Man, I like the way that the "echoes" concept turns the guess/ask dichotomy into something more organic-feeling. Feels like it does it in a very elegant way.
I agree that this seems elegant and seems to explain ask/guess in simpler terms (and probably the elbows theory as well).
I’ve never been totally satisfied with either “ask” or “guess” to describe myself — if I had to pick one, I’d say guess, on balance. But I *think* one echo might describe me better than that, if I understand the higher levels of echoes correctly. Which I might not. It seems to me that in my culture, anything beyond one echo is plausibly-deniable enough that you can go back down to that first echo and operate from there. That’s what it seems like to me, though maybe I’ll think of a counterexample.
One thing that’s always made me reluctant to say “yep, I’m a guess culture type” is that when people on the internet describe guess culture, part of what they seem to be describing is, like, performative pouting and sulking as a way of sending signals. And that makes me go “wait a minute, that does not sound like healthy adult behavior in my culture!” But I think this makes sense to me now. It’s not verbal, so it can’t be ask culture of any kind…but if I’m interpreting the echo theory correctly, it’s a no-echoes behavior. If Bailey is upset, they want other people to know they’re upset, regardless of whether those other people feel guilty or uncomfortable about it or not! Whereas if Cameron (i.e. me) is upset, they hide it to the extent possible, and if they truly can’t deal with the situation, they say that explicitly (in the usual way that guess culture makes asks as a last resort — or, in this case, not necessarily an ask but rather something blunter than normal). Or something like that. Maybe I’m confused, though.
That matches what I was trying to say! Cameron would hide their upsetness under an assumption that goes something like "I don't want to obligate other people to do [whatever] in response, and they WILL feel obligated to do [whatever], so I'll keep it under wraps."
It seems like lots of intelligent writers are constantly struggling with the should-I-respond tradeoff. And I notice myself quite frequently getting annoyed at their decisions.
Eg. How does everyone always seem to feel the need to respond to everything Curtis Yarvin has to say? He's not a good thinker or a good writer. He continually spews low-effort slop. Why is he worth anyone's time? I know it's because he's famous and has a following but it would be nice if that didn't matter.
I feel like refusing to engage with someone because of the quality of their ideas is a different thing from cancel-culture where you refuse to engage with someone because you disagree with their ideas, but I'm not sure how to make that distinction in such a way that it definitely doesn't devolve into cancel culture
Really like the echoes concept. I do think there's still value is the guess/ask distinction, because there can be a much bigger difference between 0 and 1 than between 1 and more than 1. Dropping all the way down to 0 is is qualitatively different experience. As an analogy, while being able to pay your bills is a spectrum, by far the biggest impact is the dividing line between being able to pay them and not being able to pay them.
Also related to the echoes concept, this helped me nail down my preferences a bit more. Ever since hearing about the guess/ask distinction, I've been firmly on the side of ask for its clarity. But now I realize that's not quite right. I actually appreciate the consideration in the layers of guess, BUT I go mad when I can't figure out a way to drop down to ask when needed. Sometimes I just need to ask a direct question and get a direct answer, but if I know the other person isn't able to drop their layers of echoes, then I can't either.
(Dropping down to 0 echoes: no obligation to respond to this comment)
One kind of echo I track: if I reply to an essay simply to point out a typo, that probably feels a little negative to the author. Like, that's all I had to say? It's a more visible absence than if I hadn't said anything at all. But man, sometimes I'm like, I liked this, I don't have any immediate substantive comments... maybe I can say "I liked this" but sometimes that kinda feels like it goes against local norms... I get a bit tangled up and sometimes I point out the typo and sometimes I don't. Pointing out typos isn't usually very valuable so I don't think it's a big deal but the tangle seems not-ideal.
(Anyway, typo: Bailey gets renamed to Brice. And I liked this essay.)
There are applications here in the # of echoes to Japanese honne-tatamae, which could be the beginning of a sophisticated integrative approach. Japanese are trained from birth to track infinite echoes. Tracking infinite echoes leads to a beautiful civic space, but means that no one ever asks anything directly of anyone ever; and instead simply says what's expected in the situation: tatamae. So for the practiced and the intimate, there's a special kind of honesty: honne (though not especially sophisticated honesty, imho). A culture that has space for individuals to both navigate infinite echoes & none is surely on the track to integrating these cultural clashes...
