One aspect of that which is interesting is that what the article calls "Guess culture" is fundamentally exclusionary. If you aren't initiated into how the signalling system works by an insider or in a position of sufficient stability to fail socially many times there isn't a good way to break in. That gives the culture a lot of interesting properties that promote its ability to identify and coordinate against out-groups (which to the people involved would manifest as a "these barbarians just don't know how to be polite and we can't work with them"). One of those adaptions that is a bit crazy in the micro (could just ask for what they want, geeze) but makes a lot of sense in the macro.
It's a matter of different protocols, not exclusivity. An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients.
The way to deal with it is having some kind of handshake that indicates what protocol is being used.
> An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients.
The metaphor might be a bit strained, because a congestion protocol is fundamentally determining the system state by testing it with an optimistic request for what the client wants then responding based on the server answer or lack thereof. Which is to say, the typical asker strategy.
Having a protocol at all might be more of a guesser thing though - good luck getting to index.html by sending "Hey my server friend can I have a copy of index.html pls?" to port 80 in with netcat. Very clear request, unlikely to get much consideration by nginx even if it is willing to hand over the page.
And, importantly, there isn't one single "guess culture"; there are a myriad of different micro-cultures with their own local signals and codes for subtly communicating the information that isn't spelled out in speech.
So even if you are a consummate Guesser, and have been one all your life, if you move across the country (or even just across town!) and find yourself in a group with a different set of Guessers, you may be nearly as badly off as if you were an Asker in that subculture.
As usual, if both sides exist, it's because they both provide benefits. The guessers' benefits are just not obvious at first glance.
Taleb has a nice bit on that, explaining that if something exists for long, it must have enduring beneficial properties, and if you think it's stupid, you are the one having a blind spot.
Dawkins led to the same conclusion: stuff that works stays and multiplies. You may not like it, but nature doesn't care what you think.
It's true for entities, systems, traits, concepts...
Everyone mocks Karens, until your flight is delayed and that insufferable lady tires up the staff so much that everyone gets compensation.
I dislike lying but it works, and our entire society is based on it (but we call it advertising).
Don't like mysandry? Don't understand why nature didn't select out ugly people? Think circumcision is dumb?
All those things give some advantages in some context, to such an extend it still prospers today.
In fact, several things can be true. Something can be alienating, and yet give enough benefits that it stays around.
A huge number of things are immoral, create suffering, confusion, destruction, even to the practitioner themselves, and yet are still here because they bring something to the table that is just sufficient to justify their existence.
See your friend making yet again a terrible love choice, getting pregnant, and stuck with a baby and no father? From a natural selection standpoint, it could very well be a super successful strategy for both parties. The universe doesn't optimize for our happiness or morality.
Enduring survival properties aren't the same as enduring beneficial properties. Feudalism and slavery stuck around for quite a long time and were mostly forced out against their will.
I found this 10+ years ago, and it was one of the most important things I ever read. As a consummate Guesser, it reframed my perspective completely. I started to be much happier and understanding with Askers.
I also realized how frustrating, as a Guesser, I could be to Askers, and shifted more toward being clear about what I want or need.
My family is almost 100% Asker. When I got to college, I drove Guessers nuts. They thought I was so selfish and would blow up at me (from my perspective) out of nowhere.
"No" is always a perfectly fine and polite answer from my perspective
Guessers don't believe Askers are asking in bad faith at all. If Guessers did believe that, it would be way easier for them to say no to Askers. It's precisely because the Guesser believes in the sincerity of the request that it becomes painful to deny it.
Indeed. It's the immediate assumption that since you're asking me, it must be important to you - otherwise you wouldn't be asking in the first place.
I want to be the kind of person that helps others where it matters, and here you are, asking, thus proving it matters. Refusing becomes really uncomfortable, so I'd rather go out of my way to make it possible for me to agree, or failing that, to help your underlying need as much as I can.
I realize now this is a form of typical mind fallacy - I wouldn't ask you for something if it wasn't really fucking important or I had any other option available, therefore I naturally assume that your act of asking already proves the request is very important to you.
That's the really painful part. They ask you for something, you say 'yes' thinking it's important for the person, only to learn that it wasn't that important at all. It's like giving something that you don't want to give to someone that doesn't need it. Really annoying.
Having said that, I have become a lot better at being direct these past few years, so I'd likely just say "I'm not able to, sorry. I can recommend some good hotels though".
Default No is fine, just go with it. That’s a huge ask. It was a 2 week stay, that’s a hell no unless you’re my nuclear family then maybe we can discuss it. Even then, there’s some family I don’t want as overnight guests and I usually put up in a nearby hotel when they visit.
No reason to feel guilty saying no when the ask is that large. I feel bad sometimes saying no to small things. Because it’s trivial on the surface and I don’t have a good reason for saying no except I just don’t want to do it. In any case, I like treating no as my default answer to everything then I have to be convinced to say yes (even if it’s a quick internal negotiation with myself).
If you’re consistent, the most abusive askers learn not to ask. The ones that ask with expectations of a yes, the ones that try to make you feel bad for saying no, those people go away. And that’s my ideal position, I’m only being asked for reasonable things so actually end up saying yes more often than I say no.
The askers who make you feel bad don't go away. They go up your org chart or get replaced by similar if your company culture tolerates it. You're the one who goes away or settles.
You are responsible for your feelings and setting your boundaries.
Learning how to set boundaries is something most people learn as they mature. Yeah, not easy. I have especially noticed recently that some of my friends who are mums have learnt how to claim their own needs only after their kids have left home. Some people give too much.
Do you expect others to adivinate what your personal boundaries are?
Do you get frustrated when friends or family make the wrong assumptions?
