For bulk exchange of information and state, holistic is really good. I strongly prefer the holistic approach, but I’ve found that it only works for entirely friendly conversations. If it’s adversarial, I find that branches get aggressively pruned to just the things that the opposing side can most easily attack.
And if you think about holistic being optimized for “exchange of information and state”, this makes perfect sense: adversarial conversations are rarely if ever about information exchange; they’re about “winning”.
It’s also perhaps worth mentioning that aggressively holistic comms can require more mental horsepower than some people have readily available or are willing to invest, so it’s best to tune the level of threading based on audience and discussion type.
For bulk exchange of information and state, holistic is really good. I strongly prefer the holistic approach, but I’ve found that it only works for entirely friendly conversations.
This is a good point. The holistic approach can come off as really adversarial if the conversation is just a little adversarial, because my blindsight guess can be pretty ugly, or at least, can come off that way. I have witnessed a fairly friendly seeming conversation where a holistic-responder responded to a decision theory point by bringing up trauma and abuse (bringing up episodes in the past of both conversation participants which you’d normally expect to be really sensitive) and offered a perspective which could at least very easily be confused with “it’s your fault you were abused”. If the conversation hadn’t been very friendly, this could have gone extremely poorly. Holistic responses have a tendency to
If it’s adversarial, I find that branches get aggressively pruned to just the things that the opposing side can most easily attack.
Yeah, I often find that I have to prune less-important threads preemptively, out of concern that my response on branch X might seem like an easy target and thus cause branch Y to get pruned by the other person, when I think branch Y is more important. To be honest, I probably do not do this as much as I ideally should. (I want to respond to all the threads!)
So a level of non-adversarialness is also required to really maintain good branching conversations.
For bulk exchange of information and state, holistic is really good. I strongly prefer the holistic approach, but I’ve found that it only works for entirely friendly conversations. If it’s adversarial, I find that branches get aggressively pruned to just the things that the opposing side can most easily attack.
And if you think about holistic being optimized for “exchange of information and state”, this makes perfect sense: adversarial conversations are rarely if ever about information exchange; they’re about “winning”.
It’s also perhaps worth mentioning that aggressively holistic comms can require more mental horsepower than some people have readily available or are willing to invest, so it’s best to tune the level of threading based on audience and discussion type.
This is a good point. The holistic approach can come off as really adversarial if the conversation is just a little adversarial, because my blindsight guess can be pretty ugly, or at least, can come off that way. I have witnessed a fairly friendly seeming conversation where a holistic-responder responded to a decision theory point by bringing up trauma and abuse (bringing up episodes in the past of both conversation participants which you’d normally expect to be really sensitive) and offered a perspective which could at least very easily be confused with “it’s your fault you were abused”. If the conversation hadn’t been very friendly, this could have gone extremely poorly. Holistic responses have a tendency to
Yeah, I often find that I have to prune less-important threads preemptively, out of concern that my response on branch X might seem like an easy target and thus cause branch Y to get pruned by the other person, when I think branch Y is more important. To be honest, I probably do not do this as much as I ideally should. (I want to respond to all the threads!)
So a level of non-adversarialness is also required to really maintain good branching conversations.