I write against the use of the word “obligation” in this context, as straightforwardly false. That is a small detail, but thinking of social media responses as obligations can import incorrect intuitions. Sabien’s essay has several other interesting elements, which I will not address here.
I don’t know if Sabien will even see this comment.
Obligation vs social costs
An obligation is a duty/commitment to which a person is morally/legally bound. To obligate is to bind/compel, especially legally/morally. An obligate carnivore dies if it doesn’t eat meat.
An example: after a presentation, there is a time set aside for unscreened live audience questions. The format is that audience members ask questions and the presenter responds to them. The presenter has agreed to the format and is morally obligated to respond.
A social media example: someone sets up an “ask me anything” space, and promises to respond to the top-voted ten questions. They have a moral obligation to keep their promise. If they don’t respond to the top questions, there are social cost of breaking a promise, even if there would be no social costs had they not made one.
In general social media carries social costs and benefits, not obligations. I don’t think this is in dispute. From Sabien’s essay:
It’s true in a literal sense that you never “have” to respond.
Aside: I would accept “coercion” in the case where someone is writing a comment and intending it to force someone to respond or lose status. I do not write to coerce.
Incorrect intuitions
After agreeing with Sabien that it is technically correct that there is no obligation, I’ll move on to the incorrect intuitions that arise from incorrectly treating these social costs as obligations. I have made these mistakes, and the framing of this essay might lead a reader into similar errors.
For example, we may gain an inflated sense of the social costs of not responding. Suppose in some case there is a real social cost associated with some part of the audience incorrectly thinking that the author is weak. If there was an moral obligation to respond, there would be an additional social cost associated with most of the audience correctly thinking that the author does not fulfill their social obligations. Because it’s true, and more serious, that has a higher social cost. Authors with incorrect intuitions will therefore respond too often. Duty calls.
For example, compulsory unpaid labor is unethical. If writing this comment obligated the essay author to respond, that would be quite the aggressive act, invading his free time and requiring him to write on my terms, unpaid. However, if writing this comment causes people to disagree with Sabien’s choice of words, that is freedom of speech. Similarly, I was not obligated to write this comment.
For example, obligations are more binary: we have them, or we don’t. I am obliged to feed my kids. I am not obliged to let them watch Bluey. Social costs (and benefits) are more scalar. If social-cost-of-non-response was an obligation then maybe I could fully defuse it with a disclaimer like “Yo, please feel free to skip over this”, and poof, no obligation. If only.
“I like pancakes!”
“Yo, please feel free to skip over this. So you hate waffles?”
Massive flamewar erupts over the virtues of waffles vs pancakes. Some people assume I hate waffles because I don’t respond and attack me or defend me on that basis. Other people express dismay that I’m not setting the record straight. In a splinter thread a few lunatics advocate violence against IHOP.
For example, most obligations are obvious and common knowledge. By contrast, it can be hard to estimate social costs. I do not know how busy Sabien is. I do not know how important his LessWrong reputation is to his life. I do not know what type of reputation he wants to have. This may cause authors to become super-frustrated with commenters who don’t see their social costs.
In conclusion
If I have an obligation, I desire to believe that I have an obligation.
If I do not have an obligation, I desire to believe that I do not have an obligation.
An obligation is a duty/commitment to which a person is morally/legally bound.
...wherein you decide that the word “obligation” means strictly and only a narrow technical thing, and then build an argument based off of that flawed premise.
(When done intentionally/adversarially, this is called “strawmanning.”)
You go on to make a lot of other strong claims about what constitutes an obligation, most of which do not match ordinary usage.
The fact that you believe or wish that these match the majority or even exclusive usage of the word doesn’t actually make it so. Words mean what they are used to mean, in practice, and my use of “obligated” and “obligation” in the above (especially with the clear caveats in the original post) is sound.
(Other parts of your reply contain “vehement agreement,” such as when you say “For example, we may gain an inflated sense of the social costs of not responding,” which is a sentiment explicitly stated within the original post: “It’s easy to get triggered or tunnel-visioned, and for the things happening on the screen to loom larger than they should, and larger than they would if you took a break and regained some perspective” and “we-as-monkeys are prone to exaggerate, in our own minds, how much [the audience’s] aggregate opinion matters.”)
I think in dictionaries one tends to find the “morally/legally bound” definition of “obligation” emphasized, and only sometimes but not always a definition closer to the usage in the OP, so prescriptively, in the sense of linguistic prescriptivism, this criticism may make sense. But practically/descriptively, I do believe among many English-speaking populations (including at least the one that contains me) currently “obligation” can also be used the way it is in the OP. For me at least the usage of “obligation” did not pose any speed bumps in understanding the broader meaning of the post, being unremarkable enough that the conscious idea that the word’s usage might not have matched various common dictionaries’ top or only definitions didn’t register until this comment.
