[hinkley]

If you state two facts of equal import, they aren't necessarily linked. But if they are of different levels, and one happens before the other, only people who are implying a connection or who have a clinical condition lump those together.

    Yesterday my uncle died and my dog got hit by a car. 

versus:

    Yesterday my shoelace broke and my dog got hit by a car. 

Why am I bringing up the shoelace? And why first? For want of a nail the kingdom was lost? There are people who can't filter events by intensity. That's a separate diagnosis from BPD or NPD, but it's still something to keep an eye on. You either don't know you are saying something salacious, you do and you don't care, or you do and you are enjoying the buzz it creates.

[tptacek]

There's really just no amount of message board writing you're going to be able to do to make "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash" not imply, to a reasonable audience, that Joe drove drunk. I get that you can have a lot of fun making a sport out of ever-more-elaborate arguments saying it doesn't imply that at all, or that we can't really know whether an intent to imply it was present, but none of that matters.

[DFHippie]

Here's one thing to consider:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory#The_two_princ...

Ordinary humans can predict what inferences their interlocutors will make. Their interlocutors know this. Therefore, both parties use this to communicate just as much as they do overt utterances. This being so, they can mislead with inferences as well as they can with overt utterances. This is not called lying, but ordinary users of language do not consider it less morally inculpating. In fact, they may consider it worse inasmuch as it leaves them less recourse when it is discovered.

[hinkley]

Thanks for the link.

In reading about neurodiversity I’ve encountered several groups of people who struggle with relevance theory. Not understanding how this works can drive a pretty big wedge between you and the people you’re trying to bond with, especially if you don’t know you’re doing it.

[kempbellt]

The only fair assumption from hearing either of those two statements is that yesterday contained two events. Either "uncle died and dog hit by car" or "shoelace broke and dog got hit by car".

It's a common tendency to link related subjects together. So people infer that sharing a sentence/utterance means the two are directly related.

Causing inferences like, "Oh, did he have a heart attack and run over your dog??".

It is true that some people prey on these inferences and use them to lie/manipulate but it is also very possible that they are just two things that happened on the same day - related only by their traumatic impact. TLDR: Yesterday sucked because these two separate things happened...

To a person who experienced these events, it's completely possible that you don't know people think your uncle ran over your dog. When he actually died in his sleep and your dog was run over by the neighbor.

[GavinMcG]

> it is also very possible that

Yes, speaking strictly grammatically. But that's not how people communicate.

[kempbellt]

It is how many people communicate.

[tptacek]

No. Your argument is a linguistic work-to-rules strike.

[kempbellt]

"How was your weekend?"

"Yesterday my uncle died and my dog got hit by a car"

A lot of people communicate this way.

I get the sense that you're on some vendetta against all of my comments for some reason, but I'm not on a weird strike against anything except poor assumptions.

But, agree to disagree I suppose.

[selimthegrim]

I have taken employment (probably IQ in disguise) tests that specifically look for people making this association (and mark them down for it). I imagine they thought it had some association with logical skills and success in computer programming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy

[DarylZero]

> > It is how many people communicate.

> No. Your argument is a linguistic work-to-rules strike.

It's both.

[hinkley]

No, that’s not absolutely not an assumption you can make. Neurotypical people don’t think that way. Fair has nothing to do with it. If you believe that’s normal, you might want to talk to a professional about whether you’re on the autism spectrum, or if you were raised in an abusive household (ie, by narcissists).

Getting a diagnosis might make the rest of your life easier.