Is it necessary to come up with a two-word phrase that won’t mean anything to anybody who hasn’t had it explicitly taught to them? Why not say something like “hey, I’m bowing out of this conversation now, but it’s not intended to be any sort of reflection on you or the topic, I’m not making a statement, I’m just doing what’s good for me and that’s all”?
Although honestly that literal text sounds really passive-aggressive, and I would read it to mean “you guys are an annoying waste of time, you will never get anywhere, and I have better things to do”. And I suspect I would start to attach that same meaning to any code phrase, regardless of what people claimed it was supposed to mean. Especially since this isn’t a temporally constrained CFAR workshop where everybody is briefed on the way in the door.
Also, I think that even talking about either using a code phrase or to spell it out inevitably pushes toward that being a norm. Online discussion in general already has a very effective, functional norm that, unless you’ve made some explicit commitment, you can just disappear at any time, without any implications about why. Why mess with it?
On edit: I can’t believe I missed what Dagon said. That.
Why not say something like “hey, I’m bowing out of this conversation now, but it’s not intended to be any sort of reflection on you or the topic, I’m not making a statement, I’m just doing what’s good for me and that’s all”?
That seems fine too, if I feel like putting the effort into writing a long thing like that, customizing it for the particular circumstances, etc. But I’ve noticed many times that it’s a surprisingly large effort to hit exactly the right balance of social signals in a case like this, given what an important and commonplace move it is. (And I think I’m better than most people at wordsmithing this kind of thing, so if it’s hard for me then I worry even more about a bunch of other people.)
Even just taking the time to include all the caveats and explanations can send the wrong signal—can make a conversation feel more tense, defensive, adversarial, or hypercautious, since why else would you be putting so much work into clarifying stuff rather than just giving a chill ‘bye now :)’?.
Avoiding that takes skill too. I think this is just a legit hard social thing to communicate. Having another tool in my toolbox that lets me totally ignore one of the most common difficult things to communicate seems great to me. :)
(And indeed, with your second paragraph I see that you’re spotting some of the issues. We can just pre-despair of there being any possible solution to this, but also maybe the jargon would just work. We haven’t tried, and jargon does sometimes just work.)
“I suspect I would start to attach that same meaning to any code phrase” and “I think that even talking about either using a code phrase or to spell it out inevitably pushes toward that being a norm” are both concerns of mine, but I think I’m more optimistic than you that they just won’t be big issues by default, and that we can deliberately avoid them if they start creeping in. I’m also perfectly happy in principle to euphemism-treadmill stuff and keep rolling out new terms, as long as the swap is happening (say) once every 15 years and not once every 2 years.
Is it necessary to come up with a two-word phrase that won’t mean anything to anybody who hasn’t had it explicitly taught to them? Why not say something like “hey, I’m bowing out of this conversation now, but it’s not intended to be any sort of reflection on you or the topic, I’m not making a statement, I’m just doing what’s good for me and that’s all”?
Although honestly that literal text sounds really passive-aggressive, and I would read it to mean “you guys are an annoying waste of time, you will never get anywhere, and I have better things to do”. And I suspect I would start to attach that same meaning to any code phrase, regardless of what people claimed it was supposed to mean. Especially since this isn’t a temporally constrained CFAR workshop where everybody is briefed on the way in the door.
Also, I think that even talking about either using a code phrase or to spell it out inevitably pushes toward that being a norm. Online discussion in general already has a very effective, functional norm that, unless you’ve made some explicit commitment, you can just disappear at any time, without any implications about why. Why mess with it?
On edit: I can’t believe I missed what Dagon said. That.
That seems fine too, if I feel like putting the effort into writing a long thing like that, customizing it for the particular circumstances, etc. But I’ve noticed many times that it’s a surprisingly large effort to hit exactly the right balance of social signals in a case like this, given what an important and commonplace move it is. (And I think I’m better than most people at wordsmithing this kind of thing, so if it’s hard for me then I worry even more about a bunch of other people.)
Even just taking the time to include all the caveats and explanations can send the wrong signal—can make a conversation feel more tense, defensive, adversarial, or hypercautious, since why else would you be putting so much work into clarifying stuff rather than just giving a chill ‘bye now :)’?.
Avoiding that takes skill too. I think this is just a legit hard social thing to communicate. Having another tool in my toolbox that lets me totally ignore one of the most common difficult things to communicate seems great to me. :)
(And indeed, with your second paragraph I see that you’re spotting some of the issues. We can just pre-despair of there being any possible solution to this, but also maybe the jargon would just work. We haven’t tried, and jargon does sometimes just work.)
“I suspect I would start to attach that same meaning to any code phrase” and “I think that even talking about either using a code phrase or to spell it out inevitably pushes toward that being a norm” are both concerns of mine, but I think I’m more optimistic than you that they just won’t be big issues by default, and that we can deliberately avoid them if they start creeping in. I’m also perfectly happy in principle to euphemism-treadmill stuff and keep rolling out new terms, as long as the swap is happening (say) once every 15 years and not once every 2 years.