You personally? You shouldn’t. You should also not trust my words that you shouldn’t read into my description of a potential action I sometimes take the subtext that I would want you to act as if I were saying those words to you now, if you are not so inclined. There’s no reason you should in particular.
In other words, I use this trick for helping my friends understand that I don’t want them misreading my intent and inventing subtext when I am explicitly doing everything I can to communicate only explicit information. It is assumed a priori that said friends will believe me enough to at least take this at face value and trust my efforts, at the very least.
What seems so hard? I just have a method for setting up a rule with my friends where, when the rule is active, we should not be reading any subtext into eachothers’ words, because doing so will usually be detrimental and stupid, with common knowledge that the words we say will be said as if humans were incapable of reading subtext, and thus any subtext “read” will be at best a gross perversion of the actual speaker’s intent / qualities.
When you say “If you perceive any other subtext than this one, it’s almost certainly your imagination”, why should I believe you?
You personally? You shouldn’t. You should also not trust my words that you shouldn’t read into my description of a potential action I sometimes take the subtext that I would want you to act as if I were saying those words to you now, if you are not so inclined. There’s no reason you should in particular.
In other words, I use this trick for helping my friends understand that I don’t want them misreading my intent and inventing subtext when I am explicitly doing everything I can to communicate only explicit information. It is assumed a priori that said friends will believe me enough to at least take this at face value and trust my efforts, at the very least.
What seems so hard? I just have a method for setting up a rule with my friends where, when the rule is active, we should not be reading any subtext into eachothers’ words, because doing so will usually be detrimental and stupid, with common knowledge that the words we say will be said as if humans were incapable of reading subtext, and thus any subtext “read” will be at best a gross perversion of the actual speaker’s intent / qualities.