I initially wanted to paraphrase your description of tapping out in physical pursuits as “a question is answered to my satisfaction”, but that’s not quite right. More precisely, it sounds like a signal of the inflection point between “better to continue” and “better to stop”. The standards of “better to continue” might include pursuing a hope of turning the situation around or getting closer to the goal of an exercise, and standards of “better to stop” might include avoiding immediate or delayed pain or injury, or to simply avoid wasting time after the goal of a drill has been achieved.
“tapping out” carries too much cultural baggage about loss and submission to seem promising, but we would certainly benefit from a term capturing the moment when a line of discussion hits diminishing or even negative returns for its participants and is thus a waste of time to continue.
This makes me realize that I don’t even have a particularly good term for the category of topic that gets its social/emotional hooks into the participants and forces/coerces/drags them into continuing discussing/debating it long after any real value has already been extracted from the exchange. (scissor statements come close, and might be a superset of this category, but aren’t exactly what I’m referring to)
Part of what this essay is doing is trying to argue with the connotations between tapping out and losing. Yeah, if someone taps out in a formal debate they lose the point. (Points? I haven’t done competitive debate, I don’t know how they’re scored.) From the perspective of someone who’s done a lot of martial arts, it’s really useful to be able to just practice without shame or loss of status attached to tapping out.
I initially wanted to paraphrase your description of tapping out in physical pursuits as “a question is answered to my satisfaction”, but that’s not quite right. More precisely, it sounds like a signal of the inflection point between “better to continue” and “better to stop”. The standards of “better to continue” might include pursuing a hope of turning the situation around or getting closer to the goal of an exercise, and standards of “better to stop” might include avoiding immediate or delayed pain or injury, or to simply avoid wasting time after the goal of a drill has been achieved.
“tapping out” carries too much cultural baggage about loss and submission to seem promising, but we would certainly benefit from a term capturing the moment when a line of discussion hits diminishing or even negative returns for its participants and is thus a waste of time to continue.
This makes me realize that I don’t even have a particularly good term for the category of topic that gets its social/emotional hooks into the participants and forces/coerces/drags them into continuing discussing/debating it long after any real value has already been extracted from the exchange. (scissor statements come close, and might be a superset of this category, but aren’t exactly what I’m referring to)
Part of what this essay is doing is trying to argue with the connotations between tapping out and losing. Yeah, if someone taps out in a formal debate they lose the point. (Points? I haven’t done competitive debate, I don’t know how they’re scored.) From the perspective of someone who’s done a lot of martial arts, it’s really useful to be able to just practice without shame or loss of status attached to tapping out.