To clarify, the norms depicted in that story were partly for humor, and partly “I wonder if a society like this could actually exist.” The norms are “obvious” from the perspective of the fictional author because they’ve lived with it all their life and find it hard to imagine a society without such norms. In the comments to that post I proposed much weaker norms (no arbitration, no duels to the death, you can leave a conversation at any time by leaving a “disagreement status”) for LW, and noted that I wasn’t sure about their value, but thought it would be worth doing an experiment to find out.
BTW, 15 years later, I would answer that a society like that (with very strong norms against unilaterally ignoring a disagreement) probably couldn’t exist, at least without more norms/institutions/infrastructure that I didn’t talk about. One problem is that some people have a lot more interest from other people talking/disagreeing with them than others, and it’s infeasible or too costly to have to individually answer every disagreement. This is made worse by the fact that a lot of critiques can be low quality. It’s possible to imagine how the fictional society might deal with this, but I’ll just note that these are some problems I didn’t address when I wrote the original story.
To clarify, the norms depicted in that story were partly for humor, and partly “I wonder if a society like this could actually exist.” The norms are “obvious” from the perspective of the fictional author because they’ve lived with it all their life and find it hard to imagine a society without such norms. In the comments to that post I proposed much weaker norms (no arbitration, no duels to the death, you can leave a conversation at any time by leaving a “disagreement status”) for LW, and noted that I wasn’t sure about their value, but thought it would be worth doing an experiment to find out.
BTW, 15 years later, I would answer that a society like that (with very strong norms against unilaterally ignoring a disagreement) probably couldn’t exist, at least without more norms/institutions/infrastructure that I didn’t talk about. One problem is that some people have a lot more interest from other people talking/disagreeing with them than others, and it’s infeasible or too costly to have to individually answer every disagreement. This is made worse by the fact that a lot of critiques can be low quality. It’s possible to imagine how the fictional society might deal with this, but I’ll just note that these are some problems I didn’t address when I wrote the original story.