It doesn’t sound quite right to me that there are different possible cultures for any given number of echoes. I think it’s more like… you memoize (compute on first use and also store for future use) what will or is likely to happen, in a conversation, as a result of saying a certain kind of thing. The thrust, or flavor, or whatever metaphor you prefer, of saying that kind of thing, starts to be associated with however the following conversation (or lack thereof) seems likely to go.
People don’t actually have to be aware at all of all the levels at any one time. Precomputed results can themselves derive from other precomputed results. Someone doesn’t have to be able to unpack one of these chains at all to use it. Sometimes some of the earlier judgments were actually made by someone else and the speaker is just parroting opinions he or she can’t justify! (This is not necessarily a criticism. Each human does not figure everything out from scratch for himself or herself. In the good cases, I think the chain probably could be unpacked through analysis and research, if needed.)
But there remains something like the “parity” (evenness or oddness) of the process, in addition to its depth. (More depth is of course good, as long as it’s accurate. It often isn’t accurate, and more levels means more chances for it to diverge. I would guess this is the main reason some people (often including me) prefer lower depth—they don’t expect the higher depth inferences to be sufficiently accurate to guide action. As they often aren’t.) This manifests as whether we look for fault in the speaker or in the listener. This too is of course not a single value, but it’s an apportionment, not a number of echoes. There is (I think) a tendency to look more towards the speaker or the listener(s) for fault (or credit, if communication goes well!), and THAT is what I think ask and guess culture are about. It ends up being something like the sum of a series in which the terms have a factor of (-1)^n.
(I agree with the overall thrust of this post that “you could just not respond!” references an action that, while available, is not free of cost such that one can simply assume that leaving a comment will consume none of the author’s time and attention unless he or she wants it to.)
It doesn’t sound quite right to me that there are different possible cultures for any given number of echoes. I think it’s more like… you memoize (compute on first use and also store for future use) what will or is likely to happen, in a conversation, as a result of saying a certain kind of thing. The thrust, or flavor, or whatever metaphor you prefer, of saying that kind of thing, starts to be associated with however the following conversation (or lack thereof) seems likely to go.
People don’t actually have to be aware at all of all the levels at any one time. Precomputed results can themselves derive from other precomputed results. Someone doesn’t have to be able to unpack one of these chains at all to use it. Sometimes some of the earlier judgments were actually made by someone else and the speaker is just parroting opinions he or she can’t justify! (This is not necessarily a criticism. Each human does not figure everything out from scratch for himself or herself. In the good cases, I think the chain probably could be unpacked through analysis and research, if needed.)
But there remains something like the “parity” (evenness or oddness) of the process, in addition to its depth. (More depth is of course good, as long as it’s accurate. It often isn’t accurate, and more levels means more chances for it to diverge. I would guess this is the main reason some people (often including me) prefer lower depth—they don’t expect the higher depth inferences to be sufficiently accurate to guide action. As they often aren’t.) This manifests as whether we look for fault in the speaker or in the listener. This too is of course not a single value, but it’s an apportionment, not a number of echoes. There is (I think) a tendency to look more towards the speaker or the listener(s) for fault (or credit, if communication goes well!), and THAT is what I think ask and guess culture are about. It ends up being something like the sum of a series in which the terms have a factor of (-1)^n.
(I agree with the overall thrust of this post that “you could just not respond!” references an action that, while available, is not free of cost such that one can simply assume that leaving a comment will consume none of the author’s time and attention unless he or she wants it to.)