[mikeash]

Are you thinking I said your comment is a strident claim that requires confrontation to disagree with? I said the opposite: both your comment and the one you originally replied to are conversational and easily amenable to contrary views.

[GavinMcG]

No, the other way I could disagree. I thought the first one was the closed-off claim.

[mikeash]

I gathered as much, but I don't see it. With the explicit disclaimer that it's just personal observation, it's about as open as can be to me.

[GavinMcG]

Fair enough. We're making different judgments. And it occurs to me that there might be another important distinction there: I was bringing up a question of value judgment, whereas the commenter I was responding to wasaking a claim about the actual frequency of a phenomenon.