My intuitions respond to “And if you object that there’s no rule about the size of the quotes, I’ll downvote you again” and “If I ever catch you beating your husband I’m going to report you to the police!” in radically different ways. Not entirely sure why.
For my part, my social intuitions respond differently to those cases for two major reasons, as far as I can tell. First, I seem to have a higher expectation that someone will respond to an explanation of a downvote with a legalistic objection than that they will beat their spouses, so responding to the possibility of the former seems more justified. In fact, the former seems entirely plausible, while the second seems unlikely. Second, being accused of the latter seems much more serious than being accused of the former, and require correspondingly stronger justification.
All of which seems reasonable to me on reflection.
All of that said, my personal preference is typically for fewer explicit surface signals of challenge in discussion. For example, if I were concerned that someone might respond to the above that actually, averaged over all of humanity, spouse-beating is far more common than legalistic objections, I’d be far more likely to say something like “(This is of course a function of the community I’m in; in different communities my expectations would differ.)” than something like “And if you reply that spouse-beating is actually more common than legalistic objections, I will downvote you.” Similarly, if I anticipated a challenge that nobody is accusing anyone of anything, I might add a qualifier like “(pre-emptively hypothetically)” to “accused,” rather than explicitly suggest the challenge and then counter it.
But I acknowledge that this is a personal preference, not a community norm, and I acknowledge that sometimes making potential challenges explicit and responding to them has better long-term consequences than covert subversion of those challenges.
I think that what’s happened is that my brain took “(And if you object that there’s no rule about the size of the quotes, I’ll downvote you again)” to be equivalent to “(Yes, I know that there’s no rule about the size of the quotes, but still)” with the mock threat added for stylistic/dry humour effect (possibly as a result of me having stuff like this in the past).
Also, someone considering the possibility that an objection will be made to their own comment is self-deprecating in a way that someone considering the possibility that a random person will abuse their spouse isn’t.
My intuitions respond to “And if you object that there’s no rule about the size of the quotes, I’ll downvote you again” and “If I ever catch you beating your husband I’m going to report you to the police!” in radically different ways. Not entirely sure why.
For my part, my social intuitions respond differently to those cases for two major reasons, as far as I can tell. First, I seem to have a higher expectation that someone will respond to an explanation of a downvote with a legalistic objection than that they will beat their spouses, so responding to the possibility of the former seems more justified. In fact, the former seems entirely plausible, while the second seems unlikely. Second, being accused of the latter seems much more serious than being accused of the former, and require correspondingly stronger justification.
All of which seems reasonable to me on reflection.
All of that said, my personal preference is typically for fewer explicit surface signals of challenge in discussion. For example, if I were concerned that someone might respond to the above that actually, averaged over all of humanity, spouse-beating is far more common than legalistic objections, I’d be far more likely to say something like “(This is of course a function of the community I’m in; in different communities my expectations would differ.)” than something like “And if you reply that spouse-beating is actually more common than legalistic objections, I will downvote you.” Similarly, if I anticipated a challenge that nobody is accusing anyone of anything, I might add a qualifier like “(pre-emptively hypothetically)” to “accused,” rather than explicitly suggest the challenge and then counter it.
But I acknowledge that this is a personal preference, not a community norm, and I acknowledge that sometimes making potential challenges explicit and responding to them has better long-term consequences than covert subversion of those challenges.
I think that what’s happened is that my brain took “(And if you object that there’s no rule about the size of the quotes, I’ll downvote you again)” to be equivalent to “(Yes, I know that there’s no rule about the size of the quotes, but still)” with the mock threat added for stylistic/dry humour effect (possibly as a result of me having stuff like this in the past).
Also, someone considering the possibility that an objection will be made to their own comment is self-deprecating in a way that someone considering the possibility that a random person will abuse their spouse isn’t.