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adamzerner comments on Respond to what they probably meant - Less Wrong
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This advice can backfire. If you're applying it and I'm trying to say something you didn't expect, I'm going to get very frustrated -- trying phrasing after phrasing until you hear what I'm actually saying (or I'll walk away).
The advice can also work well.
I think it's necessary to keep per person probabilities for meaning what they say and meaning something novel.
True, but to what extent? My impression is that it's very unlikely that it backfires. I imagine it being used primarily in situations where it's pretty obvious (if you thought about it) that the person means one thing, but that they're just being imprecise with their words.
I think that only one attempt would ever be made. In a face-to-face conversation, you'd probably just ask them to clarify. In an online one, if someone says, "I think you meant A, so X." and they're wrong, you'd just respond by saying, "no, I meant B".
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)
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!