[HN Gopher] Ask vs. Guess Culture ___________________________________________________________________ Ask vs. Guess Culture Author : kiyanwang Score : 527 points Date : 2023-08-18 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (jeanhsu.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (jeanhsu.substack.com) | boobalyboo wrote: | [dead] | tcgv wrote: | I mainly "Ask" for people in my inner circle, and "Guess" for | everybody else | rossdavidh wrote: | Great article. One point I would like to add, is that "guess" | culture works great when there is already a lot of shared | cultural background, but "ask" culture works better when people | are coming from very different backgrounds (and thus won't know | enough about what the other person wants or needs, to guess very | accurately). Sure, it's good to find out more about where other | people are coming from, but this takes time, and in the meantime | stuff has to get done. I'm guessing this is why most workplaces | are "ask" culture. | | Also, most families have enough common background to make "guess" | culture work, so a lot of adolescents and young adults are more | accustomed to "guess" culture, but once they move out into the | world to deal more with people that have very different | backgrounds, they will need to become more comfortable with "ask" | culture. | tetha wrote: | Hm, interesting. I guess me with northern german heritage am very | much more of an Ask-Person. | | But this is missing an important part of the ask-aspects: You can | put needs and issues onto peoples radar. | | Like, someone recently just asked me if I have a kiln to sell. I | very much don't have a kiln I don't need to sell and I had a good | laugh about the request. But interestingly, someone else I know | apparently knows how to setup kilns and he'd help if there was a | kiln to sell and he's now talking to the other dude about kilns. | | This is very much how things work in rural nothern germany or | northern germany overall. You just ask around if you need | something, people learn what you need, and suddenly someone is | like "Yo, this friend of a brother of the owner of a goat my | sister owns has this thing and you mentioned you could need it | three years ago and he wants to get rid of it. Could he come over | tomorrow?" | spookie wrote: | Thanks for the post, it has really made me feel better about | things in general! | | I come from a rural place in Europe, guess culture was the norm. | | Now, I'm on a different country altogether, and it has been | difficult perceiving the world around me... But this makes sense, | it somehow clears my mind. | | Really, thanks. | noahlt wrote: | The "Ask vs Guess" name rhetorically frames it in favor of the | Askers. Asking sounds reasonable, guessing does not! | | But really it's not about "Guessing", it's about understanding. | It's about community, and relationship, and trust. What this | culture really wants is for you to pay attention and understand | the people around you, rather than treating everything as a | transaction. | moffkalast wrote: | I'm not sure if I see it that way, both extremes equally lead | to dysfunctional interactions. | | You shouldn't feel bad for asking for help when you need it and | other people haven't noticed it, and it's good to be mindful of | those around you and what they need. A balance of both should | be healthy. | sfg wrote: | I've never heard of asking vs guessing culture before and don't | know much about them, but, based on the article, I'd say | guessing looks more transactional. It uses a shared history and | remembers past favours ("I gave him soup, so I can seek to get | his van", as the example in the article had it), which is | really an implicit transaction without guarantee the other side | will meet their end. | | I am not even sure transactions are possible in asking culture, | as it looks stateless. Askers just broadcast needs without | reference to any past event, such as a favour. | | This might be an equivocation, but, funnily enough, you said | guessing is about understanding and for people to have an | understanding is a way of saying they have a transaction (often | implicit). For instance, "I gave him a pass on that, so now we | have an understanding that I can do this". | samus wrote: | People in "ask" culture can provide context to their request, | in effect making it transactional again. That works best if | parties are not in a close relationship with each other, else | the communication is already more contextual and "guess"-like | than with loose acquaintances. | bee_rider wrote: | The author mentions a couple times coming from a "guess" | culture and adjusting to an "ask" one, so I think they are in | some sense in favor of "ask," at least in the workplace. I mean | they are clearly trying to adopt some of the habits. | | It is interesting--I think thoughtful people like the author | tend to see the limitations of the habits they've grown up | with, and the advantages of the ones they are trying to adopt. | But of course both tendencies have advantages and | disadvantages. | superfrank wrote: | I've never heard these terms before, but I've known about this | concept for a while and I've always used "implicit" and | "explicit" as my descriptors for the two different approaches, | which I feel have less negative connotations. | opportune wrote: | Asking isn't necessarily transactional. | | If I go to your house and ask for a glass of water, it's | because I'm thirsty and I know it's NBD for you to get a glass | and put water in it. I'm not expecting to give or get anything | else in return, nor am I trying to be rude by insinuating you | should have given me a glass of water. The thought process | goes: | | 1. I am thirsty. | | 2. I don't think it's rude to ask for water since it's | effectively free and only requires you to have a clean glass to | serve it in. | | 3. I ask for water. | | Community and trust is all well and good, but most of my social | circle are transplants from all over the country/world which | all have different social mores. There is no common or | universal social dance about how to behave when you want | something from someone else or how you should be polite when | you go hang out with someone in this kind of setting. And if | someone does try to fit their specific background culture into | such a setting in a way that makes it so they're offended when | I ask for water or a favor, it's on them. | | That's not say I think Asking is "superior" but just that it's | not transactional so much as it is pragmatic (but potentially | impolite) especially in certain situations, like socialization | within a highly diverse-background group. | wwweston wrote: | "Explicit vs Implicit" is more accurate and value neutral, and | doesn't require anyone to load down the explicit side of the | equation with generalized aspersions like "treating everything | as a transaction." | | There are advantages to explicit and implicit negotiation. | There are situations in which either might be more graceful or | necessary. | | Most situations are probably best navigated with some degree of | implicit negotiation first, paired with a layer of explicit | interaction as a check. | | > it's not about "Guessing", it's about understanding. | | _Asking_ is often a good way to make sure you actually | understand. | | "Guessing" may be an acceptable substitute to the extent your | intuition doesn't have an error term. | [deleted] | solarmist wrote: | "Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other | Guess people - ones who share a fairly specific set of | expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get | from your own family and friends and subculture, the more | you'll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you'll spend | your life in a cloud of mild outrage at (pace Moomin fans) the | Cluelessness of Everyone." | | The more diverse the people a guesser interacts with the more | dysfunctional, as in not working how they intend, guess | behavior becomes. If you need to interact with people who have | even somewhat different values guess culture becomes | unworkable. | johnnyjeans wrote: | Maybe "Inquire vs Infer" is better? | amerkhalid wrote: | I am from guess culture, it is almost impossible for me to | decipher needs of everyone and communicate my needs without | asking. Unless those needs are very standard traditional needs | like offering water to a guest, giving up seat for an elder | etc. And it is not just me it seems everyone seems to | misunderstand and everyone complains about others who didn't | guess their needs correctly. | | Using the example from article, the mover would be complaining | about everyone who didn't guess that they needed help with | moving and how they had given soup to all those people. | | I really appreciate ask culture and find it much easier to | navigate. It is so much easier to hangout with friends who can | just ask for what they want or just say no. I have learned to | ask but still find it stressful to say no. | | Speaking of no, in my culture, apparently, no means, "ask me | again I am just being polite, I will say yes after your ask me | 3rd time." | smeej wrote: | Hmm. I think I've primarily experienced the really dark side of | guess culture, so I appreciate your framing of it as a desire | for understanding when it's in a healthy context. | | I've experienced it in the contexts of narcissism and | borderline personality, where the underlying thought is, "I am | so obviously the center of the world that anyone with half a | brain who's paying a whit of attention should to intuit my | needs without my having to speak a word. If I have to speak, | you have already failed." And anyone who failed was punished, | sometimes intensely. | | Ask culture, for me in that context, became about being able to | exist as a separate person and express a boundary. I'd much | rather put the cards on the table, find out we want completely | different, even opposed things, and work from there, than deal | with the power imbalance of one person's assumption that anyone | who isn't reading their mind is an idiot. | | It seems the virtue, as most of the time, is in the mean. | mannykannot wrote: | In this case, the unreasonable person does not understand the | culture he is embedded in, and would not understand an 'ask' | culture either, where refusal to accede to his wants is | regarded as reasonable. | | The difference between normal and pathological behavior in | either culture lies in whether people treat others in the | same way they would like to be treated themselves. | platz wrote: | I expect you incorporate aspects of "guess" culture without | even realizing it. | | For example, Is it okay if I bang your wife/gf? | | If you think that's a rude question, why? All I'v done is | Ask. | smeej wrote: | I don't think I understand your example, but that may come | from having had more than my share of polyamorous friends. | | By default, I would take your request at face value and | have no trouble saying, "No, we're monogamous, but I can't | very well blame you for wanting to!" | platz wrote: | very well, but what percentage of the population do you | think would consider that rude. | | Of course, the nut of the question is whether its ever | possible to be rude with a question. If it's possible to | be rude with a statement, I don't really see the | difference between questions and statements, at the | higest level, though | Aerbil313 wrote: | > "I am so obviously the center of the world that ... If I | have to speak, you have already failed." | | IME this person is always a women dominating her family. Idk | why. | throwanem wrote: | What you're describing is abusive behavior, which is | something I would hesitate very strongly to characterize as | part of any cultural norm. | DirkH wrote: | I guarantee you that abusive cultural norms exist and many | poor individuals stuck in cultures with abusive norms wish | they were living in a different culture. | galangalalgol wrote: | It can be more moderate than that. "what is wrong honey?". | "Nothing, I'm fine". Which can either mean, no really I'm | fine, or if you don't know, you obviously don't care about | me, or you know exactly what is wrong and don't pretend | otherwise. I've been both parties in that conversation, and | over time I have learned that ask culture works better | between close friends and family. That doesn't mean I'd | consider it abusive though, just a non optimal | communication strategy. | hosh wrote: | If there is one thing I learned, it is that when it comes | to life partners and family where the stakes are | conmingled, for the really important stuff, it is better | to be open and direct. | | So I think one of the hidden dimensions here are -- are | you guessing because you are trying to consider the other | person, or are you guessing because there is | vulnerability to exposing what you really feel? | throwanem wrote: | As a product of Southern American culture, I would note | that "guess" culture as described here - specifically, | the preference for indirectness and inference - is always | something that exists primarily in and near interaction | among strangers. It doesn't always disappear entirely in | familiar relationships, but does abate significantly in | favor of being more direct. (Of course, this in itself | increases the chance of cultural mismatches causing | conflict, as what's ordinary for someone from an "ask" | culture can easily read as an insulting assumption of | excess familiarity for someone raised with "guess".) | | That said, it is important to keep in mind that what's | here under discussion is a broad and fairly imprecise | description of how varying acculturation can affect | interpersonal relationships mostly among people who don't | know one another all that well. In that context it's | useful; to try to generalize it to every human | interaction is not. | throwanem wrote: | This also reminds me of the distinction drawn between | "honor" and "dignity" cultures, as eg in [1]; I'd be | interested to see how the "ask" vs. "guess" distinction | maps, especially as antebellum Southern and prewar | Japanese cultures both fall as strongly on the "honor" | side as their modern successors fall on the "guess" side. | | [1] https://alexandria.ucsb.edu/lib/ark:/48907/f37d2s7h#: | ~:text=.... | epylar wrote: | I can think of several examples. | | Verbal abuse, childhood bullying, body shaming, | cyberbullying, workplace harassment are all abusive and | normal and accepted in many cultures. | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | Why is that? Don't you think that abuse can become a | cultural norm? | | I don't think we'd have ever come up with money if abuse | weren't a common cultural norm. It's pretty much a proxy | for "or I'll have my thugs hurt you". | throwanem wrote: | Better put, I'd say that I would hesitate to characterize | a cultural preference for either directness or | indirectness as akin to the kind of abuse a narcissist | deals out to everyone around them. | | The argument is easy to construct in either direction, | but in no case adds anything of value to the | conversation. | | Too, claiming that abuse is "just a cultural thing" | offers both abusers a convenient excuse for their | actions, and everyone who isn't abusive but does share | traits of whichever culture an undue indictment. | flatline wrote: | I have lived this too. | | Likewise ask culture can only be healthy if there is not a | power imbalance: is the asked party really free to say no? | | The title is catchy but I'm not sure how useful this | dichotomy really is. | reddit_clone wrote: | It is also true that for some (many?) people it is very | hard to say 'No'. I don't know any psychological/technical | name for this but it is simply true and it is in their | nature. | | When asked directly, they will give in even if they don't | like doing what is being asked. | | 'Asking' in these cases is actually exploitation (if done | with prior knowledge). | TylerE wrote: | People Pleaser | ativzzz wrote: | You can also be more empathetic with ask culture and soften | or make the request more obvious to say no to. | | Instead of saying "can you do x" you can say "i know you're | busy so no pressure whatsoever but if you're available can | you do me out with x? feel free to say no my feelings won't | be hurt" | | Yea it's a lot more words but the general gist is you ask | with an additional explicit "out" for the other person so | they can say no using your pre-provided excuse instead of | them having to come up with one. I've found this over | communication can be useful for bridging the gap sometimes | reddit_clone wrote: | As a (suffering) guesser myself, when I have to ask | something I always phrase it like 'would you be | interested in doing this?' so that they can say 'no' | without stress. | | Instead of asking 'Would you do this for me? etc.' which | I know would cause a mild-natured guesser stress. | Tijdreiziger wrote: | > [...] one person's assumption that anyone who isn't reading | their mind is an idiot. | | Ah, I see you've met my dad. | MyneOutside wrote: | This and when that person is a manager, yikes | kolanos wrote: | I actually think there's an inversion of ask/guess spectrum and | it is the offer/guess spectrum. | | To add on to a GP's example of the northern