[pharrington]

An exercise: Words relating to insects will occur in news articles about environmentalism, crop production, rituals of rebirth, etc. Words relating to plants might occur in articles about crop destruction, the international drug trade, people getting poisoned, etc.

rmxt questioned the universality of sentiment analysis. Responding by noting specific contexts, free from a clear coherent general structure, is an assertion against the discovered sentiments' universal truth.

[Houshalter]

But it is a universal truth that humans generally find plants pleasant and insects unpleasant. And the word "pleasant" is entirely based on human preferences after all.

[pharrington]

What I'm probably missing indeed is that scoping of universality to humans. Lately I've been trying to be more explicit in my written communications in an attempt to understand both the limits of my knowledge and perceptions and the limits of the sources of information that I digest.

Is suggesting that pleasantness is a sentiment that's not unique to humans really that controversial?

super late edit: it's specifically flowers, not plants, that people are biased towards finding pleasant

[mcguire]

"...it is a universal truth that humans generally find plants pleasant..."

Ah, but those exceptions are really unpleasant.