A car could look fast, but be slow, or have latent problems, software on the car's computer could be fooling emissions tests... Looking at a tree tells you nothing about photosynthesis, tree pheromones, deep relationships with symbiotic insects or bacteria...
You can't understand very much at all just based on how things look. That holds for humans and inhumans alike.
This is a perfect example of Tactical Nihilism. You're basically denying the existence of a massive amount of reproducible psychometrics and anthropological research because it makes you uncomfortable, and you're declaring that heuristic analysis of available, salient facts is not worthwhile because "you can't understand very much at all based on how things look."
When an arborist "looks" at a tree, they identify the kind of tree it is, and that connects to all of the research they know about that species of tree. It's reasonable to suppose that a new instance of a known kind of tree is going to have properties in common with all the other known instances.
I think you're reading into my comment things that aren't there. Pointing out that even apparently simple things contain hidden depths is not an example of nihilism, tactical or otherwise. Likewise, it's not a denial of research - it's an acknowledgement of the research that uncovered those hidden depths.
Your point about how a specialist can connect their knowledge to what they see is true, but not relevant to the point at hand. If I was your therapist, and had studied and understood you thoroughly, I might be able to assess your mental state at a glance in most scenarios. That doesn't deny you have a detailed inner life anymore than that an arborist might generally understand a tree does not deny the complex life of the tree.
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.
Empiricism is basically the art of inference based on outward appearance in different contexts.
I’d argue we learn everything based on appearance. You have to do more than just observe things superficially and take context into account, but for something to be measurable it has to have some sort of outward appearance, whether that be direct, as in something you can see with your naked eye, or indirect, as in something we need to measure through some other instrument.
You can, probabilistically. If you randomly sample cars from all the street-legal models in the US (for example), and sort them by how fast they are based on appearance only, you would not be 100% correct, but you'd probably do much better than if you claim that "You can't understand very much at all just based on how things look" and sort them randomly (the prior being that each car is equally likely to be anywhere in the distribution).
Ultimately we know nothing, so one can always nit-pick any statement into an oversimplified oblivion.
There are also cakes that look like cars, model sets which have miniature mountains, on and on. But in typical nature, it works well enough to breed and see what comes next.
You can't understand very much at all just based on how things look. That holds for humans and inhumans alike.