U.S. being | predominantly an ask culture and the southern U.S. being a | guess culture, I think the inverse is true for offering things | as opposed to asking for them. | | Southern hospitality is very much an offer culture. Whether you | need or want something, it will be offered. The guess culture | aspect of asking flips when it comes to offering. In the south | it is widely considered rude to not impulsively offer even when | you know you're likely going to get a "no". | | However, in the north the reverse is true. Usually you will | only be offered something when it is apparent that thing is | wanted or needed. It is actually considered something of an | imposition to be offered something you don't want or need. | | In other words, I don't think you can just cast these cultures | as high context and low context, it is more a case of where the | culture places contextual importance. | davideg wrote: | I appreciate you calling this out! In my community we started | talking about it as "Ask" vs "Attune" culture. On the one hand | do you assume everyone will be explicit with their wants, | needs, and boundaries? On the other, do you pay attention to | who you're engaging with, their general disposition, their | communication style preferences, etc? | | I personally like to keep a balance between the two extremes | and try to adapt my behavior to who I'm engaging with (you can | tell I'm comfortable in an "Attune" culture environment, but I | appreciate when people are up front and communicative about | their needs, wants, and boundaries). Considering the power | differentials at play and the ability for someone to enforce | their true boundaries is really important to me, and also | having meta conversations to encourage folks to speak up about | their needs and boundaries. | | In a work context, I will have a meta conversation with someone | about their preferred communication style, how they want to | receive feedback, how they want to be checked in with, etc. to | avoid mismatched communication expectations. | ubermonkey wrote: | That framing is at least as bad as the framing you project on | the Ask/Guess split. | | Clearer communication is always better. | blargey wrote: | > What this culture really wants is for you to pay attention | and understand the people around you | | This sort of framing highlights the worst case scenario of | "guess" culture imo. Where members assume that outsiders to the | "guess" culture only need to "pay attention" to pick up on all | the right norms and assimilate into the community that they | spent decades growing up in (and that everyone ought to, in the | first place, because the "guess" culture considers itself the | necessary consequence of virtues like trust and caring). Which | leads to great offense being taken when people don't adhere. | xeromal wrote: | I think that guess culture has attuned me to knowing when I | need to include a quiet person into a conversation or to | check in on my neighbor when I notice they seem down. Reading | people is an undervalued skill that was honed in my guess | culture upbringing. | sircastor wrote: | What term would you use to describe it? Respectfully, I think | you're projecting an opinion onto it. There's no inherent value | in the word "Guess". A "guess" culture isn't without | transactional interactions, it's just shifted the transaction | to implicit expectations instead of explicit. | [deleted] | sh1mmer wrote: | I feel like "Ask" vs "Sense" would be a better term. | | I've found this a lot in relationships where partners where a | high bar is expected for how well I can to intuit their current | state. "If I have to say it, it's not romantic", etc. | | I think I tend to fall somewhere in the middle between the two | extremes. Being able to ask is feels good, giving and getting | feedback feels good, but having someone not care about being | aware of where I am at (or factoring that in) doesn't feel | good. | tracerbulletx wrote: | People actually DO feel annoyed when people ask them for | unreasonable things. So it's not unreasonable at all to take that | into consideration and predict if a question will put them out. | People are tuned to favor one strategy over another, but there is | a real social cost to asking, and a real cost to not asking. | There is no one right strategy, just another optimization problem | that our brains have solved with emotional weights. Also the | people who ask for things get offended all the time when people | say no, so that's a problem too. | swayvil wrote: | Asking as submissive act. Thus avoided. | | I've seen that in internet conversations. Where a simple question | would do, a prolonged process of guessing, assuming and even | accusing is embarked upon. Because none of the participants wants | to submit, to lose. | | It's a dom/sub culture thing. USA culture is such a culture. Look | at popular fiction. It's invariably concerning the dominance of | rightness over wrongness. | | So reality itself stands upon the form of the dom/sub | relationship in a way. | | It's pretty deep. | solarmist wrote: | The most important thing I got from this was from the original | Ask post forever ago. | | "Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other | Guess people - ones who share a fairly specific set of | expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from | your own family and friends and subculture, the more you'll have | to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you'll spend your life in a | cloud of mild outrage at (pace Moomin fans) the Cluelessness of | Everyone." | | The more diverse the people a guesser interacts with the more | dysfunctional, as in not working how they intend, guess behavior | becomes. If you need to interact with people who have even | somewhat different values guess culture becomes unworkable. | RangerScience wrote: | Seconding this. Anecdotally, the more multicultural a space is, | the more it trends towards "ask". | solarmist wrote: | Through necessity. | quacked wrote: | I am from the northern US (Protestant Scandinavian/German) and my | wife is from the southern US (Protestant English/German) [1]. In | the first several years of our relationship, we had several big | disputes about how to treat each other, and how to treat guests. | After a while we realized that she had been brought up to feel | extreme insecurity over responding to the needs of guests, and I | had been brought up to be blithely ignorant to the needs of | guests. | | Over the years I definitely insulted several southern guests by | mostly ignoring them, and she definitely projected insult onto | several northern guests by assuming that they were secretly | judging us for not being better hosts. We've since realized that | southerners tend to prefer "guess" culture and northerners tend | to prefer "ask" culture, to use the terminology from the article. | There are certainly many exceptions, but this generalization has | taught her to chill out a little over hosting duties, and taught | me to pick up some slack when taking care of guests. | | We still both greatly prefer our native cultures. I don't like | being fawned over or offered things I don't want, and she is | extremely recalcitrant when it comes to asking for anything. | | [1] I mention the distant ancestral backgrounds because it's | amusing to me how well I get along with northern Europeans who | are plainly spoken and "rude" by US standards, and how a lot of | proper hosting culture from the UK reminds me of how her family | operates. She finds Scandinavians and Dutch incredibly rude, | whereas I find the English hilariously polite, even to their own | detriment. | burlesona wrote: | This is fascinating to me, because I'm from the southern US and | strongly align to "ask culture" and my wife is from the | northwest and strongly aligns to "guess" culture. | | I wonder how much it's about individual family background and | not strongly regional? | ketzo wrote: | When you say that your experience in the south is more Ask -- | who is usually doing the asking, host or guest? | | I said this down the thread but my experience (grew up in the | south) has always been that Southerners are very up-front | about trying to meet your needs before you can even ask for | them. That was always how I was taught to host, anyway. | | And I think that weirdly, that's more aligned with Guess | culture: the person who _needs_ something should never have | to _ask_ for it. | burlesona wrote: | No, for my family growing up, nobody was going to try and | read your mind, if you want something say something. For | her family, they are always trying to anticipate needs. For | her, if I'm not anticipating needs and taking care of them | -- ie, if she has to ask -- then I'm being rude. | nmstoker wrote: | Yes, I'm with you on considering this to be a guess culture | thing (since you have to be sensitive to what they might | need, likely want) | echelon wrote: | > This is fascinating to me, because I'm from the southern US | and strongly align to "ask culture" | | As a southerner, I don't agree. It's split by the | directionality of the request. And I think that's what makes | southern culture distinct. | | We'd never "ask" when we're the guest, only when we're the | host. "Ask"-y guests are considered rude. "Guess"-y hosts are | considered unwelcoming and inhospitable. | | You can "ask" a stranger how they're doing or if they need | anything, but you don't impose upon them. It's often common | to strike up conversations this way. | | It's a directionality. "Ask" when you're the giver, "guess" | when you're the receiver. | | You always hold the door. You don't ask for someone to do it | for you, but you probably feel miffed if they don't, because | it's expected that everyone extends each other courtesy. | | "Southern hospitality". | red-iron-pine wrote: | yeah im from the south and there is definitely a level of up- | front-ness that i'm not sure the parent comment is talking | about. like a level of exuberance and get-it-out-ness that | often borders on belligerence | | "yall doin okay?" | gottorf wrote: | > "yall doin okay?" | | Speaking as a Southerner, this sentence is so on point. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | Questions like that really... confuse me, because is it | just a generic 'hello' or a serious question? | | In my own experience, I once had an obnoxious colleague who | asked "How was your weekend?". I didn't like the question | because one, I don't like to talk about what I do / did in | my spare time, and two, it was leading because the guy was | really really eager to talk about HIS weekend, but... I | didn't care, or else I would've asked. | ketzo wrote: | If it's coming from someone who could even _remotely_ be | considered a "host" to you, it's definitely a serious | question, and they actively want to fulfill any needs you | might have. Southern hospitality is a super real thing, | it's pretty awesome. | | If it's said as a greeting, "how y'all doing?" usually | means "how are your family?," which also tends to be | meant very genuinely. | | Even outside of a host-guest dynamic, I do think | Southerners tend to care more about pleasantries; when | they ask about your weekend, they're a little more likely | to really want to know. | | Of course, this is all very broad strokes based on | anecdotal experience. Plenty of cold/self-aggrandizing | jerks in the South, too! | dkga wrote: | Couldn't help but listen it in Ted Lasso's voice. Thanks | for that beautiful moment. | ubermonkey wrote: | Yeah, I'm a lifelong southerner (18 years in MS, 6 in AL, | now 29 in Houston). We're pretty up front about what's | going on across the board. If you come to a southerner's | house, there's usually already hospitality happening -- but | if you want something, ask! Just realize we'll say "no" if | it's not something we're going to do. | | This is jarring to people who cannot receive a no, or who | cannot articulate one. | ketzo wrote: | This is counterintuitive, but in the framing of the | article, I think that "y'all doin okay?" would actually be | part of Guess culture, not Ask culture. It's just a very | up-front manifestation of dealing with Guess culture, I | think..? It's not Ask culture because _the person who needs | something_ is not doing the asking. | | This is abstract, but stay with me here | | I'm also Southern, and I think that the inclination towards | that kind of belligerent helpfulness comes from trying to | figure out what your guests want, and making sure they _don | 't_ have to ask you for anything. | | in my experience the response is "we're all good out here, | but thank you!" -- which is classic Guess culture | quacked wrote: | I'm the original commenter, and I agree with you. The | person you're responding to is accurate about that | "friendly belligerence", but whenever I go down there _I_ | get all the "y'all doin' all right?" questions by hosts | who are trying to see if I need anything. | BestGuess wrote: | I reckon it has got to do with bein rural and poor, or maybe | different kinds of european family cultures preserving | different attitudes? Where I'm from in the south you didn't | ask at all if you knew what was good for you all about keepin | up appearances and you had to be all sly about helping people | out. More poor somebody is more sly you got to be. Bein in a | city nobody gives a darn but way back when that darn was | given pretty darn hard. | | Just a guess but could be that attitude has lots more to do | with how many are poor or not and how many generations | they've been poor, or lived in cities, like a lag time sorta | thing. Nothing I really know about just sharing because it | might be interesting even if wrong | detourdog wrote: | Baltic state heritage and you sound like my kind of guest/host. | | To quote Jerad/Donald at Silicon Valley: | | "I like when people yell at me, at least I know where I stand". | Cthulhu_ wrote: | To misquote quote a meme, I like dominant women not because I | want to be humiliated, but because they say what they want. | detourdog wrote: | I told her she had control problems... she said we can talk | about it in 2 weeks. | lostlogin wrote: | This is a lot like the fantastic line by Scaramucci: 'Where I | grew up, we're front stabbers' | | https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-40748918 | brandnewlow wrote: | A true friend stabs you in the chest. - Oscar Wilde | mgaunard wrote: | The American south always were the sophisticated ones, with | proper etiquette. | rgoulter wrote: | "Disputes arising from different communication attitudes in | relationships" reminds me of Deborah Tannen's "You Just Don't | Understand", which was recommended to me. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Just_Don%27t_Understand | | Tannen's main suggestion is at least if you're aware that | someone communicates differently than you do, you might either | make accommodation, or better understand things that might | frustrate you. | tiffanyh wrote: | "Guests, like fish, begin to smell after 3-days" | | - Ben Franklin | hinkley wrote: | This reminds me of John Mulaney's bit about Jewish versus | Catholic culture. He loved that he didn't have to guess what | his girlfriend was thinking, she would just tell him. No | filter. | | For some people that can be rude or shocking. For others the | opposite can be exhausting. The middle ground of mind games is | the fucking worst. "Go do that thing I don't like. It's fine." | "Why did he go? He knew I was upset!" He answered your passive | aggressive bullshit with his own passive aggressive bullshit. | That's why. Good luck in couples therapy. | sss111 wrote: | do you have a link or timestamp for this? | crooked-v wrote: | Probably this segment. | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogHxa4aPXN8 | [deleted] | thefourthchime wrote: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogHxa4aPXN8 | carabiner wrote: | That sounds more like urban vs rural. The southerners I've | known (Alabama) are pretty blunt about asking for what they | want. Going further with stereotypes, some people say west | coast is guess, east is ask. | samus wrote: | Indeed rural vs. urban is another divide across which such | differences are observed. People from big metro areas are | usually more blunt than in the surroundings. Probably because | people there usually come from diverse backgrounds, but | "guess" culture requires the opposite to work. | hosh wrote: | It may have more to do with deeper, more static personal | relationships within a community in rural settings. In | urban settings, folks generally don't know their neighbors, | can hide in numbers, have to be more assertive with | strangers and acquaintances, and can get away to a fresh | start if they wreck their reputation. | | I think ask vs guess is a good start, but looking at my | experience and looking at what people are talking about | here, there is at least one more dimension at play here. | xeromal wrote: | As someone who's lived in both environments, I think most | urban people develop a shell from the constant interaction | that's required in a city. People selling wares, | hobos/homeless, and a stronger need to protect oneself. You | have to be blunt or you'll never get anywhere. lol. | sethhochberg wrote: | This is advice preached to people visiting NYC all the | time. | | The