Also, remember that we’re actually still dealing with the aftermath of a minor discourse disaster in which I accidentally cast a scapegoating spell (I really am sorry, Duncan!) against a person when trying to vividly criticize a policy proposal. (You correctly noted that I was using words in a way that were going to predictably generate adverse side effects.) I think the total cost of things like this is way higher than you’re noticing, if you add up the additional interpretive labor burden, foregone discourse, and demon threads.
Not saying there’s an easy solution, or that we’re not getting important nice things from the status quo, but the costs of this situation really are quite high.
I agree that in any one case it doesn’t cost much—when you think of it—to actually ask the question. But the need to do that means that costs of really asking “how are you?” scale linearly with number of such interactions, and there’s a strong affordance for asking the question the generally-recognized-as-fake way. This means that parts of your brain that attend to verbal narratives are getting trained on a bunch of experiences where you ask people how they are and they tell you they’re fine (and vice versa). This plausibly leads to some systematic errors.
Ah, this finally clarified the discussion for me.
I still don’t think the problem is that bad, because it’s fairly easy for me to say ‘how are you actually?’ and it pretty much seems to work.
Also, remember that we’re actually still dealing with the aftermath of a minor discourse disaster in which I accidentally cast a scapegoating spell (I really am sorry, Duncan!) against a person when trying to vividly criticize a policy proposal. (You correctly noted that I was using words in a way that were going to predictably generate adverse side effects.) I think the total cost of things like this is way higher than you’re noticing, if you add up the additional interpretive labor burden, foregone discourse, and demon threads.
Not saying there’s an easy solution, or that we’re not getting important nice things from the status quo, but the costs of this situation really are quite high.
I agree that in any one case it doesn’t cost much—when you think of it—to actually ask the question. But the need to do that means that costs of really asking “how are you?” scale linearly with number of such interactions, and there’s a strong affordance for asking the question the generally-recognized-as-fake way. This means that parts of your brain that attend to verbal narratives are getting trained on a bunch of experiences where you ask people how they are and they tell you they’re fine (and vice versa). This plausibly leads to some systematic errors.