There can be things one can feel sad about in language evolution (for example the treadmill of words meaning “a thing is actually true” being appropriated into generic intensifiers, see “very”, “truly”, “literally”, etc...). But it’s worth noting that different regions/social groups/populations/etc. may be at different points along the space of different such language changes and diverge in what acceptable usages of words are. As such, I think my instinct if I thought a word like “obligation” was being misused and it was sufficiently jarring might tend to be less to write a comment arguing why the original poster’s usage is wrong, and more to ask the poster if they did in fact intend that meaning or were aware that it might be sneaking in a meaning or connotation that for some segment of the their readership would come off as misleading or wrong.
Sorry this comment is long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter. Feel free to skip to the section that you are interested in, or skip the whole thing.
I appreciate the kind advice about prescriptivism vs descriptivism. I don’t want to have that debate here but yes, in saying a word choice is “incorrect” I’m necessarily using a prescriptivist lens. With a descriptivist lens I might say “imprecise” or “misleading” or “jarring” or “warping”. As well as dictionaries, I also got a second opinion from an LLM. LLMs can of course be sycophantic, but they update more frequently than dictionaries and are more aware of nuances. But perhaps they have a prescriptivist bias, I hadn’t considered that till I read your comment, and it seems likely with the test-taking bias.
With hindsight I regret using a prescriptivist lens, but I don’t know what the response would have been if I initially commented with a descriptivist lens, so it’s hard to make a full update.
Onwards with descriptivism.
Consider this sentence from the essay:
The person claiming that there’s no obligation to respond is often color-blind to some pretty important dynamics.
With my prescriptivist lens, I defended this as “technically correct”. With my descriptivist lens, I doubt such a person intends to claim that these dynamics aren’t real. A recent example is Banning Said Achmiz, where various people said variants of “no obligation to respond”, and they don’t read to me as blind to social dynamics.
Speaking for myself, I’ve been writing on the internet under my real name for a while, and I’ve experienced the pressures the essay describes. Given that high school kids are getting sometimes brutal lessons in cyberbullying, and that people have been imprisoned for social media posts, it seems hard for anyone in 2025 to have missed the reality. I see some people who seem to be oversensitive to the audience, and (fewer) people who seem to be under-sensitive to the audience, but this seems to me a consequence of value differences and occasionally reasoning failures, rather than “color-blindness”.
Another sentence from the essay:
I actually find it super frustrating when someone leaves commentary which, in one way or another, obligates me to effortfully respond, with more time and energy than I properly have to spare…
With my descriptivist lens, I read this as hyperbole, or metaphor, or a description of emotional reality. I still understand the author’s meaning, but for me it’s jarring and imports the wrong intuitions. When I reread the essay substituting a more precise term, such as “pressured to respond”, I get a different vibe.
Basics of Rationalist Discourse has a section on “Don’t weaponize equivocation/abuse categories/engage in motte-and-bailey shenanigans”. I wish the section was more peaceably named, as the author isn’t doing those things. But the contents are relevant here. The author is using “obligation” as a conceptual handle to describe scenarios which have some of the attributes (pressure, consequences, judgment, …) but not the ones that loom large in my mind (moral/legal force, compulsion, promise-keeping, …). I therefore comment that the term is prescriptively-incorrect (descriptively-warping) and discuss why.
Which brings us to:
Just Asking Questions
You’d ask a question. Basics of Rationalist Discourse says the same thing.
What’s the value of agreeing on this being an obligation? Like, you’re bidding for this label to be attached … what comes out of that, if we all end up agreeing?
If I were to say that this isn’t an obligation, it’s actually social pressure, what would you say to that?
I deliberately chose not to ask a question. This is partly because I read the author as asking me not to.
Like, it’s not your questions are bad, it’s your questions are costly, and I don’t have the spare resources to pay the costs; I’d like to not keep receiving bills and invoices from you, please.
To be clear, the author hasn’t complained to me personally about sending too many bills and invoices. But I still don’t want to send any invoices to him in the first place. I don’t believe authors have an obligation to respond, I don’t want to create obligations to respond, and if I find an author who expresses that questions create an obligation to respond, then I won’t be asking that author any questions. Especially not on the place where they complain about that! I instead posted a comment with multiple cues that I didn’t want or expect an author response.
The second reason is because of what habryka wrote in Banning Said Achmiz.
The critic has a pretty easy job at each step. First of all, they have little to lose. They need to make no positive statements and explain no confusing phenomena. All they need to do is to ask questions, or complain about the imprecision of some definition. … At the end of the day, are you really going to fault someone for just asking questions? What kind of totalitarian state are you trying to create here?
So instead of asking a question, or complaining about a definition, I chose to make positive statements about (a) the meaning of “obligated”, (b) the intuitions created by that word, and (c) why those intuitions cause errors.
