I’ve never participated on LessWrong before but I enjoyed the read too much to not, so I’m sorry if my response is socially annoying in any sense! I’m ask-culture, so much so that when you distinguished the two I was like “wait, there’s what now?” I’ll probably be making a lot of remarks equating guess-culture with dishonesty, just to preface, I found your writing excellent, informative, charming and helpful. Therefore I don’t mean you!
I have this somewhat ambiguous concept of social inflammation, and guess culture strikes me as feeding it. In principle, one could be and could be socially obligated to track an infinite number of echoes. The more echoes one feels the need to track, the less one can express themselves directly—it literally creates a situation in which truthful information flows less freely. By contrast, assuming everyone in ask culture is consistent with their ask-culture conception, truthful information has no steps of echo tracking interfering with the free flow of such information.
It’s a Kantian point, right? Implying guess culture creates the condition through which untruthfulness is preferred, though it strikes me as arbitrary that any person would consider X echoes the right number to track, such that it’s arbitrary how a culture would generally expect such levels of tracking. No more, no less. 1, 100, ten million… Ability becomes the only limit. Therefore, for each step down the echo-tracking value hole is a new level of possible work required to get truthful information to flow. The only thing at a bedrock level of expectation is ask-culture. So if everyone is guess culture, and everyone is Guess Culture X-Deep, the consequence is truth dies by proportion to the work needed to move information. But if everyone is ask culture, no extra steps of work are required for truthful information to flow. Under ask culture conditions, people may suffer certain burdens of responsibility in relation to a comment—it seems like you have to do work either way, though. Either you have to work to track echoes, or you have to work to process and respond. How many hours are burned tracking echoes?
The logical response is your realism—as far as you can tell, we don’t live in an ask-culture world. Guess culture exists and acting like it doesn’t exist probably isn’t helpful. Acting like people don’t read and judge doesn’t make the social reality disappear. But, similarly, the more time I spend preparing to possibly have to defend myself from violence, the less time I spend doing philosophy or thinking about technical matters. If I then adopt total non-violence I’m open to the fact that violent enemies exist and cannot be wished away, “hope for peace, prepare for war”—how much I have to prepare for war depends primarily on how dangerous the war culture is. If it’s a vicious circle, isn’t the case the only place I can make certain non-violence is prime is in my mind and in my behaviours? Isn’t this the first step in trying to temper the war culture so that non-war behaviours can thrive more clearly and without having to be cut with war-preparation?
That always circles around for me: if we want some possible world because we think that world is objectively better at some point we have to live those values in order to expect anyone would, and so, at what point should a person reject some level of guess culture because we just want truthful information to flow freely so that people more quickly get corrected and move more quickly towards being (sorry) less wrong? Even your writing has an “ask culture” tone to it, it’s very “look, you think x, but y” and you make your points solidly, but it almost demonstrates that the ask-culture tendency is a better style of communication just because it makes truthful information flow more clearly and freely. Some of us are just not the kinds of Pokemon who want to learn dialectical Bide techniques! Instead you could have just squinted and complained loudly “wow, it’s so exhausting for there to be all these comments to reply to, STEVE >.>” I mean, MAYBE you were subtly sending Gale a message, but otherwise… Didn’t you just ask-culture the shit out of the problem?
I kind of had a hard time not taking this as an ironic, veiled self-satire narrative by the author using a first-person perspective to deliver between-the-lines the critique of the character they’ve portrayed in the first-person. It hit me at some point that it -could- be, depending on how clever the author was or not. I don’t try to be sharp or ironic as I find it distasteful most of the time, although when I ran into the concept of benevolent irony it gave me moral food for thought, irony has largely just looked like another clever way to wound people, and especially by projecting superior ability against the inferior. In this case it makes for effective satire, however, just because the cleverness (if I’m not misperceiving the author’s intent) is quite brilliant.
That being said, if I were to try and interpret this writing as ironically satirizing the character’s perspective by the author, the identifying tokens would be: to find strength in disconnecting one’s self from enculturation via tropes that allow one to own one’s mistakes so as to make half-hearted fixes after-the-fact which did not require hindsight to avoid causing, maintaining a covert ego in relation to them, and especially over-fixating on the influence of tropes to the point of dehumanization. Am I getting that right? The problem isn’t that the end of the world is stressful, it’s that people’s experience of the end of the world which is annoying. And it’s such an annoying behaviour that the author has learned to transcend by recognizing that, while they may have an Oppenheimer-sized effect upon the end of the world, they at least don’t have his pesky and annoyingly selfish guilt about it.
A ton more observations feed into this interpretation. If I’m misreading the ironic self-satire of the character by the author, writing a first-person narrative towards that effect, and if instead it’s a sincere expression, let me know. I’d proceed just to provide a critical response to the writing without fixating on my perception of the author writing such a clever narrative. And apologize for the assumption.
And then, frankly, I might go on to write that story if it isn’t the case!