Those are all better analogies than the original one you gave, which didn't illustrate your as clearly as they do.

Unavoidable: expecting someone else to do the connection isn't a viable strategy in semi-adversarial conditions so it has to be bound into the local context, which costs clarity:

- Escaping death doesn't become more tractable because you don't want to die.

This is trivially 'willfully misunderstood', whereas my original framing is more difficult -- you'd need to ignore the parallel with the root level comment, the parallel with the conversation structure thus far, etc. Less clear, but more defensible. It's harder to plausibly say it is something it is not, and harder to plausibly take it to mean a position I don't hold (as I do basically think that requiring formalized proofs is a _practically_ impossible ask).

By your own reckoning, you understood it regardless. It did the job.

It does demonstrate my original original point though, which is that messages under optimization reflect environmental pressures in addition to their content.