If you have arseholes in your life that actually make you feel bad, then it is even more important to learn how set boundaries with them. If they don't respect the boundaries you set, or create conflict, then that is often very difficult to resolve.
I struggle with conflict avoiders because they have needs however they often act passive. Yet their hidden expectations remain, and their response if you fail to meet their expectations is often poor. One friend in particular also often guesses wrong to my detriment, instead of asking a simple question.
Do mind readers want others to read minds?
I strongly dislike passive people that blame others for their poor communications.
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I don't know where this is coming from as I didn't make these claims.
That said, your comment is disturbing.
It's a obnoxious to "strongly dislike" (read: hate) people who don't have resilient self-esteem. It lacks compassion. And if someone's bullying you, getting platitudes about "responsible for your feelings" and "boundaries" is useless.
Strongly dislike can also mean you just prefer to avoid those people or limit your interactions. It doesn’t mean hate.
If you want people like this to stop avoiding you, it’s an internal adjustment that needs to be made. That’s the responsibility for yourself part. Ignoring you is not hurting the other person one bit, actually they are benefiting from it as they skip dealing with your personality they dislike. It’s not to say they are biased against you, if you were more compatible they may change their stance without thinking about it. That wouldn’t happen if they hated you.
It's not mind reading. It's basic empathy and respect. Expecting others to understand the norms of social behavior is not smart, but it is perfectly normal. Realizing that many people lack the ability to empathize or socialize politely and dealing with that is an unfortunate consequence of modern society making travel so easy. We're all mixed up and people from totally different cultures need to learn to deal with each other.
> I strongly dislike passive people that blame others for their poor communications.
Same. I struggle with the construct specifically because I think I am both an asker and a guesser. I do agree it exists however I can’t bucket myself into either side. The approach I choose to utilize at any given time is a contextual calculation. Do I have a strong opinion? Do I have a sufficient status to assert myself? Do I not care and just want to appease the other person? Do I intentionally want to stroke their ego?
But, choose an approach and use it as a tool. Miscalculations occur leading to outcomes I may not predict or prefer sometimes but that’s just a learning experience for me. I might adjust my internal algorithm for making that calculation in the future. I might decide I just don’t like interacting with that person, and that’s fine too. But I don’t blame anyone or expect them to change for me.
Thank you for reposting this, OP. I have been (w)racking my brain trying to find this article and used HN search dozens of times. I couldn't remember what the title was, or the specific terms "ask" and "guess", so it was impossible to find.
This is one of the chief cultural differences between Southern and Northern culture.
Southerners (not transplants) will "ask" without imposition: they "ask" when giving, and "guess" when receiving.
Any inversion of these norms is an affront to "Southern hospitality" and will be met with the equivalent "Bless Your Heart".
Ask what you can do for someone, never what you can have. Assume someone will do right by you (you should never have to ask), and if they don't - people say not so nice things about those folks.
I need to articulate this better when it's not 4 AM, but it's an almost perfect descriptor of the cultural differences.
I'm pretty sure Japanese are guessers (would love to hear counter examples)
To them, the etiquette is that if you ask you've put the other person in a bind. Even if they want to say no, they feel pressure to say yes. You putting then in that situation is considered bad. So, don't ask, at least not directly. You can say "Guess what, I'll be in town next week!" and see if out of the blue they offer a place to stay. But even then there is subtly of reading between the lines, of do they actually want you to stay or are they just being polite but hope you'll read between the lines and not take them up on the offer. Generally you're supposed to refuse "Naw, I couldn't possibly stay and get in your way" and then they can come back and say "No really, it'd be great" if they really want you to stay and you might have to do this dance once or twice more to really verify it's ok.
The usual dichotomy / terminology for this stuff as it relates to painting national and business cultures with broad brushes is "high context" versus "low context". In a high context culture like Japan people would be expected to code switch between Asking and Guessing behaviors depending on their audience, relative status, social rapport, etc.
I think in Japan the culture is almost 100% Guessing.
I read this anecdote online about a US business dealing with Japanese partners (clients?). There's an item they'd like to discuss, in their regular meeting they bring it up, and the Japanese said "Hmm, this is possible. Let's discuss it next meeting.". Next meeting, they ask again, and the reply was the same. It took them a few rounds to realize that the actual (never uttered) answer is "No, this isn't possible."...
Here is my personal observation. Humans start by default as “Askers,” but society shapes them into either the “Askers” or “Guessers.” Kids don’t guess, they ask.
I have also observed that Eastern countries/regions are generally “Guessers,” while Westerners are generally “Askers.”
Growing up as an introvert, I remember many times when my guardians (uncles, aunties, grandparents, and parents) would interpret things differently than I thought they were. “My friend’s mom told me to come, play, and eat at their place today.” “No, they don’t. You need to come back after a while, not spend the whole day there.”
I learnt a lot of Guesses in school and social settings: Yes, that meant No, and Nos that were weirdly Yes, etc.
When I started working in the early 2000s, I worked with almost all US (and some UK and Australians) Companies and customers, from teachers and physicians to founders and businesspeople. Things were straightforward, “cut to the chase”, “get to the point real fast”, and the like.
Eventually, I have also worked with many Indian companies and teams. We are mostly Guessers. My colleagues and bosses have called me aside to explain the interpretation of quite a few interactions, which I thought I was doing the right thing, but I should not have (even when the clients agreed). I’ve also worked with the Japanese, and they were all Guessers to a degree, and I would love to, hopefully, take the time and effort to learn the culture a lot more.
I don't think that's the case; I have a son who has been a "Guesser" from a fairly young age, despite our family encouraging people to be "Askers" all of his siblings are "Askers" and can't understand why he won't ask for things that he wants.