I didn't really connect with the example you gave at the start of the post. I assumed "people will judge others for not responding and take a comment as gospel" was a small aspect of the larger point, but it seems to be the central argument. I then started thinking about how I would respond to the claim that 1%, or even .1% of people might make judgments based on a lack of response to comments. And even then, I thought you were probably overstating it.
Then, near the end of the post, I'm jumpscared by the claim that as many as 30%(!) of people reading posts might have their opinion meaningfully altered by whether or not the original author responded to a critical comment! That is so many orders of magnitude higher than I could have ever expected! 10% would be absurd, I would normally challenge you to find a single comment that impacts 10% of the viewership, but I don't even have a response to 30%!
The vast majority of internet personalities do not respond to the vast majority of comments. A huge percentage of people who engage with internet content don't even read comments, and usually if there is any disagreement about the interpretation of something the comments will discuss it on their own, without need for the OP to come in and respond to every individual mistake. I've been on the internet a long time, seen a lot of communities with a lot of different expectations, and only in the most extreme cases have I even seen an individual who claims the lack of response to their comment is telling. To claim that even .1% of people reading comments make those sorts of judgments is a strong claim that I wouldn't take seriously without supporting evidence. For 30%, I don't even know what could convince me, it's so far outside of my experience.
It's possible there's a disagreement about cause and effect here, I guess. Like, if there's 3 comments that misunderstand someone's post in the same way, was the post just confusing to a lot of people or did the first 2 comments copy the first? Or maybe this post is specifically about other known figures making comments on smaller blogs and bringing their fanbase along? I don't know, even in those cases I'd still say 30% is inconcievable.
Yes, this is not about internet personalities, i.e. people with a large parasocial following. This is about places like individuals' FB walls and the discussions beneath their posts, or niche webforums like LessWrong, or threads in Discord servers, or threads in smallish subreddits. I agree that in places where there's a clear preexisting expectation that someone won't even be able to read all of the comments, people make much less of an update on non-response.
Man, I like the way that the "echoes" concept turns the guess/ask dichotomy into something more organic-feeling. Feels like it does it in a very elegant way.
As a general thing, ignoring things is work. It can be made into an automatic response, but it's not not the same as not having something to ignore.
This is implied but ignored in the advice to "just ignore it". Any advice that includes "just" is ignoring a cost.
I agree that this seems elegant and seems to explain ask/guess in simpler terms (and probably the elbows theory as well).
I’ve never been totally satisfied with either “ask” or “guess” to describe myself — if I had to pick one, I’d say guess, on balance. But I *think* one echo might describe me better than that, if I understand the higher levels of echoes correctly. Which I might not. It seems to me that in my culture, anything beyond one echo is plausibly-deniable enough that you can go back down to that first echo and operate from there. That’s what it seems like to me, though maybe I’ll think of a counterexample.
One thing that’s always made me reluctant to say “yep, I’m a guess culture type” is that when people on the internet describe guess culture, part of what they seem to be describing is, like, performative pouting and sulking as a way of sending signals. And that makes me go “wait a minute, that does not sound like healthy adult behavior in my culture!” But I think this makes sense to me now. It’s not verbal, so it can’t be ask culture of any kind…but if I’m interpreting the echo theory correctly, it’s a no-echoes behavior. If Bailey is upset, they want other people to know they’re upset, regardless of whether those other people feel guilty or uncomfortable about it or not! Whereas if Cameron (i.e. me) is upset, they hide it to the extent possible, and if they truly can’t deal with the situation, they say that explicitly (in the usual way that guess culture makes asks as a last resort — or, in this case, not necessarily an ask but rather something blunter than normal). Or something like that. Maybe I’m confused, though.
That matches what I was trying to say! Cameron would hide their upsetness under an assumption that goes something like "I don't want to obligate other people to do [whatever] in response, and they WILL feel obligated to do [whatever], so I'll keep it under wraps."
It seems like lots of intelligent writers are constantly struggling with the should-I-respond tradeoff. And I notice myself quite frequently getting annoyed at their decisions.
Eg. How does everyone always seem to feel the need to respond to everything Curtis Yarvin has to say? He's not a good thinker or a good writer. He continually spews low-effort slop. Why is he worth anyone's time? I know it's because he's famous and has a following but it would be nice if that didn't matter.
