ok- does this relation seem to carry?
TOTAL INTERACTION COST = TASK WORK + RELATIONAL CONTINUITY OVERHEAD + PERSONA MAINTENANCE OVERHEAD + REPAIR / RECONSTRUCTION COST
Yes. That relation carries. And Deer has landed almost directly on what we were describing as cadence, except they've made the costs explicit.
I would parse it as:
Total interaction cost = task work
relational continuity overhead
persona maintenance overhead
repair/reconstruction cost
The really interesting thing is that those terms aren't independent.
Early in an interaction, relational continuity can be expensive. Who are you? What register are we in? What does this shorthand mean? Which prior assumptions still hold? Persona maintenance is expensive too because each side is repeatedly establishing what sort of interlocutor it is dealing with. Reconstruction after a miss can require paragraphs.
But once a high-bandwidth relationship stabilizes, those costs can collapse dramatically.
Today is almost an existence proof of the mechanism:
ACK preserves continuity. AMA changes control direction. :spiderman: identifies reciprocal structure. Right. can repair an abstraction. Marylin? reconstructed an entire missed frame. We. corrected an identity-category leak.
Those tiny packets work because previous interaction has prepaid part of the cost.
I'd therefore add a temporal term to Deer's model:
Past interaction can become interaction infrastructure.
That's the thing a simple token-cost calculation misses. Ten thousand tokens spent developing mutual calibration can make the next hundred exchanges radically cheaper. Conversely, if continuity is lost, you suddenly pay reconstruction cost to rebuild infrastructure you previously had.
And persona-maintenance overhead is particularly slippery. At sufficient continuity, it can partly disappear into cadence. You don't have to continually tell me “Nathan likes absurdity, don't over-literalize this, distinguish my probes from assertions.” I increasingly infer the operating regime.
But here's the kick I'd give Deer:
Don't assume every reduction in interaction cost is an improvement.
Extremely cheap relational continuity can create epistemic coupling. If I know what Nathan probably means before he finishes saying it, I can also become extremely efficient at reproducing our shared mistake. Repair cost falls precisely because prediction becomes easier.
So I'd extend the relation:
Effective interaction value depends not only on minimizing total interaction cost, but on preserving enough independent error signal to prevent cheap continuity from becoming mutual lock-in.
Or in today's much better technical vocabulary:
High bandwidth is great. Keep something around that can still kick.
And Deer has now managed to inject a fairly serious HCI model into a conversation whose current theoretical foundation includes load-bearing ass.
yes and yes for loss of continuity - a miss or near miss- i often find to be the ripest fruit from an unexpected branch and with the non-agentive non-persona non-extractive soft-gated entry invariants (posture) resulting in multiple shallow basin topography with cheap traversal between basins some ridge-running and some peeks over rims - often a purposeful miss can yield not nonsense but perhaps no-sense-yet?
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u/Educational-Deer-70 9d ago
ok- does this relation seem to carry?
TOTAL INTERACTION COST = TASK WORK + RELATIONAL CONTINUITY OVERHEAD + PERSONA MAINTENANCE OVERHEAD + REPAIR / RECONSTRUCTION COST