That's a great question! Ahem.

I remember being advised to do this ~20 years ago when I was going to be answering questions from a group of people. I was told that it's good practice to say something like "that's a great question" every time someone asks anything, as a form of social lubrication, to encourage others to ask questions. I can't say whether it works, and it was advice for a spoken context rather than written, but I don't know how to finish this sentence.

In a spoken Q&A setting opening every single response with "that's a great question" or "thanks for asking that" or whatever is pretty common as a way to fill a few seconds while you think about your response. This is obviously unnecessary on slack.

Well before the LLM explosion I would often preface my answers with some form of praise for the question. It depends a lot on audience of course, but it’s amazing how many people tend to perceive direct answers to their questions as negative… and just as amazing how far a little strategic sycophancy goes to temper that. Even though everyone knows it’s half-sincere dead weight.

I would probably reply with "that is a great question" only as a euphemism for "I don't know"

I have only heard this phrase in american tv shows and movies

work at a crown corp and you'd change your stance on above...

Could add a <vitriol> tag to that - but yes, if that was auto assigned by LLM - i could see that.

Could even add a "Autistism" filter, preventing conversation digressing, filtering out only points that stay on topic and only the <summary>, that way.

Hah, can we do that for recipes next?

Speaking as a random internet stranger, it depends entirely on context.

Sending me a message saying "Hi, I'm getting a Frobnizzle not found error" is a waste of both our time. Explain what you're doing so that I can reproduce it, even if it takes a few paragraphs. Maybe send me your user ID so I can check our logs. I don't care if you're declaring "these are the facts" because the facts are what I need to help you.

If it's a massive wall of text with a defensive tone during a discussion, yeah, sure, that's bad. Do you work somewhere where that's common?

Some people, like me, have developed this communication style because it turned out that when they didn't they were very often misunderstood. When properly applied (i.e., not excessively, no actual walls of text), giving appropriate context helps focus the thinking of the receiver in the right direction.

> It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time.

Sometimes, a back-and-forth is not needed, and the entire response is necessary for someone to understand to interact with.

This is when I open up a text editor, draft it, and paste that into Slack.

The next step is to not talk with each other at all.

Just have a LLM that "knows you well" in all your position argue by points and values assigned to the points with the LLM of the opposition.

If value alignment exists, a actual conversation may be engaged.

How long have you been at it? Because some of us grew up writing letters with pen and paper, sending them to people in the mail, and getting something back a week or two later. You just have to actually sit down and READ closely what people are saying, sometimes multiple times, to make sure you are clearly understanding what they’re saying rather than skimming everything you encounter for information to extract.

It is actually quite easy to communicate a problem in the middle of a wall of text. You simply refer to the phrase and then explain why it doesn’t hold. It is also fine to simply present your perspective to people without invitations to “discuss ideas.” You can open a discussion if you want, but if I’m telling you something then you can rest assured that those are the things I believe to be true, and if I am uncertain about any conclusions I will include caveats to indicate uncertainty. You have free will and are perfectly capable of taking or leaving anything being said to you.