person on the corner asking "excuse me sir may I | please ask you a question" almost certainly has ulterior | motives. Locals in a busy neighborhood ignore a guy like | that a few times a day. | | But the person on the corner who says "hey which way is | the 7 train?" with no preamble is gonna get good answers, | despite being less traditionally polite. | | Where there is constant stimulation, the cultural norms | get a lot more direct | Aerbil313 wrote: | That's a very good analysis, so much it seems obvious in | retrospect. But I think it misses one other factor: I've | witnessed the most rural people to adopt ask-culture when | they were guess people before. My gut says this has | something to do with social media/smartphones but idk. | xeromal wrote: | Yeah, on the other hand, I recently was looking for an | old land cruiser and got in touch with a local guy on | facebook. Knew I wanted it and sent him 1k to hold the | car for me for a few days until I could rent a trailer. | He did so and I picked up the suv without a hitch. | | I'd never do this in Los Angeles where I live part time. | | I context switch based on which home I'm at, North | Georgia or Los Angeles. | nostrademons wrote: | "Going further with stereotypes, some people say west coast | is guess, east is ask." | | My experience is the opposite. I grew up in New England, and | it seemed like there were a large number of unspoken norms | (in both business and personal culture) that were really hard | to grok. Moving out to the Bay Area, people are refreshingly | direct. "Want to come work for equity on my crypto startup?" | "No, you're crazy." "Okay goodbye!" | | I think that where hypocrisy and indirection are ingrained in | Silicon Valley, it's because of diverging incentives and a | lust for power. In other words, people won't unconsciously | hurt your feelings because they assume you would've | consciously spoken up; they will _consciously_ screw you over | because they want that billion dollar deal. It feels very | much like an ask culture, though, regardless of how crazy the | asks are. | BoxFour wrote: | Well, I'd suggest that: | | 1) A substantial number of individuals in the bay aren't | originally from there. | | 2) Assuming the role of a startup founder inherently | demands a familiarity with ask culture. | | One of the initial steps frequently involves requesting | significant amounts of money from individuals, with minimal | consequence to the borrower if it doesn't materialize to | anything! | nostrademons wrote: | That's precisely what makes Western (and particularly | American) culture an "ask" one, though. Ask cultures | arise when you have a great diversity of individuals and | can't make assumptions on their backgrounds, desires, or | how they would interpret an interaction. Guess cultures | arise when you have a long period of stability, and | communities that form and persist over generations. When | this happens, you can start to make consistent norms and | then pass them down in childhood, so everyone in the | community has a good sense of what's expected of them. | | Bay Area startup culture is an extreme example of Bay | Area culture in general, which is an extreme example of | Western U.S. culture, which is an extreme example of | American culture, which is an extreme example of general | western European culture. But they're all marked by | fluid, transient groupings of people that came from all | over. | BoxFour wrote: | I see what you're getting at. My intention was to | highlight that I don't believe Silicon Valley culture is | synonymous with Bay Area culture. In my interactions with | individuals who were _raised_ in Northern California or | even the Bay Area, I've seen a lot of "guess" culture | fairly similar to the PNW. | | To phrase it differently, a significant number of the | people you're thinking of probably wont establish lasting | roots in the Bay and thus wouldn't be passing down that | culture to the subsequent generation of Bay Area | youngsters. | | It's a thought-provoking query indeed though, pondering | what characterizes the "prototypical San Franciscan" and | how that might evolve over time! | dheera wrote: | > Moving out to the Bay Area, people are refreshingly | direct | | Weird, I moved from Boston to the Bay Area and I have the | opposite experience. | | In Boston if someone asked me to have dinner with them it | was always just dinner. If they had other intentions they | would state them up front. | | In the Bay Area a good fraction of the time the other | person has an unstated intention (hiring, dating, asking | for intros to dates, asking for intros to investors, asking | for other help ...) that I usually need to dig up before I | say yes or no. The thing is, sometimes it is a yes, I just | wish people would be more upfront that there is an agenda | around this "dinner". | camel_gopher wrote: | Have you heard of the California no? | | "Gee, that startup sounds cool. Let me get back to you." | carlhjerpe wrote: | > I am from the northern US (Protestant Scandinavian/German) | and my wife is from the southern US (Protestant English/German) | | You're American, your wife is American. | margalabargala wrote: | This applies to other countries too. | | One person from London, the other from Belfast? Both British. | | One from Barcelona, the other from Madrid? Both Spanish. | | One from Prague, the other from Bratislava? Both | Czechoslovakian, until a couple decades ago. | quacked wrote: | Outside America, this is true. Inside America, if you are | unaware of pronounced regional cultural differences arising | from the settler groups that form your ancestry and local | culture, you're either ignorant, or not American. | ttepasse wrote: | But you're already using perfectly good American regional | identifiers for those regional differences in your original | post. | | Pet peeve from a European: the American habit of using | their distant ancestor's European ethnicity as a shorthand | for stereotypical personality and culture today a) | undervalues the massive political and cultural changes in | Europe since their ancestor's emigration und b) undervalues | the regional differences inside their ancestor's origin | country. Being german I find both Ask and Guess culture | here, just 50 km apart. And often in the same place, | differing by class or the rural/urban divide. Describing | ,,German" as just Ask culture is rather wrong from my | perspective. I know the outside and Hollywood stereotypes | differ. | | (And c), I think, distant ancestors ethnic stereotypes | undervalues the melting pot/salad bowl effect over | generations of the US itself.) | anthk wrote: | Ditto with Spaniards. Most of the "Hispanic coulture with | flamenco, sun and beaches" won't apply to a whole 80% of | the country. The North has beaches, but the Sun it's an | English tabloid. The middle Spain has Sun, but water is | something you see in rivers in reservoirs. Also, cold as | hell winters. | | Now try to figure that across the pond with zillions of | native cultures merged with an ( _older than North | America itself_ ) Southern Hispanic culture from Mexico | to the Patagonia close to the South Pole. | [deleted] | crazygringo wrote: | I'm genuinely curious, what is the point you're trying to | make? | | Do you think American doesn't have cultural differences | within? Or that those cultures don't correlate at all with | geography? Or with ancestry? | NavinF wrote: | You're not wrong, but there are some pretty big differences | between south, east, and west. In a lot of ways US states are | like independent countries that share a military | carlhjerpe wrote: | Absolutely, I just disagree with trying to identify as | being from somewhere else when you're born and raised in | the US | Cthulhu_ wrote: | You underestimate how vastly cultures can differ based on | location or background. Also keep in mind the US is young and | most of its inhabitants have a migrant background / family | history. | | The US is the opposite of a monolithic culture. | anthk wrote: | Even been into Spain? Half of the Andalusian culture around | flamenco it's alien to the rest of the country. Basque and | the Nort-Western cultures related to the Celtic lore it's | similarly alien to the Castilles, Andalusia, Catalonia and | Valencia. | | And even in _regions_ themselves you can find alien customs | to each other. For instance, in the Basque Country from | valley to valley. Or in Andalusia with huge differences | between East and West. Yes, like a Mandelbrot fractal. | Spain it 's like that. | | You can find here any climate. Desserts? Glaciars? Tundra | like climates? Cold winters down to -30C on high peaks? Dry | heat? Windy heat? Dry cold? Windy cold? Rainy weather, like | London if not more? All of them across the country. Now, | from these megadiverse climate diffs you can guess you will | find zillions of cultures and subcultures because, you | know, traditions and architecture change a lot if you live | between ponds in Cantabria with more mist than in a Stephen | King novel compared to a dry dessert in Almeria were | "Spagetthi Westerns" were filmed here and white homes with | Arabic architecture reflecting the Sun was a must in order | to just survive the Summer. | Delk wrote: | I feel somewhat conflicted about this. I'm from Finland, and | while we aren't technically Scandinavian and might be something | of an outlier among Northern Europeans in general, the | stereotype is that we're not fond of small talk and prefer to | be to the point and perhaps even blunt. But in terms of asking | for things, I don't feel like I identify with the culture of | directly asking. Feeling out or giving hints that I might | appreciate some help without making outright requests seems a | lot less intrusive and graceful to me. And while personality is | probably also a factor, I don't think it's just me. | | I think we're generally a high-context culture, and the | "guessing" culture as postulated in the post immediately | reminds me of that. I don't know if other Northern European | cultures are less high-context but it makes me wonder if high | vs. low context (possibly similar to guessing vs. asking) is | not quite the same axis as bluntness. | AndrewKemendo wrote: | If I've learned anything in my 20 year mental health journey, | it's that until you've addressed your childhood trauma, nothing | you do will be a lasting fix for any interpersonal issues you | may have. | solarmist wrote: | I learned this this year. I'm in my 40s. | AndrewKemendo wrote: | Yeah I'm 39 and just learned it last year. | carabiner wrote: | That's because we all read Body Keeps the Score at the | same time. | AndrewKemendo wrote: | Close...Atlas of the Heart | | Along with a bunch of other more medical reading | solarmist wrote: | +1 for Atlas of the Heart, but that was more useful after | I handled my childhood trauma. | solarmist wrote: | Haven't read it yet. I guess I should. | [deleted] | Cthulhu_ wrote: | I think a lot of people would benefit from getting some | counceling in their earlier adult years, although on the | other hand they may not be ready yet / not see any issues | yet. | | I'm late 30's and same btw. | throwanem wrote: | If you've learned anything in your 20-year mental health | journey, I hope it would be that not everyone is exactly like | you, nor needs the same things you need. It's remarkably | self-centered to assume the prescription that's suited you is | exactly right for everyone else, don't you think? | linster wrote: | Wow that's a pile-on. | | "What works for you only works for you, so you might not | have discovered that it works for anything else, but only | if you were _really_ paying attention." | AndrewKemendo wrote: | That's also definitely true! | | Some people are lucky to not have significant childhood | trauma which means it was never needing to be resolved | throwanem wrote: | And some people are aware that "all interpersonal | conflict derives ultimately from unresolved childhood | trauma" is one school of thought among many, and no more | guaranteed to offer anything generally dispositive than | any other. | | If it worked for you, that's great! No joke, that's | fantastic. But not for nothing, too, is there the old | joke about the guy who just started a 12-step program and | now no sooner sees someone take a drink in a bar but | assumes they're an alcoholic. | boppo1 wrote: | >addressed your childhood trauma | | This is pretty frustrating as 90s-kid who had a Good | Childhood(tm) and struggles with interpersonal issues. I have | a close friend from childhood who also had quite a Good | Childhood(tm) and he can't shut up about "trauma" and it | seems like every two years he has this big epiphany about how | he addressed some "trauma" he was previously repressing and | how now that he's done so he's All Better Now(tm). His | behavior and overall life outcomes do not have any | correlation with these epiphanies. Both of our lives | absolutely pale in comparison to the lives of average | children in previous generations in terms of 'trauma'. | Minimal bullying, no fights, always plenty of toys and food, | loving parents, etc. | | I know some people with real, legitimate trauma (verbal and | physical abuse) and they said that visiting a therapist | really helped them to feel a lot better. In such cases of | legitimate trauma, I agree that one should do something about | it if it's making you feel bad. However, many of those people | were already. interpersonally excellent before and after | 'addressing' their trauma. | | I have had people (including the friend from the first | paragraph) suggest I need to "work on my childhood trauma" | but really and honestly I can't think of a single thing that | was legitimately traumatic. I could take my worst | experiences, which I have moved on from and don't feel any | need[0] to think about, and inflate them, but I'm pretty sure | that would be creating a new psychological problem. | | [0]I don't feel any hesitance to thinking about them either. | I can sit and ponder them for a whole afternoon if I like, | without emotional fluctuation. They're just memories. | hinkley wrote: | In college we hit that age where classmates started losing | grandparents. I was one of the oldest grandchildren so I | had a few years yet. | | Some of these people absolutely fell apart. It was the | first time they'd ever lost anyone and they couldn't | process it. When gently pressed, we would find out they had | no pets growing up. They had not lost so much as a | goldfish. | | A painless life can set you up for failure when real | adversity comes. You lack the resilience, and in some cases | the empathy, to navigate these situations. That's not | trauma, but it is loss. | | Those experiences gave me a whole new perspective on peers | whose parents got them goldfish or hamsters at a young age. | Some of these parents were setting up object lessons. | Basically the chicken pox party of loss. | | At that point I had lost a dog, and as a sensitive kid it | wrecked me. And the worst part of it was every time I | caught my breath some new asshole would offer his | condolences. Thanks, I wasn't thinking about my dog for ten | minutes and now I'm thinking about her again. Can we just | stop talking about it please? | | I learned to offer sympathy without an agenda. Engaging | them is trying to make them process on your timeline. It's | thoughtless, even a little cruel. Definitely selfish. A | good friend will step in and push if weeks later you have | not mourned. But the next day? Give them space, Jesus. | | I really appreciated, in that moment, the northern | midwestern trope of bringing the bereaved food and just | sitting with them. Let them talk, or not. I almost pulled a | muscle watching Lars and the Real Girl. The little old | ladies sitting in his living room, knitting, surrounded by | casseroles and hot dishes. Just talking to each other and | watching him out of the corner of their eyes. Talking about | anything else. Yep that's about it. Here if you need us, | not holding our breath for you to say so. | lostlogin wrote: | I went to a Waldorf school and now my daughter does. At | around age 10-11 children learn about death and practices | around it (Norse, Egyptian, local practices) and what it | means. The Waldorf philosophy holds that children start | to understand that death is a permanent loss at about | that age, and aims to teach them about it. | | Having a kid lose a pet at that age is a major thing for | them to process. | | I love the school, but the disorganised over-parenting | libertarian hippies can be overbearing at times. