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 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.