Gaslighting discussion (split from: Justin’s Miscellaneous Posts)

[JustinCEO]

@anonymous88

@JustinCEO

@Elliot

Please don’t assume, and please don’t post anything that puts a potential burden on me to respond or act.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I really wanted to say something about it, as I’ve thought about it for a while: I think that the part I bolded is, based on my current existing knowledge, actually impossible to comply with.

I didn’t read this as a hard rule. It sounds like a request to make a good faith effort.

This isn’t even that strange of a rule. I am on some facebook groups that have rules like “Please don’t post things that say ‘Moderator: Please remove if not allowed.’ If you are not sure if it is allowed, go re-read the rules. If you think it isn’t allowed, don’t post it.”

The Facebook stuff you’re analogizing to is written differently than the example we’re talking about here, and I wouldn’t have had a problem with it or have been confused by it.

I treat statements related to forum policy and what I can and can’t do as literal statements for various reasons. When I haven’t done that, I have caused problems. So I took it as a literal rule (albeit one I had no idea how to abide by).

@anonymous88

Elliot’s request seems similar to that: make a good-faith effort, don’t post things that you think are maybe not allowed.

I understand that context matters, but I don’t see how you get to what you said from “please don’t post anything that puts a potential burden on me to respond or act.”

Are there any other examples of things of this nature (statements re: forum policy/rules/behavior) that you think I shouldn’t try to interpret literally, or is this the only one?

@anonymous88

@JustinCEO

I had no standard to judge whether I could be imposing such a burden. So I was basically just ignoring the request and hoping that some other bit of knowledge I have or policy would “catch” any problems.

So because you couldn’t perfectly figure out what may or may not burden him, you just completely ignored the request? And you seem to be implying here that was reasonable of you, since it was impossible for you to do anything different.

You literally knowingly broke the rules and he asked you to not do that again (and also not do anything else that knowingly would give him a burden to respond), but you just ignored the request because you can’t perfectly figure out every single thing that he might think creates a burden to respond?

I ignored the request to not impose potential burdens because I had no idea how to implement it and keep posting, and I thought that if Elliot wanted me to cease posting, he would say that and not imply that via another statement. Any posting at all seemed like a potential violation, since any post, AFAIK, might impose a “potential burden” (very broad) to “respond or act” (also very broad).

The “Please don’t assume” part is what I thought was addressing the rule violation directly, and I’ve tried to abide by that (including mistakenly not posting here for a while). I read that as “Please don’t assume” [you can post places besides where you were literally told you can post]. And then I thought the second part, the part about burdens, was saying an additional, separate point, and that is what I was confused by and the part I ignored.

I’ll note that I took the “Please don’t assume” part, with the implied words or something like them added, as something I should abide by precisely, and not a request for best efforts or good faith or something like that. So there were two ideas. Both of the form Please don’t [X]. And I read both of them as things that I should follow precisely, which seems consistent to me. I had to imply words for one because it was too short to get much meaning from otherwise; I didn’t think Elliot was telling me to make no assumptions ever in life or something like that.