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.”)
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.”)