I feel like refusing to engage with someone because of the quality of their ideas is a different thing from cancel-culture where you refuse to engage with someone because you disagree with their ideas, but I'm not sure how to make that distinction in such a way that it definitely doesn't devolve into cancel culture
Really like the echoes concept. I do think there's still value is the guess/ask distinction, because there can be a much bigger difference between 0 and 1 than between 1 and more than 1. Dropping all the way down to 0 is is qualitatively different experience. As an analogy, while being able to pay your bills is a spectrum, by far the biggest impact is the dividing line between being able to pay them and not being able to pay them.
Also related to the echoes concept, this helped me nail down my preferences a bit more. Ever since hearing about the guess/ask distinction, I've been firmly on the side of ask for its clarity. But now I realize that's not quite right. I actually appreciate the consideration in the layers of guess, BUT I go mad when I can't figure out a way to drop down to ask when needed. Sometimes I just need to ask a direct question and get a direct answer, but if I know the other person isn't able to drop their layers of echoes, then I can't either.
(Dropping down to 0 echoes: no obligation to respond to this comment)
One kind of echo I track: if I reply to an essay simply to point out a typo, that probably feels a little negative to the author. Like, that's all I had to say? It's a more visible absence than if I hadn't said anything at all. But man, sometimes I'm like, I liked this, I don't have any immediate substantive comments... maybe I can say "I liked this" but sometimes that kinda feels like it goes against local norms... I get a bit tangled up and sometimes I point out the typo and sometimes I don't. Pointing out typos isn't usually very valuable so I don't think it's a big deal but the tangle seems not-ideal.
(Anyway, typo: Bailey gets renamed to Brice. And I liked this essay.)
Fixed; thanks!
There are applications here in the # of echoes to Japanese honne-tatamae, which could be the beginning of a sophisticated integrative approach. Japanese are trained from birth to track infinite echoes. Tracking infinite echoes leads to a beautiful civic space, but means that no one ever asks anything directly of anyone ever; and instead simply says what's expected in the situation: tatamae. So for the practiced and the intimate, there's a special kind of honesty: honne (though not especially sophisticated honesty, imho). A culture that has space for individuals to both navigate infinite echoes & none is surely on the track to integrating these cultural clashes...
I didn't really connect with the example you gave at the start of the post. I assumed "people will judge others for not responding and take a comment as gospel" was a small aspect of the larger point, but it seems to be the central argument. I then started thinking about how I would respond to the claim that 1%, or even .1% of people might make judgments based on a lack of response to comments. And even then, I thought you were probably overstating it.
Then, near the end of the post, I'm jumpscared by the claim that as many as 30%(!) of people reading posts might have their opinion meaningfully altered by whether or not the original author responded to a critical comment! That is so many orders of magnitude higher than I could have ever expected! 10% would be absurd, I would normally challenge you to find a single comment that impacts 10% of the viewership, but I don't even have a response to 30%!
The vast majority of internet personalities do not respond to the vast majority of comments. A huge percentage of people who engage with internet content don't even read comments, and usually if there is any disagreement about the interpretation of something the comments will discuss it on their own, without need for the OP to come in and respond to every individual mistake. I've been on the internet a long time, seen a lot of communities with a lot of different expectations, and only in the most extreme cases have I even seen an individual who claims the lack of response to their comment is telling. To claim that even .1% of people reading comments make those sorts of judgments is a strong claim that I wouldn't take seriously without supporting evidence. For 30%, I don't even know what could convince me, it's so far outside of my experience.
It's possible there's a disagreement about cause and effect here, I guess. Like, if there's 3 comments that misunderstand someone's post in the same way, was the post just confusing to a lot of people or did the first 2 comments copy the first? Or maybe this post is specifically about other known figures making comments on smaller blogs and bringing their fanbase along? I don't know, even in those cases I'd still say 30% is inconcievable.
Yes, this is not about internet personalities, i.e. people with a large parasocial following. This is about places like individuals' FB walls and the discussions beneath their posts, or niche webforums like LessWrong, or threads in Discord servers, or threads in smallish subreddits. I agree that in places where there's a clear preexisting expectation that someone won't even be able to read all of the comments, people make much less of an update on non-response.