Hey! Remember those toots from yesterday of mine? I've got a name now for the phenomenon I've been picking at:
Weak Induction
I'm probably not using it correctly in this explanation, but this is when you're looking at something (say an online post) and, because you have a brain which is constantly looking for patterns and motives, you induce things about what the author means.
But watch out for weak inductions! If what you assert isn't plainly there in the post, you might be on about nothing!
A problem is that lots of communication works by having the listener infer not from the literal statement, but from the speaker's choice to utter this statement from all the true statements they could have. There are some groups that have norms against doing that, but IMO fedi is too large to even try.
That is indeed a problem. And meaning absolutely no ill will, I think Fedi has a higher percentage of neurodiverse people who struggle with this than average.
That's in no small part why I've been picking at this. I have long had an intuitive sense of what's happening but couldn't describe it well. Finally, thanks to the help of someone on Bluesky, I've got a descriptor.
My experience is that nonneurotypical people tend to ignore information-via-choice-of-statement. Did you mean to say the exact opposite? If not, then I'm confused by what is the thing they struggle with (interpreting things that communicate via choice of statement? but shouldn't that make your original problem less severe by pushing the norms towards communicating only directly, lest you be not understood?)
BTW. The way I usually explain the statement vs choice of statement distinction to people is by showing/telling them about the "How to irritate people" by John Cleese.
@robryk I hope that makes some form of sense.
Usually when there's something sociological that seems intuitive to me and I see other folks denying that it could be possible I assume there's a neurodivergency in the mix somewhere. But then again, I'm clearly somewhere on that spectrum so I don't know whether I have a leg to stand on!
In order to reduce the amount of typing, let me call these communication styles direct (only statements matter) and indirect (statement choice is intentionally used to convey information).
It seems to me that the original problem you describe is predicated on the listener assuming indirect communication is happening (otherwise they'd not make ~any inferences from omissions). This makes me think that groups that have a strong norm that communication is always direct should be mostly free of that problem (it might occur when someone joins who's unaware of that norm, or if someone finds it hard to assume that this norm is actually followed).
Do you want to say that the original problem (inferring too much about the speaker) occurs when the listener is a direct-communicator?
NB. I think I'm skewed quite far in the direction of direct communication, both due to personal preference and a different reason you might find interesting: it's way easier to ensure that everyone gets the same message in the direct style. In the indirect style it's hard to ensure that, and it's comparatively easy to ensure that people do understand the message differently. I think that nonadversarial communication is ~always improved by making more things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic), so I think that making everything more direct is strictly good.
@robryk Ah, I see the confusion here. I've been conflating things and not making it explicit.
I'm getting a lot of pushback on my posts describing how people can misinterpret things in an honest way with no ill-intent. I assume that pushback is coming from direct communicators who aren't easily able to understand what it is I'm picking at. That's the group I think is overrepresented here (neurodivergent).
I don't think these are the folks who most often succumb to weak induction.
Ah, I see and that does unconfuse me.
@robryk Like, several people have said something to the effect of "I don't think this is a thing that happens" and my only explanation for that response is that it's from someone who doesn't understand these nuances of communication.
Now, why exactly I get weak induction happening to me here more than other places I don't exactly know, but I think there's a different type of divergency where people put accuracy above all else and can't resist picking nits to demonstrate their knowledge.
That's surprising. I'd expect people who communicate directly to see that _more_ often, because it happens most often when the sender is a direct-communicator. I can totally understand that (a) they don't have a model that explains why that occurs or (b) they have a model that convinces them that it requires some malice for it to occur, but I'm surprised by people not observing it happening at all. (The way lack of good model manifested for me was by assuming that my model is less accurate, which probably would cause me to be much more wary of making general statements.)
Re accuracy above everything else: might it not be completeness as opposed to accuracy? Drive for accuracy alone shouldn't trigger inferring-too-much-from-omissions. Another hypothesis I have is that overinferring-from-omissions happens to a similar extent in different places too, but drive for correctness is what makes it visible for you. (I'm pretty sure this should be sort-of testable by comparing rates of different kinds of nitpicky responses, but it's too late at night for me to think this through.)
@robryk re: accuracy vs. completeness
Now I'm not sure which one is more of a problem. Completeness is the thing I've been struggling with lately: I posted about housing affordability being fundamentally a supply and demand problem and said the red states are right in their approach to build more housing.
I know full-well that the housing being built there is sprawly and has other problems, but since I didn't specifically say that, I got pushback because of my use of "right"
@robryk I'm chalking that one up to a need to be complete.
All I wanted to discuss, and the point I was trying to make, is that to reduce rent costs in cities we have to allow more housing to be built. Red states have lower housing costs because there's more supply. So specifically in the framework of supply and demand, they're right.
Boy howdy were some weak inductions made after that! Lots of nuance I was deliberately ignoring getting brought up as evidence of my ignorance.
I wonder whether part of this has something to do with what people who know you as "the guy who makes punny videos about random subjects" expect of you. I'm not sure how you could test that without a somewhat unreasonable amount of effort (with that amount of effort: start another fedi account and compare ratios of different kinds of responses between them).
@b0rk seems to often have a related problem, where people start unhelpful discussions under her posts (it's different insofar it's mostly about posts that ask for a response explicitly). See https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/112128313009699377 for her description of the problem and how she deals with it (tl;dr when asking for responses be very explicit about kinds of responses that are desired).
I think I have a hypothesis what might be going on.
People's model of when overinference-from-omission happens might be that it happens ~only when the listener is maliciously trying to misinterpret[1]. Then they might (a) put it in a "troll behaviour" bucket (and assume that you meant nonmalicious listeners) (b) see less of it by virtue of avoiding interactions with people who do that.
I would be convinced my hypothesis is likely false if those people who think overinference-from-omission doesn't happen didn't find "malicious misinterpretation" to be a common troll tactic.
[1] A not unreasonable way of arriving at such a model is being presented with malicious people who choose that strategy of being obnoxious when faced with direct communicators.
@robryk The problems I've personally seen come from people who generally communicate very directly believing that they could only ever interpret things directly. My understanding is that it's a sort of naivety about when and how misdirection in language can occur.
I'm not a psychiatrist or anything so I can't claim to know anything concrete, but several people now have all but asserted that honest misinterpretations just flat out cannot happen. I don't know what else that might be.