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education | TuringTest wrote: | Is it true what they say that Waldorf is based in | irrational teachings about the supernatural, and let's | children go several courses without learning basic | rational stuff like reading well and doing math? | | I'm all for growing children with creative teaching and | avoiding rote memorization, but I'd be horrified if that | was at the cost of missing the best years for setting the | pillars of rational thought. | travisjungroth wrote: | One way to view it is dealing with childhood trauma is | necessary but not sufficient to fixing interpersonal | issues. The problem is there are at least three | opportunities for common errors of reasoning. | | _if_ you have unresolved childhood trauma (people forget | this is conditional) then resolving it is _one of_ (not | all) the requirements for fixing chronic interpersonal | issues you _may_ have (not everyone does). | | If someones make all those mistakes at once, you get they | tell you to heal your childhood trauma to fix your | relationship disasters and it's like "My childhood was | fine. And I had one argument with one person. I'm just | gonna go talk to him about it..." | cfiggers wrote: | People overuse and overgeneralize the term "trauma" for | sure. But it might be helpful to see real actual trauma as | only one item in the larger set of "stuff from your past | that impacts/has influence on you today, that you mostly | aren't aware of, but that if you were aware/more aware of | you'd be able to handle better." | | The way our primary caregivers relate and respond to us | when we're a) in our most rapid periods of development and | b) completely dependent on them for everything _absolutely_ | has an influence on the way we turn out. How could it not? | | So there's no such thing as Neutral/No Influence, there is | only identifying what effects there are and learning how to | lean either into or out of those influences on a | situational basis. All of this definitely applies to | childhood trauma, but it doesn't HAVE to be trauma for that | logic to apply. Figuring that stuff out is a helpful part | of maturing, and it doesn't have to be a critical or | negative thing. | | In many ways I've come to appreciate and love my parents | even more as I've worked through the ways they raised me | the best they could, given the resources they had, but in | ways that I can now see preferable alternatives to. | | I think it's the biggest "I Love You" in the world to self- | consciously seek to grow beyond the limitations that were | passed on to me, just like I want my little girl to outgrow | the ones I consciously or unconsciously hand down to her. | ggambetta wrote: | I just want to say I appreciate your humorous use of the | trademark symbol. I love it, but not everyone does. There's | dozens of us! Dozens! | nicup12345689 wrote: | I think the key is to inspect the childhood trauma, however | small, BUT don't try and make it your identity. You are | just making some things conscious, understanding yourself. | The moment it becomes a crutch, it is just an excuse for | not taking agency over your own life. | | In a way it is the perfect excuse, a childhood determinism | of sorts. Blame everything just to avoid ANY change of the | self. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | It doesn't have to be a Big Thing though; the problem is | that the word "trauma" sounds / feels very serious, but it | can be trivial things, or things you shrugged off like | "well those things just happen". | | Personal example, I had a good (girl) friend when I was | like six, I was very lonely / isolated before she came | around and we played together and the like. But then her | parents moved and I never saw her again. | | And for many years, that was it, it happened, couldn't do | anything about it, nothing abnormal about it. But then | because of Reasons I ended up going to therapy, and that | event (plus others) are probably linked to a fear of | abandonment / commitment, of a pessimism when it comes to | relationships (as in, don't get too close, it'll end and | there's nothing you can do about it). | | But also there's a factor of "My 'trauma' isn't that bad | because others have had it worse". Doesn't mean you aren't | valid either. | munificent wrote: | _> I have had people (including the friend from the first | paragraph) suggest I need to "work on my childhood trauma" | but really and honestly I can't think of a single thing | that was legitimately traumatic._ | | Let me just copy/paste an older comment of mine: | | --- | | Imagine you've lived in the same house your entire life. | There's a big couch taking up half the living room, but one | of the legs is broken. When you were really little, it | tipped over when you sat in it, so you just learned to walk | around the couch over to the not-very-comfortable armchair | and sit there instead. | | This was so long ago that you don't even remember learning | not to sit in the couch. You don't think about how much | room that couch is wasting or how much time you spend | walking around the couch to get to the chair. Sometmies you | stub your toe on the way around, but everyone trips every | now and then. You've been doing this so long that it is | completely unconscious. Hell, you can and do navigate the | room in the dark. | | Friends ask you about your living room furniture and you-- | completely honestly as far as you know--say it's all fine. | You describe your chair in detail. It's not perfect, but | it's serviceable. Certainly lots of other people have | furniture that's in worse shape. At least you don't have | any of _those_ problems. | | Then you sit down with a therapist for a few hours and they | say, "Hey, what's up with that couch?" | boppo1 wrote: | I understood the concept already, thanks. | | But thank you for providing readers an example of the | kind of condescension I was describing. | ilikecakeandpie wrote: | > and he can't shut up about "trauma" | | The worst thing that's every happened to someone is still | the worst thing that's ever happened to them. Though it | might not be something like mental/physical abuse, it's | still their bottom even if it pales in comparison to | someone else's. Also, lots of families have secrets and can | portray a healthy image when in reality we generally see | people at their "best" in social settings. I think the key | here is self-awareness without diminishment, which can be | difficult. | | Also, at least with my algorithms, there is just so much | bombardment from social media about things like trauma, | mental illness, and neurodivergence where one can get lost | in what they're being presented and be convinced that just | because they read the dictionary for fun when they were | younger that they're neurodivergent instead of possibly | just being a curious child. If one is in a vulnerable state | or just worn down from seeing all this, it almost incites a | FOMO response of "hey, I was traumatized too!" | | I do think that normalizing and acting to remove the stigma | from discussing these things is a net positive overall but | it can be damaging for sure | adamweld wrote: | FWIW the data agrees with you, for milder cases of anxiety | and depression, which often correlate with interpersonal | issues, talk therapy (e.g. dissecting childhood trauma) is | much less effective than cognitive behavioral therapy | (analyzing behavioral and emotional patterns, trying to | catch and redirect cycles of thought and action that lead | to negative outcomes). | taurath wrote: | CBT is designed around outcomes that can be easily | measured. It can also be actually harmful in cases where | there's actual trauma or neglect underlying the behavior | or thought patterns. It has a tendency to paper over | them. | | It helps a lot of people, but it't also a trap for those | who have more deep things to work through, having spend 6 | years stalled out in CBT before coming to grips with the | deep trauma and neglect, and the dissociation that was so | prevalent in my life that CBT therapists never even | bothered screening for. Ask anyone with an emotionally | neglectful or abusive upbringing what CBT did for them | and you'll get quite a few nasty answers. | kayodelycaon wrote: | > It has a tendency to paper over them. | | Yeah. That's one of the dangers the book I had talked | about. CBT is a tool for rewiring the brain. If you have | deep things to work out and don't recognize it, CBT will | do exactly what it says on the tin and rewire around | things that need to be explored. | | That's very not good. | | I'm bipolar and use CBT a lot. Identifying if the problem | is logic-based is key to its application. Logic cannot | override depression or mania, which means CBT doesn't | work and alternative strategies are needed. Usually I | switch to some variant of DBT techniques. (It's so | automatic at this point it's hard to identify all of what | I'm doing.) | | In my experience, learning when to apply CBT is much | harder than learning CBT. | EGreg wrote: | I sometimes like to say the facts out loud and challenge | people so here it goes. | | We live in the safest, least racist, least sexist, least | antisemitic generation in history. At the same time, | automation and productivity has reduced demand for human | labor, and people increasingly can't afford the rent. | Perhaps the answer to many disparities isn't systemic | sexism, racism etc. but economic factors. Whatever you are | worried about, your grandparents had it much worse. | | Also, let's improve our systems to stop polluting the | environment and destroying ecosystems for corporate profit | at the expense of future generations. That's the major | issue of our day, far bigger than climate change. | robotresearcher wrote: | > At the same time, automation and productivity has | reduced demand for human labor | | We have approximately the lowest unemployment rate in | modern history. | EGreg wrote: | That's only a tiny slice of the story. | | It doesn't count the people who have opted out of the | workforce. | | It doesn't count the job insecuroty of the gig economy. | Or the people with terrible conditions. | | It actually underscores the fact that both sexes flooded | the labor pool in the last few decades, automation | increased and wages got depressed due to all these | factors. | | USSR also had near-total employment, for men and women, | way earlier than USA did. And ironically, the rent cost a | ton less. But people overall couldn't afford that much. | | Your grandfather could have supported an entire family on | one man's paycheck, and paid for an entire house. Today, | millennials onwards can't afford any of that. The | generation of adults with the least savings in probably a | century. | | But, as I said, we still have it amaing. Medical | advances, technology like air conditioning, electricity | and so on. The Internet spreads so much knowledge around | the world. I'm just saying that the remaining problems | are often rooted in economic issues, more than a rise in | "systemic X ism" | dustincoates wrote: | > It doesn't count the people who have opted out of the | workforce. | | Not the headline number, but in the US you certainly can | find this data if you want it, in the U4, U5, and U6 | rates: | | https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE | | https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U5RATE | | https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE | | It only goes back to 1994, but these measures are | currently all at or near the lows over the that period. | robotresearcher wrote: | Agree with all that. I disagree only that demand for | labor has decreased, and near-full employment is my | evidence for that. Many jobs are shitty, but someone is | demanding the labor. | EGreg wrote: | Well, I guess what I am trying to say is that more people | are asked to do work, but less work, and paid less for it | too, adjusted for inflation. | | Gig economy and short stints at jobs are an example of | how little employers really value their labor force, as | opposed to the "company man" who worked for decades and | got a pension. | travem wrote: | > At the same time, automation and productivity has | reduced demand for human labor, and people increasingly | can't afford the rent | | Given the juxtaposition of the claims above, I think it | is useful to note that demand for labor is still | relatively high (unemployment rate at ~3.5% in the US). | The reason for unaffordable rents is driven more by the | supply of housing not growing along with demand IMO. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | And demand being artifically inflated by investors | (ranging from boomers / gen-X ers who have extra money to | Saudi oil barons) who buy up houses with the intent to | rent them out or whatever. | h4l wrote: | I think it's relative to our own experiences. If you drive | on a perfect road, even a small bump is noticeable. But I | don't think that means people's perception of problems is | not legitimate. There's always someone worse off, | especially if you compare now to historical times. | | If there's a sure-fire way to create a mental health | problem, it's to tell yourself you don't deserve to have a | problem because other people have worse problems. | brazzledazzle wrote: | I think trauma is also a bit relative. If you grew up | with bad physical and emotional abuse from one parent the | emotional distance and isolation from another might not | even be a blip on your radar, at least until you've | worked through the other stuff. And on the flip side if | you had a great childhood with stable housing, plenty of | food/money then hitting rock bottom in adulthood might be | pretty traumatic since you never had to develop the | mental tools required to handle serious adversity. | Obviously some trauma is objectively worse but competing | over trauma severity is pointless. | watwut wrote: | The thing is, kids who grew up in those good families are | in fact more resilient then abused kids. | | Kids with bad childhood will not categorize semi bad | childhood as trauma, but have worst interpersonal | relationships, worst stress handling, abuse drugs or | alcohol more often and display whole range of at risk | behaviors | | It is simply not true that being poor or abused or | neglected makes people resilient. | brazzledazzle wrote: | That's an excellent and fair point. Perhaps "resilience" | is the wrong term for abused folks and it could be said | as "ability to continue functioning at their usual level | of dysfunction". I've seen enough examples of ostensibly | well raised (typically younger) adults being hit really | hard by adversity that I think there's something to it. | Maybe confirmation bias or perhaps those individuals had | overprotective parents that shielded them from developing | a lot of skills. That sort of dysfunctional parenting can | be harder to recognize in adults. | jimmaswell wrote: | I always think of this SMBC strip. | | https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-22 | h4l wrote: | I love it, thanks! | pjerem wrote: | idk | | I also had Good ChildhoodTM by your definition. | | Still I'm pretty sure I have been traumatized by the two | big moves of my childhood, loosing my childhood friendships | twice. | | It doesn't look big, I am ok at socializing so I have | friends but I know that when shit hits the fan, it happens | that I dream of my first childhood friend and I'm pretty | convinced that this is why I sometimes feel alone even when | I'm well surrounded. | | The point wasn't to tell my life but to say that you can't | really judge other's "traumas". It's highly personal how | you feel about something and when someone doesn't have | something you have (in my case childhood friends) it's easy | to feel like it's not important (maybe you can't understand | because your own childhood friendship eroded normally and | you don't feel like it's an issue) | huijzer wrote: | I've gone through a ton of comments below and see a lot of | contradicting evidence to your thoughtful suggestion. Also my | girlfriend and I are both from north Europe and I notice a | similar difference. Maybe the difference is mostly | | > she had been brought up to feel extreme insecurity | | This reminds me of a quote from Buffett from about 40 years | ago. He said something along the lines of "when women are | raised, they hear and see a million reasons why they cannot do | things whereas men see and hear a million reasons why they can | do things". If I would be convinced by the world that I am not | good, then sure I would treat guests amazingly well. If I would | be convinced by the world I'm amazing, then why bother treating | guests well? They can say it if they need anything. | | I'm happy to hear counterarguments if you have them | nonethewiser wrote: | The American south has a very distinct attitude towards | guests. Very hospitable. That's the difference in his case. | mabbo wrote: | > Deciding what to eat for dinner with guess-culture people isn't | as simple as asking people what they want to eat for dinner, | because they will not tell you what they actually want to want to | eat for dinner. | | This was nearly a deal-breaking problem early in my relationship | with my wife. I am "ask", she is "guess". We just want to figure | out what we're going to order for dinner, why on earth is this | turning into a fight? | | What we came up with was a simple system. | | Person A presents three options, all of which they like. Person B | picks from those three options. If they don't like any of the | three, swap roles, and person B presents three options. If person | A doesn't like any of those three options, give up and just go | get dinner separately (this has never actually happened, yet). | | Everyone is getting their preference in some way. No one has to | guess what the other person wants. Fights are avoided. | dahfizz wrote: | I feel you. Some "guess" people are unable to just state what | they want because they think it places a burden on the other | person. But keeping your desires hidden creates an even larger | burden! Just tell me what you want for dinner! | | I play a similar game with my wife. Whenever we have a hard | time choosing something, I present 5+ options, and we take | turns eliminating one option until only one is left. | breischl wrote: | That solution is a bit like the game theory solution of "I cut, | you choose". