> If I made a good point, you could have signaled agreement.
Great point! [Deliberately mimicking an LLM here—not dismissively, but in jest.]
In all serious though, I understand where you’re coming from and I am aware that my approach throughout this thread is agitating. My response was a legitimate attempt to express appreciation for the time you spent answering my questions.
To be honest I was hesitant to signal agreement because I was worried that you’d interpret the entire exchange as me goading you into a point that I otherwise could’ve made on my own. I didn’t want you to think that you were working for my approval.
> where does good-faith asking questions from a non-fully-fleshed-out place actually fit in modern large-scale Internet forum discourse? It's a crappy dynamic…
Hope you don’t mind the ellipse where I left it. I do agree with this all though. And I don’t think the dynamic is inherent crappy [1], but in society’s current state and especially online it is; particularly when a certain line of questioning can be reasonably interpreted as provocative instead of curious or congenial at best.
Are we supposed to signal to each other that we are of the same ideological tribe beforehand? And what if we aren’t?
[1] I did break the quote there to gently diverge from what you actually said about reflexively jumping against the dynamic; In a way I don’t think I’m diverging though, maybe giving my take on why it’s crappy to jump, in a way I’m claiming my own judgmental stake alongside your own.
I know what I’m doing puts a strain on another person’s the cognitive bandwidth. I think that’s sort of the point. In return I reckon I presume the role of a knave.
What’s interesting is seeing how long a person tolerates my advances and how their answers develop.
Lately my primary motive is to try to drive discussions past exchanging platitudes toward something more…I don’t know yet. I started with that LLM reference for a reason but this comment is already long. If you even read this maybe you can sort of catch my drift.