Thank you. If I add your model to my hypothesis space, the probability on soldier-mindset does seem a lot less worrying.
I also now feel like I understand why you initially tried to frame this as a disagreement about posting etiquette. Posting the output of your queued work as a reply to a comment that refocused your attention (but is otherwise unrelated) seems weird to me.
It seems like you’re desiring a sort of Kialo-like approach to commenting, in which each comment chain is tackling an ever-more-narrow subargument. This does seem to be how some comment chains progress, and it would probably make for more legible reading. In the case of the comment you objected to, I could have said “I think you’re right,” realized the rest of my commentary could be split off into a separate comment, and then we wouldn’t have had an issue.
There’s something about the perception of being involved in a conversation with another person that keeps my attention anchored on the range of topics associated with that conversation. But rather than being ever-more-narrowly focused on the most recent reply, my attention fans out throughout the available text.
For example, in writing this comment, I find myself considering not only commenting etiquette, but also re-reading my original comment and your reply, and considering why I didn’t find your reply 100% convincing (instead saying “I think you’re mostly right”).
Then I start typing those thoughts, because the cursor’s in the text box. It would be inconvenient to split off AC-relevant thoughts into a different comment. It also feels weirder to me to make lots of comments on different subtopics than one long comment with all my thoughts. But in this case, I’m also paying enough attention to notice that most of these thoughts are not immediately relevant to this sub-topic, and delete them.
If I don’t edit my own comments to exclude thoughts that aren’t relevant to the subtopic under immediate discussion, all my thoughts at a particular moment in time tend to wind up in the same comment.
I suspect this habit comes from verbal debate, in which there isn’t really a convenient way to separate out thoughts into subtopics, and where a thought not verbalized can easily be forgotten.
I don’t think your description of what I want is entirely accurate. I wouldn’t say that I expect sub-comments to never be wider than their parent, but I expect that they’re somehow a response to the parent, rather than just being whatever you happened to be thinking about at the moment you wrote the sub-comment.
For example, if I posted an analogy about how air conditioners are somehow like kittens, then all of these would seem like reasonable responses that could be considered to widen the topic:
I think air conditioners are more like jellyfish because (reasons)
I’ve long thought that alarm clocks are similar to kittens for largely similar reasons; perhaps there’s an unexplored connection between air conditioners and alarm clocks?
That analogy makes sense, but it doesn’t address X, which seems to me like an important consideration
But it seems disconnected to me to post something like:
My cat just had a litter of kittens and I’m trying to find homes for them; anyone want one?
This summer is so hot. I really wish I had a better air conditioner right now.
It’s understandable that you would think of those things right after reading my hypothetical comment, but they’re not really responses to it.
I agree spoken conversations need somewhat different rules; however, even in spoken conversations there’s some etiquette limiting when and how you can change the topic of discussion.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the lines between a direct response to a comment and a non-response are clear. My reply to your comment wasn’t unrelated to your response. It just wasn’t as carefully focused as you desired.
I’ll also say that, no matter what rules we might come up with for commenting, at the end of the day the ability to coordinate around those rules, and people’s mental budget for following them, will dictate how conversation flows. At this point, I feel that this conversation has shifted from feeing like an exploration of commenting norms using our exchange as an example, and begun to feel like an evaluation of the adequacy of my commenting behavior. The latter is not really something I’m interested in.
I agree my line isn’t particularly sharp. This is less of a considered policy and more an attempt to articulate my intuitions.
Ending the discussion would be fair.
I’m glad I eventually understood your commenting model, though. I don’t feel like I often have opportunities to explore conflicts of expectations in detail, so this was valuable evidence for updating my overall Internet-discussions-model. (As well as a reminder that other peoples’ frames are both harder to predict and harder to communicate than my intuitions would suggest.) So thanks.
Thank you. If I add your model to my hypothesis space, the probability on soldier-mindset does seem a lot less worrying.
I also now feel like I understand why you initially tried to frame this as a disagreement about posting etiquette. Posting the output of your queued work as a reply to a comment that refocused your attention (but is otherwise unrelated) seems weird to me.
It seems like you’re desiring a sort of Kialo-like approach to commenting, in which each comment chain is tackling an ever-more-narrow subargument. This does seem to be how some comment chains progress, and it would probably make for more legible reading. In the case of the comment you objected to, I could have said “I think you’re right,” realized the rest of my commentary could be split off into a separate comment, and then we wouldn’t have had an issue.
There’s something about the perception of being involved in a conversation with another person that keeps my attention anchored on the range of topics associated with that conversation. But rather than being ever-more-narrowly focused on the most recent reply, my attention fans out throughout the available text.
For example, in writing this comment, I find myself considering not only commenting etiquette, but also re-reading my original comment and your reply, and considering why I didn’t find your reply 100% convincing (instead saying “I think you’re mostly right”).
Then I start typing those thoughts, because the cursor’s in the text box. It would be inconvenient to split off AC-relevant thoughts into a different comment. It also feels weirder to me to make lots of comments on different subtopics than one long comment with all my thoughts. But in this case, I’m also paying enough attention to notice that most of these thoughts are not immediately relevant to this sub-topic, and delete them.
If I don’t edit my own comments to exclude thoughts that aren’t relevant to the subtopic under immediate discussion, all my thoughts at a particular moment in time tend to wind up in the same comment.
I suspect this habit comes from verbal debate, in which there isn’t really a convenient way to separate out thoughts into subtopics, and where a thought not verbalized can easily be forgotten.
I don’t think your description of what I want is entirely accurate. I wouldn’t say that I expect sub-comments to never be wider than their parent, but I expect that they’re somehow a response to the parent, rather than just being whatever you happened to be thinking about at the moment you wrote the sub-comment.
For example, if I posted an analogy about how air conditioners are somehow like kittens, then all of these would seem like reasonable responses that could be considered to widen the topic:
I think air conditioners are more like jellyfish because (reasons)
I’ve long thought that alarm clocks are similar to kittens for largely similar reasons; perhaps there’s an unexplored connection between air conditioners and alarm clocks?
That analogy makes sense, but it doesn’t address X, which seems to me like an important consideration
But it seems disconnected to me to post something like:
My cat just had a litter of kittens and I’m trying to find homes for them; anyone want one?
This summer is so hot. I really wish I had a better air conditioner right now.
It’s understandable that you would think of those things right after reading my hypothetical comment, but they’re not really responses to it.
I agree spoken conversations need somewhat different rules; however, even in spoken conversations there’s some etiquette limiting when and how you can change the topic of discussion.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the lines between a direct response to a comment and a non-response are clear. My reply to your comment wasn’t unrelated to your response. It just wasn’t as carefully focused as you desired.
I’ll also say that, no matter what rules we might come up with for commenting, at the end of the day the ability to coordinate around those rules, and people’s mental budget for following them, will dictate how conversation flows. At this point, I feel that this conversation has shifted from feeing like an exploration of commenting norms using our exchange as an example, and begun to feel like an evaluation of the adequacy of my commenting behavior. The latter is not really something I’m interested in.
I agree my line isn’t particularly sharp. This is less of a considered policy and more an attempt to articulate my intuitions.
Ending the discussion would be fair.
I’m glad I eventually understood your commenting model, though. I don’t feel like I often have opportunities to explore conflicts of expectations in detail, so this was valuable evidence for updating my overall Internet-discussions-model. (As well as a reminder that other peoples’ frames are both harder to predict and harder to communicate than my intuitions would suggest.) So thanks.