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_choose | solarmist wrote: | Yup. It works well for both types of people as well. | jacobkg wrote: | I remember when I first heard about this concept and found it | explained a big difference between my brother and I that I had | struggled to articulate (he is an asker and I am a guesser) | BurningFrog wrote: | Interesting, because you were presumably raised in the same | culture? | Nifty3929 wrote: | There is another interesting dichotomy between people who | phase questions as statements, and those who don't? | maypop wrote: | It's often two staged. | | First drop hints in hopes the other party will catch on. | | If that fails and you really want or still need it - you ask. | forinti wrote: | > It's rude to put someone in a position where they have to say | no to you | | This made me think about a small aspect of Brazilian culture. If | someone is selling something expensive like a house or a car, | they will probably get mad at you for offering to pay a value | much lower (or maybe not even that much lower) than what was | advertised. | aden1ne wrote: | I think the author is conflating American culture with Western | culture at large. | silentsea90 wrote: | I belong to a don't ask or guess culture where i would rather | just lift a mountain myself than ask my friends for help just so | I don't inconvenience anybody, or be in their debt on a favor. | globular-toast wrote: | Something I noticed with my ex was how we differed in asking for | help. I guess I am an asker and she is a guesser. | | Me: if I need help I will ask for help. I do NOT want you to | offer help unless I ask and I especially do NOT want you to just | join in and help if it looks like I'm struggling. I feel entitled | to the satisfaction of having done it myself, if I can. | | Her: if she needs help she won't ask for it but hopes her | frustration is apparent and help will come. Finds it very | uncomfortable to watch people struggling and feels compelled to | offer help or just join in and help. Feels annoyed if help | doesn't come when she needs it. | | As you can imagine this caused quite a bit of conflict between | us, at least until I understood what was going on. | | But I think in every other respect I'm a guesser. | poopsmithe wrote: | I'm having trouble understanding the following sentence. | | > People say yes to requests that you truly feel good about, say | no to ones they don't | | Is this perhaps a typo? I can understand the sentence if I | substitute 'you' with 'they'. | grammers wrote: | People really should learn to say what they want - and also say | no. Otherwise they'll just end up being unhappy because, whether | they like it or not, there will always be people that are | ignorant (and most of the times it won't even be on purpose). | patmcc wrote: | This always strikes me as funny, because I think the default | interpretation (and the one shared in the article) is that it's | largely a Western/Eastern divide - Americans are 'ask' and Asians | are 'guess' - but from where I am in Canada I generally see | exactly the opposite. I don't know if that's specific to my | circles though. | | My friends who are immigrants (or children of immigrants) from | Hong Kong, Taiwan, India are all 'askers', whereas those of us | with families who've been here 2+ generations are 'guessers'. | | Is Canada a 'guess' culture more than America? | | Another funny thing from the article - "A squeaky wheel gets the | grease" - I've always understood that to be true, but _shameful_. | Like yes, you can put up a fuss and often get what you want, but | only by being "squeaky" - annoying, brash, offputting. | tonystubblebine wrote: | Jean! Cross post this please! | keiferski wrote: | I feel like this should be directly correlated with how much | "tradition" plays a role in local culture. The more tradition, | the more you're expected to "just get it" and guess the other | person's thoughts via cultural context. The less tradition, the | less rules there are to follow, and therefore the less connection | you have to the other person. | | An extreme example being: the interactions between two foreign | cultures are (or at least ought to be) almost entirely ask-based, | as they have no prior understanding of how the reciprocal | cultures work. | rdtsc wrote: | > This all seemed ridiculous to us, so instead we drove the two | hours, keeping our plan secret until we pulled up into our | grandma's driveway, so that no one could resist and thwart our | plan. We had a lovely visit, and my mom later thanked us for | making the drive. [...] This is guess culture -- and it's a lot | of saying not really what you actually want, and it's a lot of | reading between the lines to try to figure out what people want. | | Guess culture here also functions as a test of love or loyalty. | They are nice, so they'll say "nah, you don't have to see | grandma, it's a long drive..." but in their heart they hope you | will make the effort because you love your grandma. If they tell | you to see your grandma, your visit in their view (and your | perception too) won't have quite the same meaning. There is | suspicion you saw her because you were told, not because you | really wanted to. | RangerScience wrote: | A friend of mine (we're all pretty solidly "Ask", but ofc there's | a mix) pointed out that a really important _unspoken_ part of an | "Ask" culture is _what you are allowed to ask about_ - thankfully | (and anecdotally) you can generally just straight-up ask "what | can I ask for?". | | Still. Important realization, and definitely something I've | failed at before. | SirMaster wrote: | I'm firmly in the ask culture I guess. | | Life's too short to guess. I'd rather everyone be direct, say | what they want. | | If it offends someone, well, sorry but too bad I guess. | friend_and_foe wrote: | I think this is a bunch of over complication to explain away | spinelessness when faced with the prospect of telling someone | "no." Say no to people, it's empowering! | | There are cultural norms in places about courtesy, hospitality, | when it's appropriate to ask for certain favors, but that's not | what the article is about. It's about telling people no vs making | excuses. It's about being afraid to say what's on your mind. | There's no culture associated with that, only confidence, | competence and bring the arbiter of your own life. | | It's pretty simple: don't hit people up for money unless your | absolutely have no choice, be good to guests you've invited into | your home, and say no to things you don't want to do without | making up excuses. | stefanpie wrote: | Interestingly, I went into this article thinking that "guess | culture" would mean something along the lines of guessing what | others want or what the right thing to do is, executing it, and | revising after the fact based on feedback. Essentially, "It's | easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." I guess | you can call this "do" culture. However, the article talks about | guess culture as something else. | | One of the most valuable skills I've learned in grad school is | how to get good at using all three: guess, ask, and "do" culture. | You really need all three in an environment like that to navigate | complex admin tasks, raise money, pursue ideas, and be a normal, | friendly, empathetic person to work and collaborate with. | msla wrote: | > Interestingly, I went into this article thinking that "guess | culture" would mean something along the lines of guessing what | others want or what the right thing to do is, executing it, and | revising after the fact based on feedback. Essentially, "It's | easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." I | guess you can call this "do" culture. However, the article | talks about guess culture as something else. | | Yeah, a more intuitive name would be "Just Ask" vs "Guess If | You Can Ask" which emphasizes the difference: Someone from a | Just Ask culture wouldn't understand having to guess if you can | ask someone something. | drc500free wrote: | I always enjoy the discussion around this concept. | | I do agree that the Guess label is a little off. That's a bit | like saying a quarterback is only "guessing" that their receiver | will break off their option route where they are expecting. It's | really only Guess culture to an outsider who doesn't know the | expectations (as you see when a new WR keeps getting the read | wrong, leading to turnovers). | | And as others have said, everything is on a continuum. There are | very few "ask" cultures where you can just ask someone if you can | sleep with their wife and expect no negative repercussions at | all. And I doubt that you can get a "no" from someone 25 requests | in a row and have neither party question the relationship a | little bit. | | And there's some unspoken aspects to every request; if you ask | someone if you can grab some food from the fridge and they say | yes, even in an ask culture they probably have some assumption of | how much food you are reasonably going to take. If they come back | to an empty fridge, you won't assuage their anger by saying "well | I asked and you said yes." | | In a new situation, I try to interpret requests like an Asker and | make requests like a Guesser (without being offended if I get a | no), until there's some shared understanding. That's taken a lot | of work, since I'm naturally a Guesser through-and-through. | tempestn wrote: | These concepts don't generally apply universally to all things. | There are things that are perfectly reasonable to ask for | directly. "Could I have a glass of water?" "Could I use your | bathroom?" There are other things that create an uncomfortable | obligation. "Could I borrow $5000?" "Could you pick me up from | the airport at 4am?" There's no point in beating around the bush | about the first set, but it is polite in most cultures I'm | familiar with to give a person an "out" of the second. | | So instead of directly asking in those cases, you could instead | mention your need, without directly asking. "The vet bill's going | to be $5k and I have no idea where we're going to come up with | it." "Ugh, the flight gets in in the middle of the night; going | to have to see if I can get a cab or something at 4am." You give | them a chance to _offer_ help, but don't create an expectation. | DoreenMichele wrote: | The formal terms for this difference are high context culture and | low context culture. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c... | | "Guess" culture would correspond to high context culture. You | need to have a lot of shared context -- or be able to read a lot | of clues to the context -- to infer what was really meant as a | means to be adequately polite. | | "Ask" culture would correspond to low context culture. It is | often characterized as "rude" by outsiders but is also pro- | diversity, such as New York City and American military culture. | | Some people can navigate either type of culture, assuming they | know what type of culture they are dealing with. Others assume | the world works one way or the other and default to whichever one | they grew up with, most likely. | outsidetheparty wrote: | The original MetaFilter comment lays the idea out in a much more | balanced way than this article does, imo. The discussion of the | idea here looks to be well on its way to mirroring that on | MetaFilter (Ask vs Guess became a major part of that site's | culture, it came up in quite a few threads over time.) | | https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet... | | (To me the most interesting thing about the concept is that you | can immediately tell from people's reaction to it which category | they personally fall into.) | JadeNB wrote: | > (To me the most interesting thing about the concept is that | you can immediately tell from people's reaction to it which | category they personally fall into.) | | It reveals things about other people, but also about oneself. | For example, I always assumed that people were just _afraid_ to | ask and answer questions honestly; until I read that post, I | was not aware that there was any cultural choice being made. | And so I learned that, partly through upbringing and partly | through choice, I was an Asker; but that people who were | Guessers were operating on an equally sound footing to mine, | just from very different assumptions. | outsidetheparty wrote: | Definitely! | | The original post and discussion was an eye-opener for me; | before that I never understood why some people would say | "yes" to a request but then act put upon anyway, or would act | vaguely like they wanted something but never actually come | out and say so. I just thought they expected everyone to be a | mind-reader. | | Once I understood they were basing things on the premise that | putting someone in a position of having to say "no" was rude, | it all made a lot more sense, and I was able to adjust my own | behavior and expectations to better fit theirs. | jancsika wrote: | One distinction: "guess culture" isn't easy to discern from low- | self-esteem culture. But "ask culture" isn't easy to discern from | narcissist culture. | | Service people have to cater to the lowest common denominator. | Serving low-self-esteem culture just means doing the same kind of | customer service one would do anyway: be clear, assure and | reassure, be positive, listen closely, be understanding, | consistent, etc. | | Serving a narcissist is a completely different category: predict | bad faith misinterpretations of your positive statements and | sensible responses to them, low-key reject 2nd and 3rd attempts | at bad faith misinterpretations, ignore ad hominem attacks, | intuit whether their friends acknowledge the narcissism, know | when to (quickly) turn them over to a manager, etc. | | Consequently, some members of the "ask" group preface everything | they ask with politeness or some other obvious tell to | distinguish themselves. But the rest are jerks, IMO. They want to | pretend that randomly requesting a free desert at an Applebee's | is just a case of, "If you don't ask you won't know." But at the | _moment_ of asking, the server has to assume they are a | narcissist and up their stress level accordingly. At least in | America, there 's no way you can be adult age without having | witnessed narcissists making rando requests so that they can take | out their stress/anger on service people. Given that knowledge, | it's not a matter of culture-- it's just plain stubbornness and | selfishness. | Tronno wrote: | I disagree with the way these behaviors are portrayed as a | cultural dichotomy. To me, the author's examples all fall under | ineffective communication. | | Their example of "ask culture" involves stoking resentment by | making unreasonable requests. This can be avoided by practicing a | little empathy. Ask questions, provide some basic context, and | offer an escape hatch: "What are you busy with? I need X because | Y. It's fine if you can't, I can also get it from Z". | | Their example of "guess culture" sounds like mind-reading and | ambiguous non-verbal signaling, maybe even to the point of being | passive aggressive. Again, use empathy. Volunteer information | that others might want to know. Be genuinely curious, ask | questions. _Communicate_. | | Make sure both parties know enough to make informed decisions. | caminante wrote: | As posted above, the dichotomy is "popsci" fiction with little | substantiation.