And for several months before writing the demon thread post, the entire ontology of how I thought about online discussion depended heavily on the demon-thread concept (which I still think is quite important). So, whenever I’d explain why I thought a given interaction was going poorly or how to improve it, I’d first have to explain a bunch of relevant concepts about the ontology, which made it harder to have a conversation.
I don’t know how much double-illusion of transparency has been going on. Maybe a lot. But my impression is that I’m now able to refer to “Demon Threads” as a small bite sized chunk of an argument, and
a) many people in the discussion have read the post, and even if the phrase was unintuitive to them, they know enough of what it means for me to make my point
b) the worst case scenario is that they think it means “bad thread”, which is, in fact, often good enough. (and in situations where the precise mechanics of demon threads matter, if the subject comes up and people seem to be missing subtleties there’s a post I can link to now that explains it in more detail)
[edit: I actually think it’s an important enough subgoal of the term to gracefully degrade into “bad thread”, which I’m less confident escalation spiral does, although unsure]
And for several months before writing the demon thread post, the entire ontology of how I thought about online discussion depended heavily on the demon-thread concept (which I still think is quite important). So, whenever I’d explain why I thought a given interaction was going poorly or how to improve it, I’d first have to explain a bunch of relevant concepts about the ontology, which made it harder to have a conversation.
I don’t know how much double-illusion of transparency has been going on. Maybe a lot. But my impression is that I’m now able to refer to “Demon Threads” as a small bite sized chunk of an argument, and
a) many people in the discussion have read the post, and even if the phrase was unintuitive to them, they know enough of what it means for me to make my point
b) the worst case scenario is that they think it means “bad thread”, which is, in fact, often good enough. (and in situations where the precise mechanics of demon threads matter, if the subject comes up and people seem to be missing subtleties there’s a post I can link to now that explains it in more detail)
[edit: I actually think it’s an important enough subgoal of the term to gracefully degrade into “bad thread”, which I’m less confident escalation spiral does, although unsure]