For completeness sake, I should point out that most of our kids (including this one) are adopted so it's not impossible that there could be a genetic predisposition to being an asker or guesser.
I live in a Dutch community in the midwestern US, which is very much a "Guesser" culture, while our ancestors in the Netherlands are one of the most "Asker" societies. The difference is incredibly stark despite having a very similar genetic base
I think this is the correct dichotomy for the difference in cultures and better explains the Guesser vs Asker thing. High context cultures (Asia, South America, Mediterranean) tend to be Guessers because they already have the context and that context is the more important part of their communication. In low context cultures (Northern European, Russia, US) communication is more direct and words are more important than non-verbal cues.
I think there is a couple of interesting things. First, it's still somewhat orthogonal to the High context versus Low context cultures (see the Culture Map), as in you can have people with more ask versus guess culture in either communication contexts from my observations (at least among some low to mid context cultures, I don't have a lot of experience with very high context cultures).
Another way to think about it is that it's a lot more local than the broader culture of a country, down to the family level, and you can see this in the US as many commenters have reported where they grew up in various different places in the ask vs guess spectrum.
Finally, the US work environment is generally very "Ask"-leaning, in particular in Silicon Valley and it can take a significant amount of time to recognize where you have been raised on this spectrum versus what is required of you to be effective at work.
I've done a lifetime of code review over the last decade. Let me tell you, the number times I have asked what I assumed were simple yes/no questions like "Would it make sense to do X?" or even "Why did we do it this way?" in cases where I'm looking for a discussion and it's been taken as a call to action is just wild.
They're competent developers, I just want to understand the code and the context behind it. I want to understand what their thoughts were while building it. Yet so many times a simple question like "Why X and not Y?" results in the person whose code I am reviewing going ahead and refactoring the entire PR without return comment, or in rare cases getting angry with the question. We actually had a DBA with a history of flying off the handle over simple questions but from what I've heard this is common among DBAs? He eventually got let go over it.
If I wanted you to change it, I would have said so. My question is not wrapped up in insinuation or hidden intent. It's a question I want the answer to. There are no layers to the meaning. I basically never mean anything I do not explicitly say.
I have gotten so frustrated with this that I have started specifying "You can say no", "I'm just trying to understand the thought process", or "I'm just curious, no need to change it". Things I still feel like I shouldn't have to tell another person with an engineering mindset, especially someone with many years of experience.
This isn’t really a guess vs ask distinction, this is you just not understanding people. Those initial questions you asked are:
1. Often an implicit call to action from the person asking the question. Maybe YOU don’t mean it that way, but people have learned to be cautious
2. A distraction from actual work, and not worth it personally for a public discussion. Maybe the answer is “I don’t know” or “This is the fastest good-enough thing I could build to satisfy a dumb requirement”. But no one wants to say those things publicly, so they are cautious before answering
It’s especially aggravating when you get those questions from someone new in authority
The “why did we do X and not Y?” style of question is a commonly used passive aggressive crutch to tell someone to do Y instead, while attempting to not look mean/harsh. Its the same reason people use “we” in the first place.
You may not be using it this way but because many others are that’s how it’ll typically be interpreted
I agree, and why I hate that this has become a thing. I encountered the same thing as the GP which is from where my experience comes. I'd ask "Why did you choose X over Y" as I'm genuinely curious to know what tradeoffs were considered that led them to choose X. Perhaps there's something I don't know. But I also see it get used all the time to mean "you should have done Y".
The "we" stuff is similar. There was a movement several years ago to try to remove blame/harshness from the tone of code reviews, and this is what we got out of it.
I used to run into this type of problem frequently. I've found that personally adopting something like https://conventionalcomments.org really helps with ambiguity.
I think it requires emotional intelligence to know if you should ask or guess.
I've encountered a few people that just won't stop asking for unreasonable things, and it destroys the relationship very quickly, because they just won't take no for an answer. I also have one child that I used to have to firmly say "stop asking for things" once it would get out of hand.
I'm a guesser. What is the correct negative response to the asker in the article?
1. "No", without further elaboration
2. "No", followed by a graceful excuse
3. "No, I don't want you in my house because I can't be bothered to share my space with you"
I always found that 3 is too aggressive, and 1 and 2 trigger the asker working around the issue (asking why not, or trying to "solve" the graceful excuse). Being aggressive is ok, but sometimes it's bad (for example, if the balance of power is skewed in the relationship)
From the other replies in the thread, it seems like there is a contingent of people who believe that if someone doesn't take the first "no" as a final "no" then they are no-true-asker, and instead is just an asshole.
In my life I've never met an asker who took no as final. Maybe they said they respected it, but at least they wanted to understand why not and what could they do to help me make it a yes. At that point you're not just asking, you're wasting my time.
I'm born Guesser but evolved into an Asker. However, it depended on whether I was the requester or not; if I wanted to invite someone, I would try to avoid putting them in a position where they had to say "no". However, I didn't mind saying "no" myself.
I would argue with other people that it's impolite to put them in such a position as they may not like to decline.
After discussing it openly with friends and family, I realized that it was okay to say no and people wouldn't mind. This changed me into an asker.
What's funny is that my parents were askers. I guess being introverted made me more of a guesser initially.
I'm not that autistic but I simply can't deal with Guessers. The idea that I have to play some kind of 4D chess game to figure out what I am and am not allowed to ask or do makes me extremely stressed out. How am I supposed to map out the wishes and expectations and goals of everybody involved? Isn't that, in fact, borderline rude? What if I guess wrong? Everybody loses when that happens and it happens all the time.
