To paraphrase adamzerner...
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.
To paraphrase adamzerner...
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!
Edit: I didn't realize this before writing the post, but what I'm referring to is The Principle of Charity.
Story
I was confused about Node Modules, so I did a bunch of research to figure out how they work. Explaining things helps me to understand them, and I figured that others might benefit from my explanation, so I wrote a blog post about them. However, I'm inexperienced and still unsure of exactly what's going on, so I started the blog post off with a disclaimer:
My friend said that it's a bad idea to do that. He said:
I interpreted what he said literally and basically responded by saying:
This was stupid of me. He didn't mean "claim that you're 100% sure of what you've written". He didn't mean "pretend that you're way more confident in what you've written than what you really are". He meant, "I think that it comes across as you being less confident than you actually are. And so I think you should reword it to better communicate your confidence."
I shouldn't have interpreted what he said so literally. I should have thought about and responded to what I thought he meant to say. (Although, he also should have been more precise...)
Thesis
People often interpret and respond to statements literally. Instead of doing this, it's often useful to think about and respond to what the other person probably meant.
For example, "If I interpret what you said literally, then A. But you probably meant X, so B. If you meant Y, then C."
Depending on how confident you are in your interpretation, you should probably respond to a variety of possibilities. Like if you're < 80% sure that you know what they meant, you should probably respond to possibilities that have at least a 5% chance of being what they meant. I'm not sure whether 80 and 5 are the right numbers, but hopefully it communicates the point.
Why don't people do this?
I see two likely reasons:
Practical considerations