And this totally worked as habryka said it would! By making positive statements, I had to spend a lot more time thinking about what I was saying. Also, I made my self vulnerable to disagreement and chalked up some downvotes and disagreement-votes. That seems very much working as intended.
The third reason is that as a matter of style I prefer to discuss the text than the author. Discussing the author brings up status issues of whether the author is good or bad. Discussing whether the text is good or bad reduces this. Whether the author intended to mislead with a word choice is a question about the author. Whether a word choice is misleading is primarily a question about the text and the reader.
I write against the use of the word “obligation” in this context, as straightforwardly false. That is a small detail, but thinking of social media responses as obligations can import incorrect intuitions. Sabien’s essay has several other interesting elements, which I will not address here.
I don’t know if Sabien will even see this comment.
Obligation vs social costs
An obligation is a duty/commitment to which a person is morally/legally bound. To obligate is to bind/compel, especially legally/morally. An obligate carnivore dies if it doesn’t eat meat.
An example: after a presentation, there is a time set aside for unscreened live audience questions. The format is that audience members ask questions and the presenter responds to them. The presenter has agreed to the format and is morally obligated to respond.
A social media example: someone sets up an “ask me anything” space, and promises to respond to the top-voted ten questions. They have a moral obligation to keep their promise. If they don’t respond to the top questions, there are social cost of breaking a promise, even if there would be no social costs had they not made one.
In general social media carries social costs and benefits, not obligations. I don’t think this is in dispute. From Sabien’s essay:
Aside: I would accept “coercion” in the case where someone is writing a comment and intending it to force someone to respond or lose status. I do not write to coerce.
Incorrect intuitions
After agreeing with Sabien that it is technically correct that there is no obligation, I’ll move on to the incorrect intuitions that arise from incorrectly treating these social costs as obligations. I have made these mistakes, and the framing of this essay might lead a reader into similar errors.
For example, we may gain an inflated sense of the social costs of not responding. Suppose in some case there is a real social cost associated with some part of the audience incorrectly thinking that the author is weak. If there was an moral obligation to respond, there would be an additional social cost associated with most of the audience correctly thinking that the author does not fulfill their social obligations. Because it’s true, and more serious, that has a higher social cost. Authors with incorrect intuitions will therefore respond too often. Duty calls.
For example, compulsory unpaid labor is unethical. If writing this comment obligated the essay author to respond, that would be quite the aggressive act, invading his free time and requiring him to write on my terms, unpaid. However, if writing this comment causes people to disagree with Sabien’s choice of words, that is freedom of speech. Similarly, I was not obligated to write this comment.
For example, obligations are more binary: we have them, or we don’t. I am obliged to feed my kids. I am not obliged to let them watch Bluey. Social costs (and benefits) are more scalar. If social-cost-of-non-response was an obligation then maybe I could fully defuse it with a disclaimer like “Yo, please feel free to skip over this”, and poof, no obligation. If only.
For example, most obligations are obvious and common knowledge. By contrast, it can be hard to estimate social costs. I do not know how busy Sabien is. I do not know how important his LessWrong reputation is to his life. I do not know what type of reputation he wants to have. This may cause authors to become super-frustrated with commenters who don’t see their social costs.
In conclusion
If I have an obligation, I desire to believe that I have an obligation.
If I do not have an obligation, I desire to believe that I do not have an obligation.
Your mistake is here:
...wherein you decide that the word “obligation” means strictly and only a narrow technical thing, and then build an argument based off of that flawed premise.
(When done intentionally/adversarially, this is called “strawmanning.”)
You go on to make a lot of other strong claims about what constitutes an obligation, most of which do not match ordinary usage.
The fact that you believe or wish that these match the majority or even exclusive usage of the word doesn’t actually make it so. Words mean what they are used to mean, in practice, and my use of “obligated” and “obligation” in the above (especially with the clear caveats in the original post) is sound.
(Other parts of your reply contain “vehement agreement,” such as when you say “For example, we may gain an inflated sense of the social costs of not responding,” which is a sentiment explicitly stated within the original post: “It’s easy to get triggered or tunnel-visioned, and for the things happening on the screen to loom larger than they should, and larger than they would if you took a break and regained some perspective” and “we-as-monkeys are prone to exaggerate, in our own minds, how much [the audience’s] aggregate opinion matters.”)
I think in dictionaries one tends to find the “morally/legally bound” definition of “obligation” emphasized, and only sometimes but not always a definition closer to the usage in the OP, so prescriptively, in the sense of linguistic prescriptivism, this criticism may make sense. But practically/descriptively, I do believe among many English-speaking populations (including at least the one that contains me) currently “obligation” can also be used the way it is in the OP. For me at least the usage of “obligation” did not pose any speed bumps in understanding the broader meaning of the post, being unremarkable enough that the conscious idea that the word’s usage might not have matched various common dictionaries’ top or only definitions didn’t register until this comment.
