I agree that roughly, tracking 0 echoes gets you ask culture and tracking 1 gets you guess culture. But I wouldn't equate tracking 0 with ask culture^[1]. Echoes are determined by cultural norms, e.g. the echoes caused by sticking your third finger straight up are different in cultures where that is or isn't an insult. So once you are tracking 2 or more echoes and you realize that a guess-like set of norms might make it impossible^[2] for you to ask or even think straight about certain questions at all, one solution is to explicitly agree on ask-style norms. At which point it's not that you're not tracking echoes anymore, but rather that you've built a world with different echoes - the echo of "can my friend stay over" is not "I'm feeling pressured to say yes" but rather "I recall we agreed to ask-style norms, so..."

1. ^{^}

   and maybe I would not equate tracking 1 with guess culture either, haven't thought about it much yet

2. ^{^}

   or at least, impossible to someone with your level of guess-flavored social skills

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This week's topic is Reading & Discussion.

should be changed

My guess at the truth of the matter is that almost no one is 100% guessing, but some people are extremely confident in their answer (a lot of the correct folks and also a small number of die-hard geocentrists), and then there's a range down to people who haven't thought about it in ages and just have a vague recollection of some elementary school teacher. Which I think is also a more hopeful picture than either the 36% clueless or the 18% geocentrists models? Because for people who are right but not confident, I'm reasonably ok with that; ideally they'd "know" more strongly, but it's not a disaster if they don't. And for people who are wrong but not confident, there are not that many of them and also they would happily change their mind if you just told them the correct answer.

How valid is it to assume that (approximately) everyone who got the heliocentrism question wrong got it wrong by "guessing"? If 18% got it wrong, then your model says that there's 36% who had no clue and half guessed right, but at the other extreme there's a model that everyone 'knows' the answer, but 18% 'know' the wrong answer. I'm not sure which is scarier - 36% clueless or 18% die-hard geocentrists - but I don't think we have enough information here to tell where on that spectrum it is. (In particular, if "I don't know" was an option and only 3% selected it, then I think this is some evidence against the extreme end of 36% clueless?)

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer :)

with the following assumptions:

Should the ∨ in assumption 1 be an ∧?

Cool idea!

One note about this:

Let's see what happens if I tweak the language: ... Neat! It's picked up on a lot of nuance implied by saying "important" rather than "matters".

Don't forget that people trying to extrapolate from your five words have not seen any alternate wordings you were considering. The LLM could more easily pick up on the nuance there because it was shown both wordings and asked to contrast them. So if you actually want to use this technique to figure out what someone will take away from your five words, maybe ask the LLM about each possible wording in a separate sandbox rather than a single conversation.