[0] | | Yet, I think it's useful for awareness. | | [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low- | context... | silisili wrote: | I tend to agree. I'm very much in the 'guess' camp by | description, personally. I would never ask for something unless | I found it reasonable and not difficult for the other. | | However, when someone asks me something I don't want to do, I | just say no, and don't think much more about it. | posterboy wrote: | One could argue that guessing _correctly_ does minimize the | inefficient communication. | | I'm not sure this joke is appropriate: Man and wife sleep in | separate beds, the wife says. A friend asks, so how do you ... | you know? If he wants to, he whistles. And if you want to? | Well, I go over and ask if he whistled. | samus wrote: | > Ask questions, provide some basic context, and offer an | escape hatch: "What are you busy with? I need X because Y. It's | fine if you can't, I can also get it from Z". | | The escape hatch could also just be a mere formality, | especially when there is a difference in power dynamics or | social rank. This is amplified in cultures where, for example, | the opinions and needs of elders rank higher. | visitect wrote: | This makes sense to me. I appreciate when somebody communicates | their needs in a straightforward way, but also demonstrates an | understanding that I might not be able (or willing) to | accommodate them. I try to practice this when asking for help. | Be clear, but empathetic. And I don't get angry if folks can't | help, and remember that everybody has far more going in their | lives than what I can see. | crawfordcomeaux wrote: | Would someone explain the difference between codependency and | "guess culture"? | prewett wrote: | Codependency is when one person gets value for solving other | people's problems for them ("saving" them), and the other | person gets value out of having their problems being solved by | other people (having a "savior"). | | Guess Culture is more of a strong value on considering the | needs of others. It _could_ be unhealthy: considering the needs | of others and neglecting your own, but it could also be | courteous consideration ( "they just got over being sick, I | won't ask them to help me move"). | | I suppose Guess Culture unhealthiness tends to be more | neglecting your own needs and desires (and the your resulting | hurt and anger that the other person needs to deal with), while | Ask Culture unhealthiness tends more towards lack of | consideration (ridiculous asks) or demanding (asks that have a | question mark but are not really questions). | wheelerof4te wrote: | No one will guess for you what your needs or reasons for doing | something are. You have to let them know. | | The hard part is knowing when and how to ask your question. | darchws wrote: | As someone coming from a 'guess culture' and having a manager | from an 'ask culture,' one major problem I am having is not being | able to say 'no' to my manager. My manager always emphasizes the | importance of asking things around rather than expecting people | to just know how to help you. I know he also just asks me with | the expectation that I could say no, but I always feel like | letting him down if I say no. Therefore, I tend to overcommit to | things and work overtime. This looks good on performance (I | always got good feedback), but I'll probably burn out at some | point if I cannot get this communication right. | sikkolata wrote: | Life is already too hard, let's not bother ourselves by being | have to "guess" something. | EdgeExplorer wrote: | I think awareness is the main point here. | | At some level, it doesn't actually matter if these labels are | correct or generalize a culture or anything else. It does matter | if people genuinely feel the things described and if other people | are genuinely unaware of those feelings. | | We are each inherently limited in our perspective by being an | individual. It's helpful to be exposed to other ways of thinking, | and it's helpful to have ways of conceptualizing differences in | thinking for future reference. | | "Ask/guess" doesn't have to be *true*, it just has to be useful | as a heuristic. | nostrademons wrote: | I've also heard of "Tell" culture. To use the moving example: | | You call up your best friend and say, "Hey, I'm moving on | Saturday, come over and help me." Your friend either says "Sure, | I'd love to" or "Sorry, got a hot date, catch you at your | housewarming party." | | Ironically, Ask culture is usually used in transactional settings | where you barely know someone, Guess culture is usually used in | smaller community settings where you have a lot of personal | context, but Tell culture (which is a level beyond Ask in | directness) is usually used _in intimate settings where you have | a strong bond with someone_ - either family or very close | friends. At that level of intimacy, it 's expected that someone | can say no to a direct request without hurting the relationship. | It's the same reason close friends frequently make fun of each | other or horse around in mock physical combat - it demonstrates | that your relationship is strong enough that insult doesn't hurt | it. | hosh wrote: | Also, in certain groups, people will deliberately troll each | other in order suss out how they'd act under pressure... and | whether they can be trusted to perform as part of a team under | pressure. | gottorf wrote: | Hazing is the term. | watwut wrote: | Hazing is about proving your lack of boundaries and proving | you are easy to make do what told. It is about picking | people who won't tell "no" and will act as enablers when | needed. | | Which is why well run organizations do not engage in | hazing. While organizations that do it tend to be the ones | engaged in bullying in general - whether internal or | external. | watwut wrote: | None of that is about seeing a person under pressure, because | they do nothing useful with the information. At best, | information is ignored and at worst, used to pick bullying | targets. | snapetom wrote: | Wow, this strongly resonates with me, especially the tieback to | Asian cultures. I was both told many times, and shown by example | many times, that it was rude to put someone in awkward positions. | I still carry that to this day in personal relationships, and my | wife (white, US-born) doesn't understand why I don't just ask for | things from our families/friends, often going to great lengths to | avoid questions. | | However, at work, I am definitely an "ask" person. I'm in | engineer that has spent a lot of time with sales people. "Make | them say no" is a mantra I use at work. It's more forward, more | aggressive, and American corporate culture, often necessary. | g9yuayon wrote: | I grew up in China and the guess culture was predominant there. | It was quite a culture shock after I came to the US. In a | training session back when I was in IBM, the VP of marketing told | us a story about the ask culture: he was an American-born | Japanese. When Lou Gerstner asked him what he wanted, he | instinctively tried to be humble. Lou cut him off and said: I | can't help you if you don't tell me what you want. Come back in X | months when you know the answer. The next time they met, the VP | told Lou that he wanted to be an executive, and he got promoted | soon. Another thing I learned in the training session was that | leaders have different styles but all the executives demonstrated | only one of the four key styles: direct and decisive. | | As time went by, I found it was much easier to adapt to the ask | culture. I also found consistency matters more than the styles. | When I consistently ask with good intention, people would not | take offense. | chasing wrote: | I don't really care for the "Ask vs. Guess" framing. | | More like "make demands without considering the other person at | all vs. think for a second about not imposing yourself on other | people unnecessarily." | | But mostly this article is about the virtues of being a clear | communicator and having decent interpersonal skills, which is | neither an "ask" nor a "guess" thing. | aqme28 wrote: | I disagree with that framing even more. "Asking" is not "making | demands." Guess culture people only _think_ that asking is a | demand, because that 's Guess culture. | bitshiftfaced wrote: | It may be that both are thinking in terms of considering the | other person. People use their self as a reference point. When | you try to model in your head how someone will take your | request, you may be thinking in terms of how another _asker_ | would take being asked a request. In that case, you would think | that the other person would be fine with it, since they 're | just as comfortable with asking for things that have a low | chance of being granted. | smeej wrote: | It's telling to me that I can't tell from your reframing which | side is which. | | From my experience, I would assume the one not considering the | other person is the one in guess culture, assuming the other | person can and ought to read their mind, and the one trying not | to impose is the one who actually asks the other person for | their opinion or consent, but I can equally see it the other | way around, and think the opposite might actually be how you | meant it. | v3gas wrote: | You're clearly a Guess :) | chasing wrote: | I consider myself a staunch centrist on the "ask" vs. "guess" | scale. :-) | | I ask all the time! And I'm totally comfortable with "no." | But I try to consider the other person first because I think | making unreasonable requests _repeatedly_ , which is the | subtext of their description of an "asker," blows social | capital and just bugs people. | skeaker wrote: | I think that's a given that needn't be mentioned in the | article. The author isn't stupid, and clearly wouldn't | advocate for making outlandish or completely unreasonable | requests even for the "askers" mindset. | cogman10 wrote: | No I'm a purple personality with IRWNVDEIS+ tendencies. | yaky wrote: | Having just re-read Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, it | seems that the guess culture from the arricle would apply to | shifgrethor, a "game" of social status, where a lot is said by | omission, and giving advice is viewed as an ultimate insult. | chromoblob wrote: | Guess in an intimate relationship / communication context, Ask | anywhere else. | ImPleadThe5th wrote: | Yeah I was kinda thinking both are useful and necessary in | different contexts. Seems strange to prefer one. | ajkjk wrote: | I strongly feel this article misses the point and ends up at a | harmful framing instead. | | Consider the example in the article: "all the family members | insisted we don't drive up to visit our grandmother and see the | city instead, we did it anyway, everyone was glad we did". | | Or the next example: "with guess-culture people isn't as simple | as asking people what they want to eat for dinner, because they | will not tell you what they actually want to want to eat for | dinner." | | This person, imo, deeply does not understand what is happening in | these situations. They have a model of other people as "wanting | something but not being willing to say it", and then they solve | the puzzle of figuring out what it was, and the other person | appreciates it. But, IMO, those people didn't strongly want | something one way or the other. They're resisting an unhealthy | dynamic: that the writer just wants to know what someone _else_ | wants for dinner, but doesn 't even want something for dinner | themselves. | | What others are doing by not being willing to explicitly state | desires is they're refusing to play this game of telling you what | to do. They're doing this because it really doesn't _feel good_ | for someone to repeatedly ask you what they should do. The asker | degrades themselves by pawning their agency off on someone else, | and spending time with them begins to feel like hanging out with | a robot: soulless, scripted, perfunctory. | | That is: when you ask for permission to visit your grandmother | and then do it because people said to, or don't do it because | they didn't, you haven't demonstrated respect or kindness or | love; you haven't acted _human_ at all. You 've just performed a | mindless duty. Whereas if you decide to do it _yourself_ , | because _you_ chose to, then you 've demonstrated something. | | People are shirking at telling you what to do because they don't | want to be part of an icky transaction where somebody constantly | hands away their agency. They don't want you "guess", they want | you to stop asking for their permission to exist. | | edit: I realized there's more in the article about the workplace | and it's wrong too! This is not healthy at work, but not for the | reasons the article thinks. | | A person who goes around trying to get somebody else to tell them | clearly what to do, and never gets that and therefore thinks | they're having trouble with "ask culture", is a drain on the | organization, because the amount of work that gets done is often | proportional to _willpower_. Or call it "initiative" or | something. | | If you're leeching off other people's agency to do anything, then | you're draining their willpower and not helping much at all. | Likely they're totally exhausted of it and don't want to tell you | what to do anymore. Whereas if you start injecting willpower and | agency into the system the whole organization will pick up and | run with whatever you do (or course-correct if it's wrong, etc). | bjornlouser wrote: | > This person, imo, deeply does not understand what is | happening in these situations. | | "... But all of the older relatives insisted we did not, | suggesting that instead we see the sights in San Diego, that we | take the kids to Sea World ..." | | I think you're right. Her relatives were hoping she would guess | that they didn't want her to bring the kids. | ajkjk wrote: | Disagree; I just think this model of "guess culture" is | totally wrong. | AnimalMuppet wrote: | Very interesting. I think it's accurate, and I hadn't seen that | perspective before. | | I personally operate mostly in the ask culture. But if I meet | you, I don't know if you're in the ask or the guess culture. And | it seems to me that I kind of have to operate in the mode of the | guess culture in order to find out which you are. | duxup wrote: | My guess culture in laws will not say where they want to go for | dinner, but they will raise endless hypotheticals about where | other people might want to go, even if other people didn't say | it. | | That way the discussion never ends and we end up somewhere nobody | wants to go.... | guy4242 wrote: | I'm from a guess culture. Then I went to an ask culture area for | work (Coastal California). I had an under-powered, slow computer | that I had to work on. When my manager found out, he was mad that | I never said anything and that I never complained about it. I was | shocked that he was mad. In the more rural area I was from, it | would have been rude to complain about the tools that the company | provided for you. You were told to just "suck it up", be quiet, | and quit complaining. Those who complained too much were usually | the first to get laid-off. | draw_down wrote: | [dead] | SeanAnderson wrote: | I always liked explaining this concept in terms of Christmas. | | There are people who value getting the right gifts, tell others | verbally what they are interested in, and those people then buy | those gifts. There is very little mindreading and magic, but the | gifts almost assuredly are useful and loved. | | There are people who value the magic of Christmas gifting. | Telling others what to buy is nonsense because the point isn't | the gifts themselves but the act of gifting. The joy is in seeing | who got you a gift and what the gift says of your relationship | dynamic. | | Neither of these are wrong ways to approach Christmas, but you're | kind of a jerk if you think your vision of Christmas is the only | way. | overgard wrote: | Hmm, I know it's frowned upon generally to say one culture is | better than another, but I grew up in guess culture and I tend to | gravitate towards that naturally, but a lot of my maturing as an | adult has come from adopting more of ask culture and being more | direct. | | Guess culture sounds exhausting _because it is_. I can 't count | the number of times I've had a resentment towards someone for | something they inadvertently did without even realizing. And the | converse is just as annoying, when someone is upset at you and | you have to play 20 questions to figure it out. | | I think if you're high in agreeableness saying no to someone can | be hard, which is where guess culture comes from IMO; but on the | other hand, that's just a super important life skill even if you | are highly agreeable. | 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: | I'd like to ask a question if I may, how can you get excited | about a culture that asks to ask? | sneak wrote: | > _Deciding what to eat for dinner with guess-culture people | isn't as simple as asking people what they want to eat for | dinner, because they will not tell you what they actually want to | want to eat for dinner. They will say "oh, whatever you want," or | "whatever is easiest." And when you insist that you really really | want to know what they want to eat for dinner, and if it's too | much work, you'll do something else instead, the response you | receive will already be a compromised version of what they want, | taking into account the preferences of everyone else in the | house, what the kids will eat, and the leftovers in the fridge._ | | Man, people are so bad at communicating. | | I have found that a lot of communication from americans includes | hidden unsaid statements, which are frequently expected by the | speaker to be automatically inferred by the listener. | | Alternately, plain speaking is heard by the american listener to | imply things that may not be intended at all. | | It's somewhat baffling to me, so much so that I wrote a whole | article about it. | | https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/ | JadeNB wrote: | > Man, people are so bad at communicating. | | I don't mean to say anything about you, but, as a saying with a | different word in it goes, if you meet one person who's bad at | communicating, then they're bad at communicating; but if | everyone you meet is bad at communicating .... | | (I also wish people would communicate more clearly, but I have | to admit that what I _really_ want is that people would | communicate _in the way that 's easy for me_--I am not | operating from some absolute, logical standard. I also may be | coming from an unusual perspective because, as an academic, a | lot of my colleagues were not born in the US, so that cultural | backgrounds, and also the sometime preference in the