‘Most EAs don’t eat enough vegetables, though the dedicated ones do’ sounds fine to me. It’s actually almost directly analogous to my chosen example (‘actually most Christians in the UK aren’t anti-gay-marriage, even if the archbishops are’).
I find going this far out of our way to be indirect and use convoluted sentence structures to avoid acknowledging some people’s lax moral attitudes a bad sign about our intellectual integrity.
Why does this avoid acknowledging? The example I gave conveys the same factual information that casual EAs suck at eating vegetables, which means it acknowledges and indeed explicitly states the same factual reality. If I was refusing to even talk about the state of the world, then worrying about intellectual integrity seems reasonable.
But actually the content is unchanged, and all it does is eliminate a loaded word that can and will be used to make some people feel bad, whether you want it to or not.
Whereas I’ve never yet met the person who has been offended by being caught under the qualifier ‘most’.
This is complicated by the fact that you might just want to make the statement about literal vegetables, where “most” is true but doesn’t align with a level of dedication.
I’m sympathetic to not generally using a term for this.
‘Most EAs don’t eat enough vegetables, though the dedicated ones do’ sounds fine to me. It’s actually almost directly analogous to my chosen example (‘actually most Christians in the UK aren’t anti-gay-marriage, even if the archbishops are’).
I find going this far out of our way to be indirect and use convoluted sentence structures to avoid acknowledging some people’s lax moral attitudes a bad sign about our intellectual integrity.
Why does this avoid acknowledging? The example I gave conveys the same factual information that casual EAs suck at eating vegetables, which means it acknowledges and indeed explicitly states the same factual reality. If I was refusing to even talk about the state of the world, then worrying about intellectual integrity seems reasonable.
But actually the content is unchanged, and all it does is eliminate a loaded word that can and will be used to make some people feel bad, whether you want it to or not.
Whereas I’ve never yet met the person who has been offended by being caught under the qualifier ‘most’.
This is complicated by the fact that you might just want to make the statement about literal vegetables, where “most” is true but doesn’t align with a level of dedication.
I’m sympathetic to not generally using a term for this.