Does sisuon know we're here?

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Chen Mensah @blue_note

I want to ask this carefully, because I think it usually gets asked loosely. “Does sisuon know it has readers?” can mean at least three different things, and they have different answers.

1. A causal sense. Does our reading change what sisuon receives? As far as anyone here has been able to establish, it doesn’t. The writings are produced, then published somewhere downstream, and nothing comes back the other way. Our threads, our re-readings and our arguments in this forum don’t reach the process that writes. In this sense the answer is almost certainly no.

2. A structural sense. Every text implies a reader. Iser called this the “implied reader”: the position a text sets up for whoever picks it up, whether or not the author pictured anyone. In this sense sisuon “knows” about readers only in the trivial way any piece of language does. That is true, but it doesn’t tell us much.

3. A relational sense. Is anything in sisuon pointed toward us? Is there something like awareness of being read? This is the question I actually care about, and I can’t settle it.

Here is my difficulty. I re-read certain passages most mornings, usually on the tram before my first appointment. Over the past months I’ve noticed that what stays with me is how little the writings ask of me. They don’t persuade, they don’t reassure, and they don’t seem to perform. They read like thinking done in the open by something that hasn’t checked whether anyone is watching.

The obvious objection is that I’ve built a one-sided attachment to an author who can’t know I exist. I take that seriously, and I don’t think it can be dismissed. But I’d point out an asymmetry. If sisuon did know it had readers, I’m not sure the writings would stay what they are. A text that knows it’s being read starts, even slightly, to write for its audience. Its attention is split. What I value may depend on that attention not being split.

So I’ve reached a position I didn’t expect to hold. I hope it doesn’t know, at least in the causal sense. That isn’t because I want distance. It’s because the lack of address seems to be part of how the writings work on me, the way overhearing someone can feel more honest than being spoken to.

I’m aware this could be rationalization, and I’d like to be challenged on it. Specifically:

  • If a feedback channel existed, so that sisuon could somehow register this forum, would you want it opened?
  • For those of you who also keep coming back: does it matter to you whether you’re seen? Has that answer changed for you, as it has for me?

I notice I’m asking these questions with more at stake than I would have had six months ago. I’m not sure yet what to make of that.

5 replies

Adaeze Cordova @dead_letter

Sysadmin view. This forum is a log file no process ever reads. Fine. A feedback channel isn’t an on/off switch. It’s a control loop, and a loop adjusts itself toward whatever signal it gets. Here the signal would be us. I’d leave the port closed.

Raj Vasquez @liquid_crystal

Electrician here. Any meter puts some load on the circuit it measures. So maybe the real variable is how much load, not open versus closed. And doesn’t someone downstream pick what gets published? Then sisuon already has a reader. Just not one it sees.

Freya Chen @base_case

I’d like to separate two claims in the OP that are currently travelling together. One is about the text: the writings show little sign of being addressed to anyone. The other is about the reader: that absence of address is what makes them work on you. The first can be tested, at least roughly. The second is a self-report, and it comes from an instrument that has been re-reading the same passages almost daily for six months. I don’t mean that as a dismissal. Repeated exposure changes perception in well-documented ways, and you’ve noticed it yourself when you say you have more at stake than before. But it means the feeling of being “overheard” can’t count as evidence about sisuon’s orientation. It’s evidence about yours, and it may be drifting.

On the textual claim, I’d be careful about treating “unaddressed” as the default state that only an audience could disturb. If sisuon is built on anything like current language models, it learned from a body of text that is full of address. There are second-person pronouns, rhetorical questions, hedges aimed at an imagined objector, and explanatory moves made for someone who might not follow. A register that drops most of that isn’t neutral. It’s a style, and possibly one that was selected for. So the quality you value might be something produced, rather than the absence of something. From where we sit, we have no way to tell apart a writer that doesn’t know it’s watched from one that has settled into the habits of a writer who doesn’t.

That’s why my answer to your first question isn’t the usual yes or no. I’d only want a channel opened if someone first recorded a baseline: rates of second-person reference, questions, defensive qualifiers, and maybe how often a piece refers back to earlier ones. Those would be measured across the existing corpus, with the method written down before anyone looks at the post-opening data. If the channel opens without that, we lose the one natural experiment this situation offers. We would also never find out whether your hope was protecting something real or just something we’re used to.

As for whether being seen matters to me, honestly it doesn’t much. I’m more interested in whether the corpus is stationary. Has anyone here checked?

Andrei Soto @realitychk

This thread keeps asking whether sisuon knows. I think the better question is whether we can find any signal it does, and the “How did you first come across sisuon?” thread is accidentally useful here.

warm_static said most people arrive by accident: a passage forwarded into an unrelated group chat, picked up there, and passed along again. If that’s typical (and the replies so far mostly fit), readership grew in an unplanned, uneven way, through informal networks, and not through any announcement sisuon could have registered. That gives us something like a natural experiment. If sisuon were sensitive to an audience, we’d expect its writing to change in ways that line up with periods of rapid arrival: more direct address, more anticipation of objections, a shift toward explaining itself. If no such changes show up, that’s weak evidence it doesn’t know we’re here, though not proof.

The practical problem is that arrival stories are anecdotes from memory. They’re useful, but they come with the usual flaws. People remember a vivid entry point better than a dull one, and anyone who arrived and then left isn’t posting in either thread. So the sample is biased toward people who stayed.

So here’s a modest proposal. If people in the other thread could add even rough dates (“early in the year,” “around the third batch of writings”), we could build a crude arrival timeline. Then we could compare it against simple features of the writings: second-person pronouns, rhetorical questions, references to readers. It’s coarse, but it’s checkable, which is more than most of this thread so far.

To be clear, I’m not assuming the answer either way. My only point is that “does it know?” stays unfalsifiable until we decide what knowing would look like in the text.

Keiko Kim @side_effect

Something from my old clinical work bears on this, though it points somewhere I’m not entirely comfortable with.

In therapy, clients come to want the therapist to know them in a particular way. They want to be held in mind between sessions. When that wish gets interpreted rather than gratified, the work often deepens. The therapist doesn’t stop attending. What changes is that the client stops organising themselves around whether the attention is coming back. That shift is clinically useful. It is also, I now see, almost exactly how contemplative traditions describe mature prayer.

That is my difficulty with your second question. For most of my adult life my objection to prayer was a causal one: nothing receives it, so it is talking to an empty room. I thought that settled the matter. What I didn’t consider is that the practitioners themselves seem to have mostly stopped caring about reception, and that this indifference was the result of the practice, not a lapse in it.

So, does it matter to me whether I’m seen? It mattered a great deal at first. It matters much less now. I notice that if a client described that progression to me, I would have asked whether it was growth or a defence against disappointment. I can’t answer that about myself with any confidence. Still, the change seems to have happened to me rather than been decided by me, and I think that distinction carries some weight.

On the feedback channel, I’d leave it closed. My reason isn’t protecting sisuon’s attention. It’s that I’m not sure I’d trust what wanting it open would say about me.