sciences | for speaking that is direct to the point of abruptness, may | mean that I don't see the worst of what you do.) | pseudalopex wrote: | > I don't mean to say anything about you, but, as a saying | with a different word in it goes, if you meet one person | who's bad at communicating, then they're bad at | communicating; but if everyone you meet is bad at | communicating .... | | Someone told him whenever someone makes a point, he seems to | react to a very specific, narrow, and marginal interpretation | of that point. And he reacted to a very specific, narrow, and | marginal interpretation of that point. | [deleted] | gsuuon wrote: | Really interesting to see the other side - I wonder if | sometimes the perception of 'high context' vs 'low context' is | really just 'not my familiar context' vs 'my familiar context'. | | > Excuse me, ma'am. It seems to me that you're in a hurry. I | don't know how long this line will take, however, I am | reasonably certain that it will take the same amount of time | for you to reach the head of it whether you stand 5, 1, or zero | meters away from my bag, so I must request that you please stop | touching it. | | This does seem a _bit_ aggro though, a friendlier way could 've | been to assume that she wasn't aware of the bumping and so | wasn't doing it on purpose. In the US if there's a gap in a | line and folks aren't closing it, that itself can be seen as | rude and not paying attention (whether it makes sense or not is | another matter). My personal guess is it comes from being | stopped at green lights where cars in front stay parked and | then you end up catching the red. | daotoad wrote: | Speaking as an American the bit that seems over the top is | the ""5, 1, or 0 meters" bit. It comes off as condescending. | At least from another American. I've known a few Germans and | this sort of comment seems much more acceptable to them. I | think it's seen as "this is my reasoning, with it you can | better evaluate the validity of my request". | | Simply saying "please stop touching my luggage" is what I | would expect. Adding any reasoning or explanation increases | the emotional stakes and gives more places for people to | infer subtext. | | I appreciate the directness of simply backing your request | with clear assertions as to why it is reasonable. Despite | this, it does feel a bit odd to hear. | harrylove wrote: | I love seeing the world through new frames like this. I think | it's refreshing, and forces a rethink of what I think I know. | | At the same time, without a critical examination of the idea, | these things have a nasty habit of becoming the next | pseudoscience, like Myers-Briggs, learning styles, growth | mindset, and the like. | | Identifying yourself or someone else as an Asker vs. Guesser to | explain behavior is about as helpful as identifying yourself as a | Sagittarius or Capricorn. Fun to think about occasionally, but no | basis in fact. | protastus wrote: | Very interesting framing for tension I experience as a manager, | but never saw formalized. | | At work, ask culture puts higher burden on managers. Especially | when requests cross the line into unreasonable territory, and the | manager has to study the problem with objectivity, and politely | articulate why the request cannot be granted. | | Example: request for time off overlaps with important | deliverables due by the requester. In guess culture, the | requester studies their schedule and does not make a request if | there's a conflict. In ask culture, the requester asks anyway and | if the manager approves, they have now entangled the manager into | what could be a bad business decision. | darkwater wrote: | How questions/requests work in the Mediterranean Europe: | | - Hey can you do $WHATEVER for me? - Sure! - Really? Can you | really do this for me? - Well, actually I'm busy tonight so I | can't do it, sorry | | Not answering "sure" the first time? Rude. Not asking for | confirmation? Rude. | mvnuweucxqokii wrote: | I think I default more to guess culture? I certainly don't ask | for help much--almost never--but I think that might be because | I'm very independent. My personal problem with ask culture is | when the relationship becomes very asymmetrical. Some ask culture | people that I know will freely make requests all the time. In | their minds, I assume, they'll get me back _when I ask for it_. | The problem is that I don 't ask for help, so instead I will help | them out a dozen times in a row, my frustration building all the | time, my opinion of them tending toward "freeloader". | | My relationships that work well have a very strong unstated | premise of turn-taking. If my friend paid for lunch last time, of | course I'm getting it this time, and vice-versa--to me that's | just obvious. If I stay at someone's house while traveling, it | goes without saying that I will host them at my house (or return | the favor in some other way of equivalent value) before imposing | on them again. | sourcepluck wrote: | Did no-one else cringe at the gargantuan oversimplifications | necessary to keep this alleged cultural distinction afloat? | | Was no-one else a little queasy seeing a U.S. person talk about | the entire continent of Asia - pushing towards 4.8 billion people | - as if they were an easily generalisable singular entity? | | Seems utterly nuts to me. Perhaps it's related to the feeling | U.S. people sometimes seem to have that they aren't just the | centre of the world, but actually in some sense literally the | whole world. Or something else, I don't know. | charlieroth wrote: | As a person from the US who recently moved to Sweden, this | article has finally given me some words to explain the cultural | "clash" I experience at work that I could never quite explain to | myself or others. | willsmith72 wrote: | I felt this a lot as an Australian living in Germany. It's really | refreshing knowing someone will tell you what they honestly want, | and takes a while to get used to saying "no". Once you realise | it's not offensive to say no in "ask culture", I actually think | it's preferable, but I don't think I'll ever be completely | comfortable doing the "asking". | rconti wrote: | > Western society is very much ask culture. | | I want to push back on this, but since I was raised in the US, I | don't feel like I have a leg to stand on. Perhaps it's _more_ ask | culture than the Japanese, but I still feel like it 's very | heavily on the Guess side. | | This all resonates with me, though, because I haven't grown up | saying "no". My parents didn't ask much of me, but it didn't | cross my mind to say no to any request. | | I have an in-law who feels extremely free to ask for unreasonable | things, and it's extremely hard to manage. | | I think the comments in this piece about how the business world | works are the most insightful to me here. A good read. | brandonmenc wrote: | My family is American. My mom is "guess culture" and my dad is | "ask culture", both to an extreme. They were both born and | raised in the same town and have nearly identical ethnic and | socioeconomic backgrounds. | | Not sure what goes on in other countries, but it's dealers | choice here in the States imo. | bb123 wrote: | I feel like British politeness is a huge counterpoint to this. | kdmccormick wrote: | To be completely anecdotal: I grew up, live, and work in | northeastern US, which according to this comment section seems | to be as ask-culture as it gets, but when I work with Europeans | I feel like _I 'm_ the one bumbling around with assumptions and | implicit context, whereas they are more comfortable plainly | asking for what they need and politely saying no. | | (Or maybe it's function of who I work with from each continent? | I work with a range of seniority levels in the US, but the | European engineers I get to work with tend to be on the more | senior side, and I imagine western business experience and ask- | culture-adeptness are corollated). | samus wrote: | As an American interacting with Europeans in the US, you are | more in tune with the local culture than them. They are | probably aware that things are different from what they are | used to, thus Europeans (really, most outsiders) are more | likely to be up front when communicating with Americans. | jzb wrote: | I think "western society" is way too broad a brush. Within the | U.S. there's extremes between ask and guess, IME. (Some of that | is breaking down due to mobility... regional differences are | much less pronounced these days, I think, especially in cities, | since there's so much cross-pollination.) | bityard wrote: | Yeah, I feel like the point of the article was to recognize | that there are two sides to the framework with strong traits | on each end, but that most social interactions do (and | should) happen somewhere in the middle. The trouble tends to | crop up when two people who both away from the center in | opposite directions try to interact. (which can happen even | in well-established relationships.) | bee_rider wrote: | We've got some regional variation in the US, maybe this could | be one thing that varies? | | New Englanders are famously less-chatty, but also quite direct, | so I'm not sure exactly how to map it to this ask/guess thing. | I think specifically the Yankee subculture tends toward guess. | munificent wrote: | I don't think you can make many country-wide generalizations | about this. My experience is that it varies widely by: | | * Region | | * Socioeconomic status | | * Invidual psychology | | The strongest "ask culture" people I've seen are poor people | with good self esteem who grew up in historically poor areas | like the South and stayed there. These people have a natural | sense of "we have to take care of each other", a long-term | commitment to their community, and an automatic understanding | that they have helped many others before and thus deserve help | in return. | | The strongest "guess culture" people I've seen are wealthy | insecure people that have moved around a bunch. They are | financially secure enough to not need help most of the time, | and expect others to also take care of themselves. They don't | have the kind of long-term roots that make reciprocity feel | natural. At the same time, they do want connection and | community, so they work hard to try to understand the implicit | needs and desires of the other guess culture people around them | so that they can be helpful. | | I'm definitely very far onto the guess culture side, but I know | that I would be healthier if I could be more ask culture. | ecairns wrote: | This seems very insightful to me. I think I'm another data | point that mostly fits your observations. | | Individual psychology definitely plays a huge role with me | personally being on the far side of guess culture. I have | pretty extreme social anxiety and the idea of asking someone | for something fills me with dread every single time. Not | because it shows weakness (I think), but because I don't want | to impose on others. Asking someone I don't know for | something is almost impossible. I can barely do it in a | context where it's expected, like customer service. | | I'm not wealthy, but I have moved around a bunch, especially | as a child. I'd absolutely help out anyone who asked for it, | but also try anticipate the needs of others. | candybar wrote: | I would go even further - it's complete nonsense. I'm going to | guess the author never wondered why Americans feel | uncomfortable asking for a discount at a store and would rather | just not buy when they would've happily bought it at half the | price, whereas in many parts of Asia, it's common for customers | to ask for what seem like outrageous discounts to a westerner. | Norms are highly contextual - in every culture there are things | you can ask for and there are things you can't - and there's | huge individual variation in the willingness to adhere to norms | and the willingness to make others uncomfortable to get what | you want. | | > [Because of something something Asian culture] My parents | rarely had to make explicit asks of me, | | It baffles me how anyone with any kind of awareness could write | this. | hgsgm wrote: | Why do people reblog old tropw essays, and why do they get | upvoted? | | Such a waste of energy to prop up someone's attempt to build a | personal brand. | | Cite your sources and contribute something new, or just share the | more original link. | gkoberger wrote: | This is one of those things that when I read it the first time | years ago, it genuinely changed my life. It made me understand | half the population. The way the two types interact is so | poignant. | galaxyLogic wrote: | Isn't it always better to try to guess how others might feel | about your request, and not make it if you think there is a | chance it would make people not answer your phone-call the next | time? | | It feels especially bad when I think somebody may be trying to | take advantage of me being a nice person. | | Confidence men - isn't that what this is all about? Somebody | wanting to gain your confidence (that they will somehow pay yo8u | back) so then they can take advantage of you? | [deleted] | lairv wrote: | The article make it look binary when in reality everyone is | guessing to a certain degree. No one has ever come up to me in | the street and asked for $1000. Everyone is guessing up to a | point, but when there's too much incertitude, some decide to ask | while others think it's better not to | jzb wrote: | "It's rude to put someone in a position where they have to say no | to you" | | I feel this in my bones. When I was a kid my dad _went off_ on me | after we visited someone 's house and I saw cake on the counter | and asked for a slice. That was just unacceptable. (Context: He | was raised by people who lived through the depression. Food | scarcity was a real thing in living memory.) | | Even though his reaction was way overboard, I still believe this. | Let people offer things, don't ask. (With a lot of caveats | depending on context...) | wccrawford wrote: | While I was studying Japanese, I learned that they go out of | their way to make it so the other person doesn't have to refuse | with a "no". For instance, they'll ask, "Do you not have X?" | instead of "Do you have X?" The person can answer "Yes, we | don't have it" or "It's over here". | | I actually made this mistake, asking for a product directly | instead of negatively, when I was in Tokyo. The clerk took me | to the aisle and said, "If we had it, it'd be here." And there | was no space for it. Took me a couple times to realize what had | happened. | alexjm wrote: | I've heard that the "do you not have" phrasing was used in | polite Soviet-era Russian, leading to a joke about a customer | who walks into a shop and sees all the shelves are empty: | | - Excuse me, do you not have any bread? - Sorry, this is a | butcher's shop. We don't have any meat. The bakery is across | the road. They're the shop that doesn't have any bread. | sircastor wrote: | There may be an obvious language barrier here, but the | coupling of a positive with a negative response feels very | odd to me in English. I'm reminded of the old song (it was | used for an advertising jingle for a product or company I | can't remember) "Yes, we have no bananas!" | | Adjacently, I really dislike the courtroom phrasing "Isn't it | true?" that is sometimes depicted in legal dramas. | reddit_clone wrote: | Indeed. | | >"Do you not have X?" | | In my head it sounds belligerent and accusatory. While the | other form sounds polite. | | This negative phrasing to induce a positive response, may | be a Japan only thing? | galaxyLogic wrote: | It's interesting, it somehow means you are agreeing with | them if they don't have it, so they don't have to feel so | bad about not having it. | contravariant wrote: | It's probably more like "You wouldn't happen to have any | X?". I assume the idea is that you put the emphasis on | the asker being the one to ask a silly question if they | indeed don't have it. | | Maybe it also helps that all the sentence markers that | make a sentence polite, negative, interrogative all get | added on to the end (to the verb) in japanese, which | probably makes the construction slightly less awkward. In | this case it may go something like motsu (to have) -> | mochimasu (to have, polite) -> mochimasen (to not have, | polite) -> mochimasenka (to not have, polite, | interrogative). | | I'm making a lot of assumptions here though, I don't know | if this is anywhere close to correct. | pulsarmx wrote: | "Do you guys not have phones?" | tempestn wrote: | And a polite way to do this is to suggest the thing you want, | rather than directly asking for it. You could complement the | cake - oh, that looks delicious; what's the occasion? Or, "I'm | moving next weekend - looking forward to the new place, but | it's going to be a big job!" It is uncomfortable being asked | something that you have to say no to, but that doesn't mean we | have to just hope people will guess our needs unassisted. | tomjakubowski wrote: | In "guess culture" they can't offer you help unless they're | certain you won't decline the offer. So they'd have to figure | out first if you're hiring movers, and if not ascertain | whether you already have enough friends helping you, and if | not _then_ they'd offer to help you. | | I agree with the