Everyone sometimes issues replies that are not rebuttals, but there is an expectation that replies will meet some threshold of relevance. Injecting “your comment reminds me of the medieval poet Dante Alighieri” into a random conversation would generally be considered off-topic, even if the speaker genuinely was reminded of him. Other participants in the conversation might suspect this speaker of being obsessed with Alighieri, and they might worry that he was trying to subvert the conversation by changing it to a topic no one but him was interested in. They might think-but-be-too-polite-to-say “Dude, no one cares, stop distracting from the topic at hand”.
The behaviour Raemon was trying to highlight is that you soapbox. If it is line with your values to do so, it still seems like choosing to defect rather than cooperate in the game of conversation.
I mean, I agree that I have soapbox-like tendencies (I often have an agenda, and my contributions to our discourse often reflect my agenda), but I thought I’ve been meeting the commonsense relevance standard—being an Alighieri scholar who only brings it up when there happens to be a legitimate Alighieri angle on the topic, and not just randomly derailing other people’s discussions.
I could be persuaded that I’ve been getting this wrong, but, again, I’m going to need more specific examples (of how some particular post I made misses the relevance standard) before I repent or change anything.
Everyone sometimes issues replies that are not rebuttals, but there is an expectation that replies will meet some threshold of relevance. Injecting “your comment reminds me of the medieval poet Dante Alighieri” into a random conversation would generally be considered off-topic, even if the speaker genuinely was reminded of him. Other participants in the conversation might suspect this speaker of being obsessed with Alighieri, and they might worry that he was trying to subvert the conversation by changing it to a topic no one but him was interested in. They might think-but-be-too-polite-to-say “Dude, no one cares, stop distracting from the topic at hand”.
The behaviour Raemon was trying to highlight is that you soapbox. If it is line with your values to do so, it still seems like choosing to defect rather than cooperate in the game of conversation.
I mean, I agree that I have soapbox-like tendencies (I often have an agenda, and my contributions to our discourse often reflect my agenda), but I thought I’ve been meeting the commonsense relevance standard—being an Alighieri scholar who only brings it up when there happens to be a legitimate Alighieri angle on the topic, and not just randomly derailing other people’s discussions.
I could be persuaded that I’ve been getting this wrong, but, again, I’m going to need more specific examples (of how some particular post I made misses the relevance standard) before I repent or change anything.