fairly frequently does a “Write a reply to a person’s post as if it’s a rebuttal to the post, which mostly goes off and talks about an unrelated problem/frame that Zack cares about
Would it help if we distinguished between a “reply” (in which a commentator explains the thoughts that they had in reaction to a post, often critical or otherwise negative thoughts) and a “rebuttal” (in which the commentator directly contradicts the original post, such that the original post and the rebuttal can’t “both be right”)? I often write replies that are not rebuttals, but I think this is fine.
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.
Would it help if we distinguished between a “reply” (in which a commentator explains the thoughts that they had in reaction to a post, often critical or otherwise negative thoughts) and a “rebuttal” (in which the commentator directly contradicts the original post, such that the original post and the rebuttal can’t “both be right”)? I often write replies that are not rebuttals, but I think this is fine.
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.
We might distinguish between
Reaction: I read your post and these are the thoughts it generated in me
Reply: …and these thoughts seem relevant to what the post was talking about
Rebuttal: …and they contradict what you said.
I’ve sometimes received comments where I’d have found it helpful to know which of these was intended.
(Of course a single comment can be all of these in different places. Also a reaction should still not misrepresent the original post.)