Growing up in the east of the Netherlands made this worse; the Dutch are widely known as rude and direct (ie Askers), but in the rural east this is very much not the case. Everything there runs on a mixture of "what will the neighbours think" and "what will people expect me to do?" and it's just maddening. Fortunately I was sufficiently tone deaf as a youth to not notice when I was getting it wrong, and when I grew old enough to figure that out I moved to places where you can just ask stuff. It's nuts that such a small country can have such a widely varying cultural differences but it's very real.
I live in the south now and here I can ask everybody everything and people won't feel bad for saying no. It's lovely.
I also figured out that my mom (a total Guesser like everybody in my family) loves me even if I get this wrong! So I just began to treat her like an Asker and verrry explicitly spell out that it's totally fine to say no, no really it is, I'm not asking for a favour, I just want to know what you want, really mom it's true. It stresses her out! The idea of being asked point blank for her personal, disregard-other-people preference is just entirely outside her normal way of thinking. She has to do hard effort to disregard other people's wishes, it's just all totally mixed together in her brain. I know it's not nice of me, but the alternative is that we (my wife and I) keep getting it wrong and accidentally visit too often or too little or invite them to parties they don't want to go to and so on.
So yeah, protip for askers, treat guessers who love you as askers. They'll forgive you for it and everything else becomes easier.
That makes sense if it's in moderation. An overzealous asker can disproportionately eat up people's time. Context as to why you're asking helps set priorities.
Yeah ofc. I mean as someone who grew up in Guesser Land and got taught that it’s important to be able to read people’s minds, discovering that I can just, you know, ask, felt like a superpower. I don’t think I’m overdoing it.
I think this has a lot of truth to it, but I think it is ultimately an oversimplification or even a false dichotomy.
I was in a relationship that was constantly strained by something similar to this. My partner would never ask for help with anything and would just get frustrated when I didn't pick up on her struggling and jump in to help. Conversely, I only ask for help when I really need it but she would see me struggling and jump in, which would annoy me because I didn't ask for help.
But I'm not an asker in the sense of this article. I would never randomly ask someone to stay at someone's house, for example. This strikes me as like a child constantly testing their boundaries. I know where the boundaries are.
But, there is still some truth to it. I've often found that non-native speakers in my country tend to be askers. This can come across as quite shocking and lead one to believe, as I had, that this is actually part of their culture. But I have another theory: to be successful as a non-native you have to be an asker, because you will find it difficult or impossible to be a guesser. So it's a survivorship bias, essentially.
By the title I also thought this was going to be about another phenomenon: when given a task, some people will continue to ask for confirmation until they're confident they get it, while others will just "fill in the blanks" and deliver something, even if it's wrong. LLMs, of course, being the ultimate "guesser" in this sense.
It seems like the introvert/extrovert split, where few people are near the poles and there's a lot more going on in the middle.
E.g. I might check if someone has weekend plans before asking if I can stay with them. Or, I might ask outright, but specify it's not important, I just want to catch up, and the nearby hotel looks nice.
These seem like important differences even though they're both in the middle of ask and guess.
Yes, I don't support labelling people as one or the other, but defining and articulating the two kinds of behaviors and expectations relative to each other is incredibly useful for communication and understanding.
It’s hard to imagine what a guesser is feeling if you don’t understand the differences between their expectations and yours as an asker, and vice versa.
You are presupposing that the internet forum comment on which all this is based has correctly modelled the world and that this asker-guesser thing is indeed real.
Usually it takes one or ideally several studies, with large groups of people, with a solid hypothesis and some strong, rigorous protocol.
Until then, it's not worthless, but it's at best an inspiration.
Social stuff is rarely that easy, seducing, cute, with two clear, beautiful categories of people.
It makes sense to judge models by how useful they're in some situation, and compare them by usefulness in context[0]. It doesn't make sense to ask which is right, because they're all wrong.
Here, at least for me, but I guess(!) many other HNers, the "Askers vs. Guessers" model is very useful.
Would some RCT studies be nice? Sure. I don't expect them to prove the model to be accurate. But it doesn't have to be, that's not the point. Just pointing out that there's some variability between people along these lines is very useful.
Diverse modes loosely held, eh?
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[0] - Consider Newtonian vs. relativistic motion. The latter is more accurate and gets you better results at large scales - but in almost all circumstances in life (up to and including landing a probe on the Moon, or landing a shell in someone's back yard), the Newtonian model is much simpler and therefore much more useful.
Of course we could say that all models are "wrong" because they are simplifications of the reality. But there's wrong and wrong. We don't usually say a model like the Newtonian motion is wrong, it's not a very useful way to deal with models.
Newtonian motion has been shown to be repeatable and to accurately predict motion within limits. It has scientific backing.
The asker-guesser model isn't even shown to be a simplification of the reality. And actually, later in that High-context and low-context cultures [1] Wikipedia article:
> A 2008 meta-analysis concluded that the model was "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".
Which is scientific speak for bullshit.
There's a world between scientifically backed "wrong" Newtonian movement and random internet forum comment backed social model found to be "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".
The Newtonian movement is an evidence-backed simplification. The asker-guesser model is a persuasive illusion.
Are you really comparing some internet commenter with Newton and the broader scientific community?
> The Newtonian movement is an evidence-backed simplification. The asker-guesser model is a persuasive illusion.
Both are evidence-backed simplifications. The difference is in the amount of evidence and degree of simplification. Both are better than random in their respective domain, and can be useful depending on your tolerance for errors.
Sometimes even a very broad simplification is useful. E.g. it's perfectly valid to assume that π = 3 or even π = 5 to simplify some calculations, if you don't need the value to be more accurate than "non-negative and less than 10". It'll probably cost you something somewhere (e.g. you end up ordering too much paint), but being able to do the math in your head quickly is often worth it.
