My impression is that the expected cost of using this technique online—the probability of it backfiring multiplied by the average cost in the case that it does—is low.
While most of my communication experience is from my past role as a moderator of a youth-dominated engineering forum, and so is somewhat unusual, I believe that the expected value is in fact highly positive.
I think this is mostly because:
It’s a pretty cheap technique to implement—you can simply paraphrase the person you are responding to, rather than directly quoting. (As I did in this post)
In the case that you, in good faith, misunderstand the other member, they are going to have to re-explain their position anyways; it is far better to catch this early on, before anyone gets frustrated and before any more time is wasted.
Same function and justification as checksums, I suppose...
On the other hand, if you are only 50% sure what the other person meant, I found it was better to simply let them know that they were obscure.
My impression is that the expected cost of using this technique online—the probability of it backfiring multiplied by the average cost in the case that it does—is low.
That’s a great way of wording it. I had been trying to think about how to word it in terms of expected value, but my thoughts were too jumbled to post. Thank you for clarifying!
To paraphrase adamzerner...
While most of my communication experience is from my past role as a moderator of a youth-dominated engineering forum, and so is somewhat unusual, I believe that the expected value is in fact highly positive.
I think this is mostly because:
It’s a pretty cheap technique to implement—you can simply paraphrase the person you are responding to, rather than directly quoting. (As I did in this post)
In the case that you, in good faith, misunderstand the other member, they are going to have to re-explain their position anyways; it is far better to catch this early on, before anyone gets frustrated and before any more time is wasted.
Same function and justification as checksums, I suppose...
On the other hand, if you are only 50% sure what the other person meant, I found it was better to simply let them know that they were obscure.
That’s a great way of wording it. I had been trying to think about how to word it in terms of expected value, but my thoughts were too jumbled to post. Thank you for clarifying!