A reply pretty near the top that also feels relevant to this overall point:
...shouldn't usually be this apologetic when they express dissent...
I think we shouldn't encourage a norm of people being this apologetic by default.
Again the post does not recommend this. I am not going to respond further, because you are not actually talking to me or my post, but rather to a cardboard cutout you have superimposed over both.
(The recommendation is not to be apologetic, and it is not contingent on whether the commentary is dissenting or not. You keep leaping from conversation A to conversation B, and I am not interested in having conversation B, nor do I defend the B claims.)
Your mistake is here:
An obligation is a duty/commitment to which a person is morally/legally bound.
...wherein you decide that the word "obligation" means strictly and only a narrow technical thing, and then build an argument based off of that flawed premise.
(When done intentionally/adversarially, this is called "strawmanning.")
You go on to make a lot of other strong claims about what constitutes an obligation, most of which do not match ordinary usage.
The fact that you believe or wish that these match the majority or even exclusive usage of the word doesn't actually make it so. Words mean what they are used to mean, in practice, and my use of "obligated" and "obligation" in the above (especially with the clear caveats in the original post) is sound.
(Other parts of your reply contain "vehement agreement," such as when you say "For example, we may gain an inflated sense of the social costs of not responding," which is a sentiment explicitly stated within the original post: "It’s easy to get triggered or tunnel-visioned, and for the things happening on the screen to loom larger than they should, and larger than they would if you took a break and regained some perspective" and "we-as-monkeys are prone to exaggerate, in our own minds, how much [the audience's] aggregate opinion matters.")
I think it's quite representative of a swath of people. I think there are, in absolute terms, many many people following this sort of algorithm. I furthermore think things would be better if more people followed it.
But my own experiences lead me to believe it's a minority, and likely not even a plurality, of people, and that it's not easy to get more people to adopt something-like-this.
How many hours are burned tracking echoes?
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.
If it's a vicious circle, isn't the case the only place I can make certain non-violence is prime is in my mind and in my behaviours? Isn't this the first step in trying to temper the war culture so that non-war behaviours can thrive more clearly and without having to be cut with war-preparation?
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.)
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."
Yes, there are efforts; they are unfortunately controlled by the publisher and not the sort of thing we can outsource or influence. Renegade translations seem morally good to me, if people are moved to create them, provided that they actually try to do a good job.
Languages that the book is being translated into include (85% probability on any member of this list; I'm a bit brain-dead this weekend): Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Dutch, and Bulgarian. We're working on translating the online supplementals into at least those first four.
("Why such a strange list?" you might ask. Well, the list isn't done; the publisher is still wrangling contracts in other nations/regions. Contracts come in when they come in. German, for instance, is highly likely to eventually get a translation—or at least, we'd be quite excited to see one, given Germany's prominence in the EU. But again, out of our hands. We put most of our prioritization energy into making sure there would be a Chinese-language translation, as that seemed super obviously the most important non-English-speaking audience.)