The claim wasn't that people are harder to understand than trees based on appearance - it was that people are harder to understand than anything based on appearance. It seems like a poorly articulated reference to people having an interior mind - but so do animals. Can you identify a friendly or sick or lazy dog just by looking? No.
> Can you identify a friendly or sick or lazy dog just by looking? No.
Yes you can do that. To put it extremely simply: define what "friendly", "sick", and "lazy" means in terms of behavior, then observe the dog's behaviors.
you can't identify every friendly dog just by looking at it, you'll identify dogs that are also acting friendly and doing things people have found preceded positive experiences.
you can't identify every sick dog just by looking at it, otherwise the vet would never find additional issues.
This is a case of "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. "
Yes, it's wrong to assume that you can tell everything about that dog by looking at it - but it's so much more uncomparably wrong to consider that you can tell nothing about friendly or sick dogs based on looking at them!
Observating the behaviors and dog breeds correlating with previous friendly and unfriendly experiences is a very useful, somewhat reliable predictor of how likely this particular dog is to be (un)friendly. Sure, if you know this particular dog, then that should supercede any group information, but if not, then that's all the information you have, it is useful information that correlates with (future) reality that matters to you, and so it's prudent to use it. Appearing "nonjudgmental" by throwing away information and judgment is simply stupid, and bound to get you bitten at least in the metaphorical way.
If we are talking about observing behaviors, then the original assertion that you can't tell anything about humans by looking is so silly that it wouldn't have been made. We are not talking about observing behaviors, but appearance.
Yes, I agree. I originally commented to disagree with this claim someone made above
> It's really only people where you can't tell what it does/is from the outside. Cars, trees, animals, mountains... everything else, if it looks a way it acts that way.
> Yes, it's wrong to assume that you can tell everything about that dog by looking at it - but it's so much more uncomparably wrong to consider that you can tell nothing about friendly or sick dogs based on looking at them!
but nobody in this entire thread was saying that, and my contribution was an additional attempt to further point out why the other sibling responses were missing this
At this point I'm totally content in talking past each other on this topic as I honestly don't know why its not clear that the subset which is undetectable by mere observation is statistically significant.