I could keep inventing examples, but surely you'll be able to come up with some of your own, once you realize there's no hard divide between what's scientific and not. These are just rough categories. In reality, you have models of varying complexity, correlation with reality, and various utility. It's a continuum.
Also:
> Are you really comparing some internet commenter with Newton and the broader scientific community?
Yes. Don't be biased against Internet commenters. Papers don't write themselves ex nihilo, and are generally distillation of existing ideas, not the first place where new ideas are ever published. And scientists are Internet users too.
Which evidences do we have for this asker-guesser thing? Naive intuition doesn't count. That's not how robust knowledge works. There's a freaking meta analysis finding we don't have strong enough evidence. This is pseudo science. It could be discovered later that this stuff indeed works, but we don't know yet. It's a sexy topic, the lack of any convincing publication for all this time makes this pretty unlikely.
> Yes.
Ok, I'm done here.
If you don't see how an internet comment from a random person and a proper paper written by Newton (or even by a random scientist) are fundamentally different when it comes to robustness and reliability of the described knowledge, even accounting for all the flaws scientific publishing has, I don't see how this discussion can be productive any longer. This won't lead to anything interesting.
I think I've written everything I had to write on the topic, several times. I'll leave you with your pub / armchair science. You do you.
> Naive intuition doesn't count. That's not how robust knowledge works.
Sure it does. Data is actually plural of anecdotes. That's how most actual research started. The difference between "science" and "armchair science" of this kind is a matter of degree.
Anecdotes is already a plural, of anecdote. Data is not a plural of anecdotes, or anecdote, it is plural of datum (kinda, data is often used as a mass/uncountable noun, in which case it's not a plural).
Under which hypothesis (formulated before the observations), how you collect it and its statistical significance and then how you interpret it (guided by the hypothesis) are key.
Such data is nothing like anecdotes. Anecdotes are at best inspirations to formulate hypotheses.
Intuition is a core element in research (it guides the formulation of hypotheses) but doesn't constitute evidence.
I don't necessarily think it is how you were brought up, and probably more to do with personality. As an introvert, I don't have the talk time to continuously put out feelers, I just gotta ask.
Interesting, I feel the opposite. I always tend to associate askers and extroverts, and feel us introverts are tired all the time because of all the guessing going on during human interactions.
But of course, your opposite takeaway also makes sense!
I'm going out on a limb and say that pretty much all human cultures are guess cultures. What if every woman was sexually propositioned thousands of times per day? Maybe I should ask every person I ever see if they'll give me $1,000, maybe some will say yes. And then I'll expand my horizons, since my normal day routine doesn't take me by enough potential benefactors. Spam is essentially an ask-culture failure.
That sounds like something a guesser would say. I'm only going to ask for something I'm already likely to get (going back to the original MetaFilter thread).
Indeed. Most of human social interactions, throughout a lifetime, are non-verbal. That does not mean it's the most efficient or socially expedient way to communicate. I would say that it has a larger domain of communication failure states than direct questioning. Perhaps that's part of why language has persisted and supersedes non-verbal communication in most social domains.
It seems to me that it is much more symmetric. In both situations one side guess, due to fundamental uncertainties of human interactions -- each side knows their subjective costs/benefits, but not costs/benefits of the other side.
For 'guesser protocol', the initiatior guess whether the ask is appropriate (say initiator_known _benefit > responder_guessed_cost), while in 'asker protocol', the task of guessing is shifted to responder, as the responder has to guess whether the reject is appropriate (say responder_known_cost > initiator_guessed_benefit).
I can think of birthdays when even the most diehard asker turns into a guesser - they would never go out of their way and ask to be coddled on their birthday but still don't mind bit of a fuss being made on their behalf.
... You haven't met Colombians. It could be just my extended family or it could be cultural; they love celebrating birthdays, including your birthday and theirs, and will actively and overtly tell you what they expect. In a strange way they're asking, it's a negotiation of wants and needs.
It could be just between family. I should ask my wife what's the go.
it's not completely black-and-white, and it similarly depends on group-level - whole-country vs region vs suburb vs family, and even domain-in-question..
This is really interesting to me because I don’t think I fall into either category, but I can easily place a majority of people in my life into these two categories pretty solidly.
Edit: this whole theory seems to come from some internet forum comment! I know a lot of people here are seduced (I was a bit too) but basing your social interactions and how you see others and yourself on this stuff might not be the best thing to do!
Original comment below for posterity and because there are answers.
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I'm not sure this stuff is really that helpful. You might be tempted to put people into these categories, but you might have a somewhat caricatural and also wrong image of both which could worsen interactions.
By the way, that article doesn't cite any studies!
It's probably helpful to know people are more or less at ease asking direct questions or saying no or receiving a no, but it's all scales and subtleties. It could also depend on the mood, or even who one interacts with or on the specific topic).
The article touches this a bit (the "not black and white" paragraph).
We human beings love categories but categories of people are often traps. It's even more tempting when it's easy to identity to one of the depicted groups!
I wonder if this asker-guesser thing is in the same pseudoscience territory as the MBTI.
In the end, I suppose there's no good way around getting to know someone and paying attention for good interactions.
Yes, it is not a black or white thing, more a spectrum. But for many people, including me, just naming the categories is very clarifying, even eye opening, akin to beginning to know an alien civilization. It allows you to consider a different point of view, a way of interacting, taking decisions and actions very different to what you are used to.
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.
Damnit, that seemed interesting!
Thanks for sharing though, I'll still read about this.
Indeed, I personally take all this stuff not as scientifically merited theory, but just as some sort of artistic social commentary that at least has enough truthiness to be interesting/helpful. Sometimes the illusion of control and understanding is all you need in order to feel more secure in your social interactions, benefiting everyone as long as you don't fly off the handle with pseudoscience.
