okay to be selfish at the expense of everyone else (within limits, e.g. I wouldn't nuke New York to get an ice cream). But from the viewpoint of total utility, you may or may not be hurting the world overall by adding "friction". I'm kind of on the fence about this - please don't take my grandparent comment as claiming that taking offense is always negative-sum. I was just pointing out the possibility, but to get the right answer you have to imagine the two worlds and calculate.

But is reality being described any less accurately by one of these two phrases?

When comparing two predictions, the better prediction is the one that leads to less surprise.* That means that oftentimes you may treat false positives as much less important than false negatives, or vice versa. To me, the difference between the two is which error they favor- the first is likely to overestimate the chance someone is gay, whereas the second is likely to underestimate it. Given that the damage done by a wrong guess is asymmetric, which error you favor should likewise be asymmetric.

*I say this instead of "is right more often" because when it's wrong in a spectacular way that should be counted multiple times. If you say "well, 5/6ths of people haven't been sexually assaulted, so I can make rape jokes and be ok 5/6ths of the time!" then you are cruelly underestimating the damage done by making a rape joke to a rape survivor. When you count it in terms of surprise, you get the better result of "always assume someone could be a rape survivor."

Agreed with what SarahC says, but will add to it that your suspicions about the speaker ("that who uttered the second phrase was more likely to disapprove of homosexuality than who uttered the first phrase") are not irrelevant.

That is, if the speaker doesn't disapprove of homosexuality, then the second phrase is conveying misleading information about the speaker, who is real. In this case, yes, reality is being described less accurately by the second phrase.

By the same token, if the speaker does disapprove, then reality is being described less accurately (along this axis) by the first phrase.

Also, it's worth asking why you conclude what you do about the speaker. It seems likely to me that it's not an idiosyncrasy of yours, but rather that you are responding to connotations of the word "aberration" which are communicated by the second phrase... specifically connotations involving, not only the statistical likelihoods, but the perceived social value of people who are/aren't straight.

One could therefore determine which phrase was more accurate in a particular society by looking at how people's value to that society varies with their orientation.

Something similar might be true about perceived moral value, but talking about moral value as part of reality is more problematic.

3-8% of Americans are gay (more like 5% in the UK.) That's a true statement. Guessing that an arbitrary person is straight is perfectly kosher, from a Bayesian perspective.

Here's the thing. Most of us would say that being left-handed is a minority trait, while being six-fingered is an anomaly or aberration. About 15% of people are left-handed; about 0.2% of people are six-fingered. Take that as a benchmark. Then being gay is more like being left-handed than it is like being six-fingered.

And, at 20-30%, women scientists should definitely belong in the "left-handed" rather than "six-fingered" category.

If you start thinking of a sizable minority as though it's as rare and strange as a very small minority, then you're making a mistake.

I haven't seen any get angry at being mistaken for Americans. Just sorrowful.

I think it's a polite presumption of ability, because Canadians are just like Australians from the anti-Earth on the opposite side of the sun, where it's cold instead of hot. They also understand humour, not just humor. Canadians are Commonwealth, Americans aren't.