–“How do you determine when a person has passed the threshold.”–
TLDR; “evidence of demonstrated behavior in linguistic expression in uncontrived circumstances.”
I work in a field that is somewhat difficult to understand if you’re unfamiliar with it, but at the foundations of it, the simple version is that the language one uses, especially in expression of demonstrated preference, in ordinary circumstances, provides insight into the working of one’s mind and brain, if one understands a few concepts that are uncommonly understood: sex differences in cognition, the spectrum of explanation (descriptive grammars), and the spectrum of means of lying (deceptive grammars). In order to solve the problem of testimonial truth (truth proper), I had to ‘science’ language and especially lying, which led to sex differences in cognition – and all differences originate in sex differences.
So in economics we explain the difference between “imagined, reported, and demonstrated behavior”. Demonstrated behavior is empirical, everything else is not, and this is why most social science is nonsense other than behavioral economics.
So if we look at human behavior on the terms I’ve described above and we look at the behavior demonstrated by speech, with a rather trivial number of words we can tell a great deal about you (facebook can profile you within about one hundred likes for example), and if we have as little as a few thousand words, we can determine almost everything about your thought processes, your biases, values, knowledge, class, age, and sex that is relevant in relation to others.
With more experience we can, as any psychologist or psychiatrist can, explain your behavior by reducing it to the primary causes of the variation of your behavior from some standard or other. (And we can probably do better than they can.). They are worried about how to fix you. We are only concerned in explaining you.
So there is an intersection here between linguistics (“Grammars”), computational linguistics (usage), behavioral econ, neuroscience, and genetics that provides us this understanding.
Reply addressees: @HakeemDemi