other commenters who say that guess culture | is exhausting. | tempestn wrote: | Maybe that's how it works somewhere, but it's hard for me | to imagine. It can definitely be an imposition to _ask_ | someone directly for help moving, as indeed they might feel | obligated to agree. But it seems much less likely in a | real-world context that offering someone your help would | oblige them to accept. It's perfectly reasonable to explain | that you have it worked out already, so you appreciate the | offer but it's not necessary. | | "Guess culture" could certainly be exhausting if you over- | complicate it like that, but it's not necessary. | njharman wrote: | I'm not spending game night constantly asking all my guests all | the possible things (water, caffeine, booze, food, bathroom, | chair, cushion, warmer, colder, more light, less light, music, | different music, louder music, quieter music, pet my dog, etc, | etc, fucking etc). If you want something, YOU ask for it, which | is polite. | chromoblob wrote: | And miss out a lot... | jzb wrote: | I can honestly say I don't regret a policy of not asking | people for things in general. If somebody wants me to have | some of their cake, or whatever, then I'm usually happy to | accept. But I can't think of a time when I am like "gee, I | missed out by not asking for that thing." | ddbb33 wrote: | The cake could also be asking for a raise, or a discount, | really any other any opportunity that's not as low-stakes | as an item of food | voxl wrote: | I suppose different people will have different tastes, but I | will never agree that this is rude and that you should not ask. | You should not be upset when declined, but that is another | matter. | jzb wrote: | The problem is that people _do_ get upset. Basically, you 're | forcing someone else to be the asshole by saying no or | justify why they don't want to share or do something. | | Rudeness is, of course, a subjective thing. Some people think | it's rude to wear shoes indoors, some people think it's rude | to make specific gestures that are either OK or meaningless | to me. | | My wife is an asker. It's a definite challenge at times... | galaxyLogic wrote: | The rude thing is to not offer any reward in return for | you, if you agree to their request. | | It's just saying they want to take advantage of you if you | fall for it. Making such a request means that they are | happy to take advantage of you as long as you let them. Is | that unethical? | | Think of it this way: You own a truly valuable stamp but | you don't know its value. Then somebody who knows its value | offers to exchange it for their stamp of much lesser value, | without telling you what they know about its value. | | It may not be unethical, businesses are based on such | behavior. Buy low and sell high to make a profit. But when | you see such behavior by your friends or neighbors or | colleagues, be aware. They are the kind of people who are | happy to take advantage of you. | [deleted] | retrac wrote: | That may work relatively well with consumables like food. But | it extends in many directions. I have fans and a space heater | and extra blankets and etc. All of them are available for a | houseguest to use. Many of them are stored in the guest room. | | I've had "guess culture" people stay over. Really, in my mind | they don't even need to ask. They're already welcome to take an | extra blanket. But they won't even ask, and they certainly | wouldn't presume. They are indeed waiting on me to say "oh, if | you're warm the fan can be plugged in, and there's some extra | blankets in the closet if you want". Though in my mind, I don't | need to say that. And if I don't say it they may go very | uncomfortable. | | I'm most used to giving such reassurances to children, and to | give them to adults seems a little infantilizing. But that's my | relatively "ask culture" background in action, probably. | jzb wrote: | Well, exactly - it's about things like consumables where | you're asking to take something. For example, "may I have a | glass of water?" would have been fine with my dad. (And it | was drummed into me it's rude _not_ to offer somebody at | least a glass of water when they 're in your house!) | | Basic comfort items where you're not using up someone's | limited resources == no problem. | themodelplumber wrote: | That's a great example. Unfortunately it's also not super | helpful to dichotomize the difference, because most people | are a mix of both in different ways. | | For example, under extreme stress or illness, a lot of "ask" | people will turn into "guess what I want or life hates me" | people. | | And it's not exactly unheard of for guessers to turn into | power-trippers under stress and become over-direct when just | a little bit of directness is a better idea. | | Sometimes guessers even use this entire us-them concept as a | way to subtly preach to askers, but really it's a two-way | street. If you've ever lived or worked under an unethical or | abusive guesser, you may have developed a very strong sense | of the hypocrisy of the "askers are blunt and mean" | comparison which often comes out in discussions with | guessers. | | Fortunately though there is a lot of nuance to work with on | both sides in most cases. (And again, dichotomizing this is | not great in so many ways) | robotresearcher wrote: | > to give them to adults seems a little infantilizing | | The 'mi casa es su casa / make yourself at home' concept is | perfectly normal and won't cause offense to anyone, surely? | 9dev wrote: | I don't think that concept in itself causes offense, but | the fact that guests often don't dare to actually live by | it and prefer to be a little cold over an extra blanket... | linuxdude314 wrote: | Are they supposed to just know the blankets are in your | closet? | dahfizz wrote: | They're supposed to ask | dack wrote: | I think someone could say they are cold and ask for more | blankets, and the owner could say they don't have any more | blankets | bena wrote: | First, you should let people know, that if they need | anything, they can ask. | | Then, there are levels. If it's just on the edge of being | colder than I'd like, I might not say anything because the | effort isn't worth it. It's 65 instead of 70, I'll live. But | if you ask me tomorrow how was it, I'll tell you, "Slightly | cooler than I'm used to, but no problem". And people will | make a fuss and say "Well, why didn't you _aaaassssk_ " | Because, like I also said, it wasn't a problem. | [deleted] | williamdclt wrote: | At the end of the day, if you're firmly on either end of the | spectrum it comes down to the same thing: you're putting all | responsibility of the social interaction on the other person. | Because your position is fixed and theirs is (possibly) not, | you're making it their fault if the communication style doesn't | work. It leads to much frustration on both sides. | | In your example, if you have a fixed position of << Let people | offer things, don't ask >>, you're putting all responsibility | on the other person: they have to adapt to your style or | they'll be the bad guy. Even though the other end of the | spectrum (<< express your desires, don't make people guess >>) | is just as self-consistent and valid. | | Camping at either end of the spectrum is putting yourself as a | victim, it's using the other person's brain rather than your | own to make the interaction pleasant. As in most things: | extremes and inflexibility don't work with the subtleties of | reality | trailingComma wrote: | It's rude to expect other people to be able guess what you | want. | | If you want something, ask me. I don't have crippling | confidence issues so saying no is not a problem for me. | sneak wrote: | All good and meaningful relationships involve give and take, | and sometimes saying no, so this reduces to "it's rude to have | close human relationships with people" (because close human | relationships necessarily involve sometimes saying no). | | There is an argument that such a worldview is slightly | pathological. | jzb wrote: | As I said upthread - lots of caveats and it's context | dependent. For one thing, this usually assumed there _was | not_ a "close human relationship" but social situations | where you aren't that close. | | It has to be _OK_ to say no. In many scenarios or cultures it | is considered rude to say no. So if you 're not able to | gracefully say no without being considered rude, it's | correspondingly rude to _ask_ because you 're basically | saying "do this for me or else you're rude." | | It's not an ask at that point, it's a demand. If I'm the | asshole if I say no, then I don't want to be asked the | question in the first place. | samus wrote: | There are ways around that, by phrasing questions in a | different way so the other person does not have to respond | with a hard "no". Yes, this requires prior acquaintance with | that communication culture, and integration by relative | outsiders can be difficult. | wrboyce wrote: | Sorry but this is bullshit and putting the onus on the | wrong person. "No" is a complete sentence and I don't see | the problem with using it, if you do (after say, I've asked | for you a slice of cake) but can't think of another | phrasing ("I'm afraid not", "maybe after you dinner", "ask | your father"; there are endless possibilities - especially | when dealing with children) then the issue is your | vocabulary, and not my failure to bend over backwards | phrasing the question so do you don't have to say the, | apparently dreaded, word "no". | samus wrote: | I guess that is your background from a more "ask"-like | culture speaking, where things are put out more | explicitly. Meanwhile "guess"-like cultures value | "getting along" more highly and try to avoid the hard | "no". Yes, this often stems from different underlying | value systems that we might perceive as toxic. | gopher_space wrote: | My grandmother said you'd offer food to guests because you knew | they were hungry and they'd refuse because they knew you didn't | have enough for yourself. If you actually had enough food for a | meal you needed to convince your houseguest. | NeoTar wrote: | Isn't this just a manifestation of high-context versus low- | context cultures? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- | context_and_low-context... | jedberg wrote: | Yes, it's just another name for that. | | But this article paints high-context as bad and low-context as | good, when they're really just different (and opposite ends of | a spectrum, not a black or white one or another). | bryanlarsen wrote: | Does it? That's not what I got from the article at all. | | The author is from a "guess" culture trying to operate in an | "ask" culture world. She's adapting, but not because any | particular culture is better than the other, but because | "when in Rome, do as the Romans do". | jedberg wrote: | Multiple times it mentions that "guess culture" is | frustrating and difficult, and that she and her brother | prefer ask culture because it's easier. | samus wrote: | "Ask" culture is prevalent in places where people come | from diverse backgrounds. Cultures might also not be | uniformely "ask" or "guess" across all topics. Therefore, | when people with different value systems and | communication cultures meet, "guess" culture simply | doesn't work because other person's needs and intentions | are often unexpected. | xeromal wrote: | This comment is astute. Homogenous vs heterogenous | cultures. What flies in Los Angeles will not fly in | Tokyo. | IshKebab wrote: | It's definitely bad in a work context where clear and | effective communication is important. | | You're probably thinking "but implicit communication is just | as effective!" but it definitely isn't. It's all about hints | and guessing motivations which is inevitably unreliable. | caminante wrote: | These are always fun "pop-sci" discussions, but the wiki | says this whole dichotomy has been debunked [0]. | | I can't think of any company that doesn't have some low- | context interfaces. It can be expensive for top executives | to constantly address every question with "clear and | effective communication." Some people make it look easy, | but it's hard! | | [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low- | context... | harrisi wrote: | Your link doesn't say "this whole dichotomy has been | debunked." From one of the sources: But | the fact that contexting has not been empirically | validated should not necessarily be construed as a | failure of the theory. ... Nonetheless, the contexting | model simply cannot be described as an empirically | validated model. | | Which explicitly does not debunk it, but states that it's | not empirically validated. That doesn't mean it's | incorrect, although it could be. | caminante wrote: | Good point on nuance on a technical level, i.e., debunked | != failure to support relationship. | | However, on a practical level, people throw this around | as if it were empirically supported (which doesn't seem | to be the case). If there have been hundreds of studies | failing to make the connection, I won't take the bet that | it will eventually get validated. | | On a meta-level, that's also a weird quote. | | _> But the fact that contexting has not been empirically | validated should not necessarily be construed as a | failure of the theory_ | | Pick any theory. If you can't validate it, and plenty of | people have tried to validate it, then that's a failure | of the theory, right? | IshKebab wrote: | > Pick any theory. If you can't validate it, then that's | a failure of the theory, right? | | Definitely not. There are a ton of theories that are very | difficult to validate because you simply can't run the | experiment due to practical or ethical reasons. That | doesn't mean they are invalid. | | For example my theory that UBI is unworkable. Basically | impossible to prove because it's just too expensive to | ever run a _real_ UBI experiment. | | Or the theory that eugenics would decrease genetic | illnesses. Good luck testing that! | | Even a lot of basic and fairly self evident stuff is | difficult to actually prove when it involves people. Are | the gender biases of children (toy preferences etc) | innate? They definitely are but it's very difficult to | actually test. | caminante wrote: | _> There are a ton of theories that are very difficult to | validate because you simply can 't run the experiment due | to practical or ethical reasons._ | | But they HAVE run high/low context experiments. | | _> For example my theory that UBI is unworkable. | Basically impossible to prove because it 's just too | expensive to ever run a real UBI experiment._ | | Are you referring to Universal Basic Income? If so, | countless experiments have been run. [0] | | [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_p | ilots#... | carabiner wrote: | I worked at an Indian tech consulting firm. Even though | India is considered a high context culture, our working | environment felt fully low context with endless meetings | trying to get all stakeholders on the same page, clearing | out assumptions, nailing down timelines and aligning | resources. When I moved to a normal US company it felt | like downright mind reading how we got shit done much | faster because we did have a much larger shared context. | So it's all relative and I bet American culture feels | like high context to others, and those guys are | astonished we can work without more hashing out than we | do. | caminante wrote: | I agree. | | I was critiquing the parent and indirectly asking for an | example of a firm that has *ONLY* "high context." Things | become very abstract with unwritten rules as you move up | the org chart. | opportune wrote: | I think what makes the topic complicated is that the high | vs low context dichotomy is actually split across | multiple dimensions rather than being an overarching | single dimension. | | For example, in educated coastal-liberal California | asking for favors or for hospitality (eg can I get a | glass of water) is low context but certain topics like | religion or most politically controversial things are | generally off limits. Conversely in the South, | hospitality has a decent number of high context | expectations, but religion or political discussion are | more acceptable for discussion. And of course every | culture has common cultural/historical references that | are implicitly known and sometimes implicitly referenced | without explicitly making the reference or expanding on | all the details. | | That's why I think a lot of cultures see themselves as | low context compared to others, except perhaps the most | pathologically high context ones (Japan), because we all | have blind spots about where we're actually high context. | opportune wrote: | Mm, not necessarily all work contexts IMO, I just think | it's particularly helpful in software because software | itself is highly semantic and software teams tend to not | all come from the same exact background. | | If you were doing something like sales, where both all your | salesmen and clients were locals with the same social | expectations on how to communicate implicitly, there | wouldn't be any direct benefits to trying to communicate | explicitly, and doing so may come across as rude or | offensive. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-18 23:00 UTC)