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Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

> It speaks a lot to just how effective frequent, high volume stress is at producing muscle mass even in cases where people were (most likely) eating very plain diets which a lot of people today would categorize as "insufficient".

> EDIT: I mistakenly thought that 'selected specifically' and 'some' would be sufficiently adequate at emphasizing that I meant that these people existed; I'm not suggesting that the average Roman citizen was built like a young Arnold. My apologies.

Spot the discrepancy. “Most likely” versus “some”.

Most people subsisting on peasant diets doesn’t mean that there were not some people that had better diets.

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Thank you for explaining.

I'm not a native speaker and am finding it hard with how many qualifiers one needs to put into English sentences as to avoid looking like one is making sweeping absolute statements. Is this also necessary for verbal communication?

To fully pad out what I meant with that sentence:

  ... where I assume that most people doing that type of heavy physical labor were, on average, quite likely to have had very plain diets when compared to what a lot of laymen in modern days would deem/assume sufficient for developing such a physique in modern times.

> I'm not a native speaker and am finding it hard with how many qualifiers one needs to put into English sentences as to avoid looking like one is making sweeping absolute statements. Is this also necessary for verbal communication?

I would recommend you don’t extrapolate too much from HN conversation. The prevalence of skimming combined with detail fixation here means that often times you are receiving feedback from the most argumentative people who can also respond more quickly because they didn’t fully consider your position.

Notice how the commenter here skillfully talks in general instead of asserting that the original replier did anything in particular. This is how to write a good HN comment.

I think you might just be victim to some small pedantry here.. your original sentence communicated what you meant just fine!

I believe your qualifier "on average" is fine for communicating you are not making sweeping generalizations. I prefer the phrasing of <who/subject> <did/verb> <qualifiers/adverbs> <what/object acted upon> and then adding in context: when/where/why/how.

I would have written it this way. I believe on average our ancestors had more muscular physiques than us, despite having what laymen today would deem a poor diet lacking sufficient nutrition due to the heavy physical labor required in the past.

My comment had exactly nothing to do with your supposed lack of qualifiers. No need to bring out the ESL qualifiers.

> I'm not a native speaker and am finding it hard with how many qualifiers one needs to put into English sentences as to avoid looking like one is making sweeping absolute statements.

Web-forum-English isn't like normal English. Well-written books or articles in real publications usually aren't written with the goal of heading off unreasonably-hostile readings or very-careless readings—in normal writing, that just means a few readers misunderstand something due entirely to their own mistakes or prejudices and that's the end of it, while on Web forums it can spawn entire useless threads and flamewars.

Clarity and some amount of contextually-appropriate precision are still important in normal English writing—it's not the case that every misreading is necessarily the reader's fault—but this kind of trying-to-craft-a-wish-for-a-malicious-genie crap isn't the norm.

"most likely" is just referring to the likelihood of their diets being plain, no?

Likelihood based on what? Likelihood of some distant past is easier to talk about when you talk about the average and is harder to talk about when you talk about some specialist, like a model.

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