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Lumifer comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - Less Wrong
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Citing phatic expressions is not really enough. The issue is what creates the signal: presence or absence of something.
If the default is "Thanks" then saying nothing is the negative signal and saying "Thank you, you did such a great job!" is a positive signal.
But if the default is "Thank you, you did such a great job!" then just "Thanks" becomes a negative signal and for a positive signal you have to escalate to "Oh my God this was the greatest thing ever I thank you so much how could I ever..."
It's easy to see how this could get to be very inefficient and, frankly, ridiculous.
But in reality this runaway process doesn't get off the ground, and peters out at something called "collegiality and tact."
The default amount of "gratitude" expressed on LW seems to be considerably less than that expressed by even "thanks". Actually, most of the time it seems that the default response is to find some flaw of wording to nitpick, and usually such a flaw is only tangentially related to the thrust of the argument. That's not what we should be encouraging.