Setting aside questions of appropriateness, which can include concerns about hurt feelings and community health, is the connection I was drawing between the Obligated to Respond post and the "800 pound gorilla" comment relevant, accurate, or illuminating?
No. The "if —> then" of the comment is valid, in that if your characterization were at all reasonable, then yes, that would in fact be relevant contextual information for the reader, just as it's important for, I dunno, readers of various books on polyamory to know that the authors have failed marriages and abuse accusations.
But the "if" doesn't hold, making the leap to the "then" moot. And although the paragraph starts with a gesture in the direction of split-and-commit ("I would posit that if you mean this literally") it does not proceed to act as if both possibilities are live; it clearly focuses on the one possibility that it presupposes is true.
I lean toward ask culture for reasons similar to this, but I'm wary of there being something like a Chesterton's Fence that I'm not fully accounting for.
I mean it in the sense of "fake frameworks" or models that are wrong-but-useful à la Newtonian mechanics. Sorry, that might've been a bit too local-culture-jargon-y. "Ask culture and guess culture aren't real things; they're constellations we've imagined over top of the actual stars and the underlying reality is way messier than the model."
to demand that people reading an article be apologetic if they ever disagree in the comments
This piece does not recommend this. That interpretation is explicitly ruled out (and pretty clearly) by the words of the piece itself. It's not only not supported by the above, it's directly contradicted.
So ... you've changed the conversation from A to B, presumably unintentionally and without noticing that you did it. And I think this is "not the author's problem."
I think this is a great example. Thanks for thinking of it and putting it here.
I don't ask for unreasonable things. I do ask for reasonable things with the understanding that people don't like saying no, but aren't obligated to say yes. The more demanding the ask, the more I consider the social implications. There is a cost to asking or being asked, but that's the expected way to communicate.
I think you're much closer to the-thing-people-have-chosen-to-cluster-under-the-label-guess culture than you think! This is pretty close to a description of basic guess culture perspective, with the main asky part just being an acknowledgement that people aren't obligated to say yes.
(I will note, in agreement with you, that Ask/Guess is not a true dichotomy, and that the above is evidence in favor of that.)
This can definitely work! But it's often hard to do adroitly; there are situations where it comes off basically the same as not responding at all (e.g. in the eyes of the chunk of the audience that's inclined to view non-response as cowardice, this sometimes comes off as cowardice plus trying to dodge the consequences of cowardice).
I deleted it for such poor reading comprehension and adversarially selective quotation of the Facebook post in question—
(which is over 2200 words long and has tons of relevant context that softens the impression of the above text, which also didn't contain the added bolding that pushes it in an even more straw direction)
—that it was inescapably either malice or negligence sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from malice. I would've greatly preferred that DirectedEvolution take the hint rather than reposting elsewhere, but since that hint was not taken I am now banning DirectedEvolution from being able to do any similarly shitty psychologizing on my future posts (and lodging this brief defense of myself, which I would have preferred not to have to write in the first place, and was with the original deletion trying to avoid needing to write).
From that same Facebook post:
I'm just going to blurt words and blame the lack of artistry and sophistication on insomniac COVID delirium
...
And yeah, it's actually fine 99.9% of the time, the thing I'm saying here isn't, like, "it's impossible to coordinate or cooperate with humans." I drive on roads. I shop at grocery stores. I engage in chitchat with Uber drivers and people at the airport.
And from discussion beneath it:
re: felt sense of strong fear, it's not that I'm actually, like, nervous-system activated at all times? I do not walk around feeling viscerally anxious, for the most part. I think I *do* shift into high-alert faster and on smaller bits of evidence than most people.
DirectedEvolution's overt attempt to categorize me as mentally ill, and my models suspect based purely on that categorization, is unjustified and not particularly welcome, LessWrong's enthusiasm for upvoting shitty behavior notwithstanding.
(I also found a bunch of the reasoning in the four bullet points to be pretty poor, but that just made me unenthusiastic about trying to bridge gaps; it was the last paragraph that earned intended-to-be-silent deletion.)
One thing I didn't have time for in the post proper is that ask culture (or something like it) is crucial for diplomacy—diplomatic cosmopolitan contexts require that everyone set aside their knee-jerk assumptions about what "everyone knows" or what X "obviously means," etc. I think part of why it came about (/has almost certainly been reinvented thousands of times) is that people wanted to interact nondestructively with people whose cultural assumptions greatly differed from their own.
SO MANY oh my god. And it's also a vector for various kinds of scurrilous behavior, e.g. I have seen people (whether intentionally or unintentionally) rapidly switch back and forth between "how dare you say X when you knew it would produce Effect Y two echoes down the line" and "I'm just being direct and honest!" Like, a vague and unspecified duty to kinda-sorta maybe track an unknown number of echoes allows for a lot of something similar to motte-and-bailey.
My own answer to this is to pretty ruthlessly filter. These days, I spend my time in an environment where the-people-who-will-make-war in that way are not present, and it's amazing how much good can flourish under those circumstances.
(I've only partially responded to your comment, but those were the top thoughts that were easy to write down.)