I'd probably need more proof-of-work of understanding to want to continue engaging

[This is a message I have, several times, wanted to send to commenters (mainly on public forums). I'm putting it here so I can link to it.]

For whatever reason, in order for me to actively independently desire to continue this thread of discussion, I would probably need something from you. What I would need from you is something like more evidence that you're genuinely trying to understand what I'm saying in context, and some of the output from that process.

This is not a dunk on you. This is me just saying:

For the time being, I don't want to keep talking on this thread, though I'm still at least a little interested in the topic. By default I would just go silent. But, as a slight improvement over that, I'm letting you know that I might want to keep talking on this thread, if I had more sense that (and how) you were trying to understand what I'm saying / what I think / what we agree or disagree about / etc.

I might have stated slightly more specifically why I'm sending this, along with the link; but either way, this is a vague statement, not necessarily specifically saying what's going wrong or what would help.

1. What I'm not saying

I'm not promising, or even strongly suggesting, that I will continue the conversation if you say more. If I'm linking this, there's a good chance I don't have a clear sense of what's going wrong (in terms of, what's making me not want to continue engaging) or what would help. You should be aware of this before doing a bunch of interpretive work. Your work might be good, accurate, effortful, and generous work, and then I might still not want to continue. So I don't want to lead you to waste effort on this without a good enough chance of benefit, but with a mistaken expectation of benefit. Even if you do everything I list below I might still not want to engage. Maybe you didn't do it well enough to address the issue, or maybe my list doesn't include what would help in this specific case, or maybe I'm totally wrong that more understanding from you would make me want to engage.

There's no specific thing I'm saying that would make it so I want to talk more. For example, I'm not saying "cite more of the words I wrote" or "summarize the whole foregoing conversation". Sometimes that might help / be relevant, sometimes not. That might in some sense fall in the general category of [some type of evidence that you're trying to understand what I'm saying], but it may or may not address the communication issue for me. See below for examples of things that might help; notice that they are varied, so that any one thing may or may not help.

I'm not demanding or even requesting that you do anything. I'm just trying to communicate about a possibility other than "I simply stop responding". I'm not wanting to imply that I have some special right or position to demand or request that you do anything. You could very well respond to the exact same thread with a link to this very post or a similar disclaimer.

Likewise, this isn't a dunk. I'm not saying you necessarily did anything wrong. Your comments might be correct, relevant, polite, helpful, interesting, prosocial, etc.

You can still be annoyed at me for ending the conversation abruptly, same as if I just silently left. I hope you'll view me linking this as a slight improvement over that, rather than as an aggression.

You may very well have already put in a lot of work. You may have thought about what I wrote, thought about what you think, and formulated a correct relevant response—and then I linked this. This is perfectly possible. I may have not put in much work; I may have been behaving poorly, e.g. not understanding what you were saying, or not trying very hard to, or not communicating clearly. This is not to excuse my poor behavior, or imply that it's your fault.

Especially if you are a third party reading this disclaimer, remember, this is just me giving a low-context signal. More like me waving a driver to go ahead through the intersection, rather than me, a judge in a civil court, deciding whether someone violated traffic rules. Just the fact that I linked this is only very weak evidence that the person to whom I linked it is doing anything objectionable. It could very well be just that I, at this particular moment, have an especially high bar for wanting to engage, because I'm tired or busy or whatever; or I'm misunderstanding what they are saying, or not myself putting in much work to understand; etc.

2. What might help

(To repeat from above, this is not a list of demands to be met.)

This section may be annoying, in that it lists several separate things. Indeed, there's a good chance you don't want to try to continue the conversation (with me, for the time being), because it's hard to tell what would make me want to continue. That said, the single general thing would be:

Try to figure out how it seems like, from my perspective, we are failing to be on the same page about trying to talk about something / communicate about something / figure something out. Then try to address that somehow.

For example:

• Maybe I thought you literally hadn't read what I wrote. Then a summary of the foregoing discussion might significantly help, because it would show you had read it.
• Maybe I thought you were talking about something irrelevant to the topic of discussion. Then the summary might not help, and instead what might help is you saying what you think the topic at hand is, and why you're saying what you're saying—how it relates to the topic at hand.
• Maybe I thought you were too much projecting / imagining positions onto me that I don't hold. Then it might help for you to restate the position you think I hold, that you're responding to.
• Maybe I thought you seriously misinterpreted words I wrote, or missed the point. Then it might help if you gave a little transcript of what you're thinking when you're reading what I wrote and trying to understand the main thrust of it. That way I can see that you're trying, and maybe I can point out what went wrong—or I can see how I miscommunicated and say "oops, my bad, I should have said XYZ instead of what I said".
• Maybe I thought you were just out to dishonestly frame something. Then it might help if you restated things in a more complete and fair (not necessarily balanced) way.
• Maybe I thought you were a Charging Hobby Horse. In that case, it might help if you take some time to reflect on what you're really trying to do in the conversation, and then try to state that openly.

(It might seem strange that I sometimes say "the topic", as if there's one "the topic" and it's whatever I say it is. Fair enough, discourse is high-dimensional. But if you're riding a hobby horse, I may not be interested. If you're responding to something in the middle of another discussion, then the relevance and meaning of statements is by default in reference to that context.)

3. Why I might be saying this

There are several sorts of reasons I might be saying this; and often I can't immediately tell exactly what the reason is. Note that it may be just one or two of these. I definitely am not asserting that all or most of these are the case.

Again, this isn't a dunk, and it can't possibly be a detailed argument that I have the moral high-ground in the specific thread where I'm linking this, because this is a post I've written abstracted from any specific situation, maybe long before this thread occurred. The reason I list these possible reasons is not to accuse you, but just to give you information.

That said, some of the possible reasons I'm linking this:

• You seem to simply be saying several importantly incorrect things.
• You seem to not be responding at all to what I wrote, or seem to not have read it.
• You do seem to have read what I wrote, but you're restating my positions very incorrectly.
• You seem to perhaps be bad at understanding what I write, and this particular topic is complex / subtle, so this combination makes me not want to continue at the moment. (If I saw the output of your attempt to understand what I'm saying, I might be able to at least say that this is what's happening.)
• You seem to be responding to positions I don't hold and didn't say. Maybe I've already restated my relevant positions and you're still not getting it; or if you are, then something else is going wrong.
• You seem to be saying something pretty off-topic / not relevant to what I think we're talking about. Especially, you seem to be zooming in on certain statements, and then failing to correctly connect them to other statements.
• I can't tell whether, on the one hand, you're genuinely misunderstanding / I communicated unclearly, vs. on the other hand, you're not trying to understand or you're actively trying to misunderstand. I would like to see proof-of-work so I know you're actually trying to understand.
• You're only trying to understand some of what I said, rather than the main / most relevant parts of what I said.
• You're persistently saying things that seem to me logically disconnected from the previous discourse, e.g. you're working off an enthymeme; and I'm not succeeding at getting you to talk about that in order to clarify the structure of what you're saying.
• Information that I'm trying to communicate to you seems to bounce off you—especially information about my positions, especially especially information about my positions that you are apparently arguing with. Similarly, I'm trying to reorient with you in order to repair the discourse, but this is going wrong somehow and I've locally lost hope that we can get back on track by talking about how we went off track.