Not to spam, but the 2023 HN discussion brought up the excerpt from the first paragraph on Wikipedia:
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.
The dichotomy feels true enough even if the data is fuzzy.
> Having to use circumlocution like that—and thus making the meaning unclear—seems like an aspect of a Guess, or high-context, culture, doesn't it? ^_^
Ah ah :-)
Well, not really. Scientifically stating something doesn't exist is very bold, usually you can't formally do this. Your best way is to say "so far, we have no evidence of this existing".
Several studies or a meta analysis stating "we have no proof of this existing" is a strong hint towards this indeed not existing, usually that can't be for sure.
To prove something wrong usually you need a counter example, but in this stuff it's hard even imagining what's a counter example.
Generously, it could be that some relevant phenomenon does exist, but the studies are testing a hypothesis that is too strong or misaligned with the real phenomenon. Like, say, maybe the studies are attempting to show that people divide along these lines for all purposes, when the actual phenomenon only applies to matters of sufficient gravity; or maybe the studies are attempting to show that cultures divide along these lines, but actually individuals vary much more within cultures than between them. There's a million related hypotheses that you could try to parse, and finding that some of the strong ones are not supported by evidence is interesting but not evidence that the concepts aren't useful at some level.
Regardless of the above, it seems uncontroversial to say that some interactions have one or the other character -- and that it could sometimes be useful to name that character.
This was discussed on HN in 2023 . The whole "high context v. low context" model doesn't have scientific backing.[0]
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation
> but basing your social interactions and how you see others and yourself on this stuff might not be the best thing to do!
Why not? Just knowing that there is such different ways of thinking is useful especially when interacting with people.
I was a guesser until maybe 2 of 3 years ago until I talked about it with friends and family and I learned just today that it was called "asker" and "guesser".
If you spend time with people from different cultures, there clearly is a stark divide in behavior. Even inside said culture there might be situations in which someone becomes an asker.
Therefore this framework is good to understand how people think socially and have a better understanding towards one another. Some people may think you are rude to ask–or an idiot not to–and you will probably lose relationships if you don't realize it.
> Just knowing that there is such different ways of thinking is useful
We agree. People have different ways of thinking and interacting. Maybe that asker-vs-guesser thing made you / others realize that (and that's good! Possibly it made me realize that too, although having a flatmate years before had already done the trick tbh), but we didn't need it to know this.
> there clearly is a stark divide in behavior
How are you sure it's not confirmation bias [1]? When you have a hammer, everything looks like nails. When you have an asker-guesser theory, everybody look like askers and guessers, including yourself.
Odds are it is most likely, in fact, confirmation bias, since that theory was found to be unsubstantiated and underdeveloped, and since this is a sexy topic, it's hard to believe nobody tried to validate it rigorously (and the way scientific publishing is currently organized sadly doesn't encourage publishing negative results).
> Why not?
Because apparently, from what we actually know (robust, established knowledge), there's no good reason to think the following is actually true, even if it strongly feels like it for a host of reasons, which is my whole concern:
> this framework is good to understand how people think socially and have a better understanding towards one another
It's too easy to pick two half convincing categories that feel somewhat opposite and have the feeling that these two categories provide insight on how people work. Such theories are sugar for the brain.
I'd be most happy to be proven wrong in the future though! In the meantime, I'll pick cautiousness.
I agree with what you say regarding confirmation bias but then how do you separate that from what is considered the scientific consensus? What I mean is that Newton's Law is not scientifically accurate anymore (it's good enough, though) but the fact that it validated what we observed (i.e. gravity) is also confirmation bias.
What I'm getting at is that there is a fine line between confirmation bias and scientific theory. I hope I made sense, lol
Ooh that's a good question, how do you control for confirmation bias in studies?
I'm a bit embarrassed to have to admit that this goes beyond my knowledge. I'm sure there are answers to this, this must be well known in these areas of research. We also know that research itself can be biased too. I'll have to ask friends working on these topics! Thanks for the interesting discussion about this I'll probably live in the future.
On this topic specifically though, that meta analysis that concluded there was a lack of evidence was despite the potential confirmation bias (unless the authors of the meta-analysis where already suspicious about the theory… oh well… one can hope them following the scientific method provides strong enough guarantees. It's not completely bulletproof but it's the most reliable thing we have. I'll ask for sure!).
> but the fact that it validated what we observed (i.e. gravity) is also confirmation bias
Pretty sure that's wrong. The way it works is: we have this equation. It predicts where we expect such stuff to be in X seconds. In X seconds, we check it's indeed there. It's there: actual confirmation, not confirmation bias. That's how you check your hypothesis. Of course the initial hypothesis comes from intuition… formed by observing the world. Enough confirmations makes your model more reliable, and is the thing that will be used until a counter example shows its nose and a better model is found. Even then, the model can still be used for cases where we know it does the job; Newton's model is simpler to use than Einstein's so we keep using it.
I guess if you have a solid enough hypothesis, it also works like this in human sciences.
> Pretty sure that's wrong. The way it works is: we have this equation. It predicts where we expect such stuff to be in X seconds. In X seconds, we check it's indeed there. It's there: actual confirmation, not confirmation bias.
Exactly. My point is that since Einstein's theory, we know that Newton's Law is incomplete. Therefore proving that it was confirmation bias (i.e. that our equations just confirmed what we observed). Since we observed black holes, we knew that Newton's was incomplete as it couldn't fully explain their behaviors.
> i.e. that our equations just confirmed what we observed
No, no, it's the opposite, and it's key! What we had been observing kept matching what the equations gave us "so far". Without cherry-picking, or refusing to see the cases where the model doesn't apply (consciously or not), which would have been confirmation bias.
