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I kind of had a hard time not taking this as an ironic, veiled self-satire narrative by the author using a first-person perspective to deliver between-the-lines the critique of the character they've portrayed in the first-person. It hit me at some point that it -could- be, depending on how clever the author was or not. I don't try to be sharp or ironic as I find it distasteful most of the time, although when I ran into the concept of benevolent irony it gave me moral food for thought, irony has largely just looked like another clever way to wound people, and especially by projecting superior ability against the inferior. In this... (read more)

I've never participated on LessWrong before but I enjoyed the read too much to not, so I'm sorry if my response is socially annoying in any sense! I'm ask-culture, so much so that when you distinguished the two I was like "wait, there's what now?" I'll probably be making a lot of remarks equating guess-culture with dishonesty, just to preface, I found your writing excellent, informative, charming and helpful. Therefore I don't mean you!

I have this somewhat ambiguous concept of social inflammation, and guess culture strikes me as feeding it. In principle, one could be and could be socially obligated to track an infinite number of echoes. The more echoes one feels... (read 565 more words →)