Conversation

There is something like a common knowledge game but with silences. Like, not all silences mean the same thing. When a bunch of people are silent about X for the same reason, and everybody kinda knows everybody is silent for the same reason, it’s a common silence or something.
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One of the tactical mistakes made by earnest/sincere people who think they are being courageous truth speakers is assuming that everybody’s reason for silence is the same. It’s a typical mind fallacy effect.
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Reasons people can be silent: They’re afraid of challenge They’re afraid of cooption They don’t care enough They haven’t found the words They don’t want to be misunderstood They’re uncertain about what’s true They think it will blow over Hard to know without discreet research
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But there ARE shared reasons for silences, which become known via networks of private conversations. That’s a common silence. But you can’t just assume this based on DMs with like 5 people who are exactly like you. That’s the easiest way to falsely conclude a consensus exists.
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You need high diversity in your *private* conversations to draw robust conclusions about common silences. And the diversity has to be relevant. If you are male and have male friends of all races, and all of them agree with certain sentiments about women, that’s... not robust.
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Privacy and trust are not panaceas for fragile reasoning. They address certain fragiliti4scin public conversation like preference falsification, social desirability bias, and PCness. But not stupidity, ignorance, shared sincere prejudices etc.
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So much conversation has gone underground in last 5 years that now we are far more at risk of bad patterns in underground conversations than in public ones. When someone posts a dumb public take and sparks an outrage cycle on internet of beefs, we all kinda know how to deal now
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I’m in at least a couple of dozen vaguely overlapping dm conversations that are all underground in part as retreat from culture war... it’s not easy forming coherent mental models of public silences via the Venn diagram of your underground whisper web.
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Modeling this stuff is like modeling flows in networks of pipes rather than in a large pool. It’s fundamentally harder. For the same reason distributed complying is harder than centralized.
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