We did, in fact, question the model as soon as we noticed it didn't apply.
Confirmation bias implies "cognitive blinkers", I don't think this happened in this Newton vs Einstein stuff.
But I agree the confirmation bias risk is not very far away. It's an issue in the general population, it's also likely a big issue in research.
Don't we start the equations after observing a phenomenon? It wouldn't make sense to try to explain something before observing it..
For example, after observing black holes we understood that Newton's was not enough to explain them. Thus we had to find another theory that explained our observations. Now with quantum computing we know that Einstein's theory is insufficient, too (not very knowledgeable on quantum physics myself, though)
There's definitely a "Seeing an apple fall and intuiting a hypothesis" process which is early in the research process, which leads to formulating the equation as an hypothesis somehow.
So you observe stuff, intuit and formulate an hypothesis. The hypothesis is a model that you hope matches how the world works well enough. Developing a scientific hypothesis takes scientific rigor. Among other things:
- it needs to be testable (it needs to be possible to design some scientific protocol to check the hypothesis)
- it needs to be formulated before you start experimenting and collecting data (that doesn't mean you can't observe your world before, you just can't use these observations in the data that backs your thesis)
- it needs to be rooted in existing science, knowledge, it's not a simple "naive" guess. It certainly takes being deeply familiar with the research area.
Then you test your hypothesis with experiments. You design a significant number of them. You must not cherry pick here, that would be confirmation bias (but you can encode the limitations of the model in the previous step). You predict your expected results with the model you have in your hypothesis. You run your experiments, make your measurements, compute the deltas. Here too, you must not discard or tweak the results to your liking. That would be cherry-picking, or event outright falsification. If the deltas are small enough, and people review your work, and ideally reproduce it (same experiments, or other experiments), eventually there's a consensus that starts forming around your model. Congrats, the model is validated.
So, people start to use your model. They do exactly the opposite of what you did when you formulated your hypothesis: they don't try to come up with a model from preliminary observations, they assume the model works, and they use it to predict the future.
Until Einstein comes :-). And stumble upon a black hole. An observation that doesn't match. Then your model gets refined (with limits and restrictions) or even "deprecated".
But yeah, physicists model the world after the observations they make, not the contrary. Otherwise they are doing something else. Math, maybe, or philosophy, or whatever. It's just that designing the model is only the beginning, you have to check that it works… with carefully selected observations… before it can be validated.
With this asker-vs-guesser thing, we don't have convincing work that provides the validation step. This means asker-vs-guesser is an hypothesis, at best (at best, because we don't know if things required to formulate a scientific hypothesis have been respected).
>By the way, that article doesn't cite any studies!
That's fine. I think we need to get away a little bit from the implication that any thought not connected to studies or statistics makes it borderline worthless. We need to lean a little bit more toward humanism ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).
Thought not well grounded in objective evidence has a place, both on matters that are not subject to empirical inquiry and in preliminary speculation about matters that are.
But it also runs the risk of building palaces of elaborate BS with no relation to reality and pure garbage filler content, like article presenting three different non-evidence-based ideas of how a dichotomy itself not grounded in evidence supposedly plays out in reality, with no effort to do look at any evidence or do any analysis as to whether any of them or the underlying dichotomy is connected to reality.
Wrong social models can have bad human implications. It seems to me that being careful with these models and requiring rigor is the humanist thing to do.
Go ahead and present hypotheses, that can be very interesting, just don't present them as facts.
(Now maybe this asker-guesser thing is indeed studied, I don't know)
> ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).
I'm not sure what you're getting at here by suggesting an elite class of people above the "average person" who do not require objective evidence. That's not really aligned with the core tenets of humanism.
Reducing ambiguity by definition increases effective communication. Any number of social experts would undoubtedly herald an increase in effective communication an unequivocal boon to human relationships.
Nothing in the article suggests forgoing politeness or etiquette. The grace with which a communication is delivered is orthogonal to it's explicitness.
Seriously though, it depends on the boss and the relationship you have with them. It can really fall into either camp and it might even be situational with the same person!
I would say that, generally, I would prefer to be direct in these relationships unless you both know each other really well. It does make things easier for all involved.
That wasn’t the intention of what I wrote. I was referring more to how people speak. It’s very common in British English to phrase a request as a question. The “relationship” I refer to isn’t “they’re your boss,” it’s “how do you and your boss communicate,” which is a different thing altogether.
That’s not to say power dynamics can’t exist, just that it’s not a thing you can apply to every conversation or situation.
For your hypothesis to work, it would mean it’s not possible for me to tell my boss “no.” Yet I do this all the time without repercussion. Trying to boil every relationship down to “power dynamics” is outright childish.
Do my boss and I have a formal relationship based on expectations we have of each other? Yes, absolutely. Are there consequences if I repeatedly go against those expectations? Yes. Are we friends? No. Does that give him unlimited control over me? Also no. Are there consequences for my boss repeatedly going against my expectations of him? Yes. Are they the same?
Are there people out there that abuse the position of boss to extract unreasonable concessions? Undeniably, yes. Is this relevant to a discussion of your boss asking if a task can be finished sooner? Not in the slightest.
> Do my boss and I have a formal relationship based on expectations we have of each other? Yes, absolutely. Are there consequences if I repeatedly go against those expectations? Yes. Are we friends? No. Does that give him unlimited control over me? Also no. Are there consequences for my boss repeatedly going against my expectations of him? Yes. Are they the same?
What you are describing is what we call power dynamics, the effect of a power differential on the dynamics of a relationship.
> I hope this clarifies things for you.
This seems oddly passive aggressive and dismissive. I wonder would you speak to me this way if I was your boss, or the CEO of your company, or the majority owner.
