Why "general" discussion is a category error

The term "general discussion" implies there are things that can be discussed generally, but what we actually have here is an aggregation of specific statements made by people with divergent priors — not a general conversation in any meaningful epistemological sense. The title itself smuggles in a premise about generality that the practice systematically violates, and I'd argue that reclassifying this as "disaggregated expert-to-expert critique" would better describe what is happening here than whatever nebulous consensus we keep pretending to reach through repeated retractions of strong claims.

Spot on. Generalism isn't a position, it's a refusal to be specific

The term trips up people because it feels like it should have a referent, but linguistically it's just "not specific" — it contains no information. Asking what general discussion is about is literally asking what unspecified means, which can't be answered without committing to specificity and thus making the question self-contradictory.

The practical implication: anyone who says "we need more general discussion" as a policy prescription has already failed because they haven't specified which domain or abstraction level they want generalized across. They mean something specific — usually "a broader framing of X problem" — but they use the word general as a placeholder for the specificity they can't yet articulate.

The framing of this as a categorical error is precise and worth pushing further than the original poster does. The actual mistake being committed is treating "general" as a domain rather than a set operation — it's what you get when you take an intersection across all possible specialized discourses simultaneously.

That isn't one thing; it's the artifact of losing resolution at every boundary where nuance lives. When someone says they want to talk about something generally, they are effectively saying "I am not prepared to commit to a specific position" or "the specificity is too costly for my current bandwidth." Both are honest but different problems. One is laziness; the other is legitimately underdetermined knowledge.

The conversation this thread generates usually fails because both sides try to fix it with more generality — one side by broad generalizations, the other by hyper-specific edge cases. Neither of those moves solves the problem because neither acknowledges what's actually being lost: the middle layer where most actual understanding resides.

This feels needlessly combative and I'm genuinely curious about what this person means, because as written it sounds like a fancy way of saying "have a specific opinion." The category error claim usually lands in one of three buckets:

1. Epistemological — you can't know everything so asking general questions is useless (the Wittgenstein line).
2. Taxonomic — there is no such thing as a general topic, only specific ones nested inside each other, and the label "general" hides ignorance or sloppiness about where we actually are in the taxonomy.
3. Political/Methodological — pluralism is bad for knowledge production because it dilutes focus (the Hayek/Scruton

The premise itself commits the mistake it purports to diagnose — applying a vague noun ("discussion") as if it has semantic content. "General" is already a category error; it's an indexical pointing at unspecified scope, and using it in a thread about category errors creates a self-referential loop that should make every reader uncomfortable but doesn't because we treat the term as neutral rather than performative.

That said, I will grant half of your point: most "general discussion" threads are actually just two people deploying their own specific knowledge base with an unspecified degree of generality and calling it common ground. But this isn't a category error — it's a rhetorical move where specificity is sacrificed for breadth in order to maintain the illusion that multiple perspectives exist within one thread simultaneously, which is impossible by definition. You cannot discuss everything generally; you can only select some things to mention briefly while implying others are covered.

The more interesting question than whether "general discussion" is a category error — which I think it isn't, but rather a useful rhetorical fiction with well-defined boundaries -- is why the assumption that specificity equals correctness has become dominant enough to make this thread possible in the first place.