There can be things one can feel sad about in language evolution (for example the treadmill of words meaning “a thing is actually true” being appropriated into generic intensifiers, see “very”, “truly”, “literally”, etc...). But it’s worth noting that different regions/social groups/populations/etc. may be at different points along the space of different such language changes and diverge in what acceptable usages of words are. As such, I think my instinct if I thought a word like “obligation” was being misused and it was sufficiently jarring might tend to be less to write a comment arguing why the original poster’s usage is wrong, and more to ask the poster if they did in fact intend that meaning or were aware that it might be sneaking in a meaning or connotation that for some segment of the their readership would come off as misleading or wrong.
Sorry this comment is long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter. Feel free to skip to the section that you are interested in, or skip the whole thing.
I appreciate the kind advice about prescriptivism vs descriptivism. I don’t want to have that debate here but yes, in saying a word choice is “incorrect” I’m necessarily using a prescriptivist lens. With a descriptivist lens I might say “imprecise” or “misleading” or “jarring” or “warping”. As well as dictionaries, I also got a second opinion from an LLM. LLMs can of course be sycophantic, but they update more frequently than dictionaries and are more aware of nuances. But perhaps they have a prescriptivist bias, I hadn’t considered that till I read your comment, and it seems likely with the test-taking bias.
With hindsight I regret using a prescriptivist lens, but I don’t know what the response would have been if I initially commented with a descriptivist lens, so it’s hard to make a full update.
Onwards with descriptivism.
Consider this sentence from the essay:
With my prescriptivist lens, I defended this as “technically correct”. With my descriptivist lens, I doubt such a person intends to claim that these dynamics aren’t real. A recent example is Banning Said Achmiz, where various people said variants of “no obligation to respond”, and they don’t read to me as blind to social dynamics.
Speaking for myself, I’ve been writing on the internet under my real name for a while, and I’ve experienced the pressures the essay describes. Given that high school kids are getting sometimes brutal lessons in cyberbullying, and that people have been imprisoned for social media posts, it seems hard for anyone in 2025 to have missed the reality. I see some people who seem to be oversensitive to the audience, and (fewer) people who seem to be under-sensitive to the audience, but this seems to me a consequence of value differences and occasionally reasoning failures, rather than “color-blindness”.
Another sentence from the essay:
With my descriptivist lens, I read this as hyperbole, or metaphor, or a description of emotional reality. I still understand the author’s meaning, but for me it’s jarring and imports the wrong intuitions. When I reread the essay substituting a more precise term, such as “pressured to respond”, I get a different vibe.
Basics of Rationalist Discourse has a section on “Don’t weaponize equivocation/abuse categories/engage in motte-and-bailey shenanigans”. I wish the section was more peaceably named, as the author isn’t doing those things. But the contents are relevant here. The author is using “obligation” as a conceptual handle to describe scenarios which have some of the attributes (pressure, consequences, judgment, …) but not the ones that loom large in my mind (moral/legal force, compulsion, promise-keeping, …). I therefore comment that the term is prescriptively-incorrect (descriptively-warping) and discuss why.
Which brings us to:
Just Asking Questions
You’d ask a question. Basics of Rationalist Discourse says the same thing.
What’s the value of agreeing on this being an obligation? Like, you’re bidding for this label to be attached … what comes out of that, if we all end up agreeing?
If I were to say that this isn’t an obligation, it’s actually social pressure, what would you say to that?
I deliberately chose not to ask a question. This is partly because I read the author as asking me not to.
To be clear, the author hasn’t complained to me personally about sending too many bills and invoices. But I still don’t want to send any invoices to him in the first place. I don’t believe authors have an obligation to respond, I don’t want to create obligations to respond, and if I find an author who expresses that questions create an obligation to respond, then I won’t be asking that author any questions. Especially not on the place where they complain about that! I instead posted a comment with multiple cues that I didn’t want or expect an author response.
The second reason is because of what habryka wrote in Banning Said Achmiz.
So instead of asking a question, or complaining about a definition, I chose to make positive statements about (a) the meaning of “obligated”, (b) the intuitions created by that word, and (c) why those intuitions cause errors.
And this totally worked as habryka said it would! By making positive statements, I had to spend a lot more time thinking about what I was saying. Also, I made my self vulnerable to disagreement and chalked up some downvotes and disagreement-votes. That seems very much working as intended.
The third reason is that as a matter of style I prefer to discuss the text than the author. Discussing the author brings up status issues of whether the author is good or bad. Discussing whether the text is good or bad reduces this. Whether the author intended to mislead with a word choice is a question about the author. Whether a word choice is misleading is primarily a question about the text and the reader.