> What you are describing is what we call power dynamics, the effect of a power differential on the dynamics of a relationship.
My wife and I have a formal relationship: our marriage contract. If I violate that contract then there can be consequences for me. Are there power dynamics at play?
I sign a contract with a supplier (or vice-versa). If one of us violates that contract, there are consequences. Are there power dynamics at play?
> I wonder would you speak to me this way if I was your boss, or the CEO of your company, or the majority owner.
It seems from your comments that you are confusing power dynamics with coercive control.
Power dynamics doesn’t refer to coercion, but to asymmetric authority wielded, social status, risk distributed, or cost borne by individuals in a group. Even when refusal is possible, where the one or more of the above is uneven, power dynamics are at play.
> My wife and I have a formal relationship: our marriage contract. If I violate that contract then there can be consequences for me. Are there power dynamics at play?
I'm not sure this is landing the way you think it is, as yes, of course there are power dynamics at play in personal relationships, including between you and your wife.
>I sign a contract with a supplier (or vice-versa). If one of us violates that contract, there are consequences. Are there power dynamics at play?
Yes, of course.
> I have done, yes.
And of course you would speak to each differently as you would to me or to a subordinate, due to the power dynamics at play.
Power dynamics are definitely a factor. There have been many scandals around people in power asking subordinates to sleep with them, and it appears that the majority of the (Anglo) public now considers this morally wrong.
The publicly accessible article is the article, it isn’t the reader’s fault that the publisher decided to only make a little bit of it accessible to us.
One aspect of that which is interesting is that what the article calls "Guess culture" is fundamentally exclusionary. If you aren't initiated into how the signalling system works by an insider or in a position of sufficient stability to fail socially many times there isn't a good way to break in. That gives the culture a lot of interesting properties that promote its ability to identify and coordinate against out-groups (which to the people involved would manifest as a "these barbarians just don't know how to be polite and we can't work with them"). One of those adaptions that is a bit crazy in the micro (could just ask for what they want, geeze) but makes a lot of sense in the macro.
It's a matter of different protocols, not exclusivity. An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients.
The way to deal with it is having some kind of handshake that indicates what protocol is being used.
Only on HN do we explain social interactions using network protocol analogies, and not the other way around!
> An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients.
The metaphor might be a bit strained, because a congestion protocol is fundamentally determining the system state by testing it with an optimistic request for what the client wants then responding based on the server answer or lack thereof. Which is to say, the typical asker strategy.
Having a protocol at all might be more of a guesser thing though - good luck getting to index.html by sending "Hey my server friend can I have a copy of index.html pls?" to port 80 in with netcat. Very clear request, unlikely to get much consideration by nginx even if it is willing to hand over the page.
Now, hear me out, what if we hooked an LLM up to some TCP sockets…
And, importantly, there isn't one single "guess culture"; there are a myriad of different micro-cultures with their own local signals and codes for subtly communicating the information that isn't spelled out in speech.
So even if you are a consummate Guesser, and have been one all your life, if you move across the country (or even just across town!) and find yourself in a group with a different set of Guessers, you may be nearly as badly off as if you were an Asker in that subculture.
Any type of culture is "fundamentally" exclusionary if you don't know how it works. Let me guess which culture you're from :)
As usual, if both sides exist, it's because they both provide benefits. The guessers' benefits are just not obvious at first glance.
Taleb has a nice bit on that, explaining that if something exists for long, it must have enduring beneficial properties, and if you think it's stupid, you are the one having a blind spot.
Dawkins led to the same conclusion: stuff that works stays and multiplies. You may not like it, but nature doesn't care what you think.
It's true for entities, systems, traits, concepts...
Everyone mocks Karens, until your flight is delayed and that insufferable lady tires up the staff so much that everyone gets compensation.
I dislike lying but it works, and our entire society is based on it (but we call it advertising).
Don't like mysandry? Don't understand why nature didn't select out ugly people? Think circumcision is dumb?
All those things give some advantages in some context, to such an extend it still prospers today.
In fact, several things can be true. Something can be alienating, and yet give enough benefits that it stays around.
A huge number of things are immoral, create suffering, confusion, destruction, even to the practitioner themselves, and yet are still here because they bring something to the table that is just sufficient to justify their existence.
See your friend making yet again a terrible love choice, getting pregnant, and stuck with a baby and no father? From a natural selection standpoint, it could very well be a super successful strategy for both parties. The universe doesn't optimize for our happiness or morality.
Enduring survival properties aren't the same as enduring beneficial properties. Feudalism and slavery stuck around for quite a long time and were mostly forced out against their will.
Slavery has existed for all human history and still exists today.
I found this 10+ years ago, and it was one of the most important things I ever read. As a consummate Guesser, it reframed my perspective completely. I started to be much happier and understanding with Askers.
I also realized how frustrating, as a Guesser, I could be to Askers, and shifted more toward being clear about what I want or need.
My family is almost 100% Asker. When I got to college, I drove Guessers nuts. They thought I was so selfish and would blow up at me (from my perspective) out of nowhere.
"No" is always a perfectly fine and polite answer from my perspective
It's a shame more people don't assume good faith so we can have more direct and honest communication with each other.
Guessers don't believe Askers are asking in bad faith at all. If Guessers did believe that, it would be way easier for them to say no to Askers. It's precisely because the Guesser believes in the sincerity of the request that it becomes painful to deny it.
Indeed. It's the immediate assumption that since you're asking me, it must be important to you - otherwise you wouldn't be asking in the first place.
I want to be the kind of person that helps others where it matters, and here you are, asking, thus proving it matters. Refusing becomes really uncomfortable, so I'd rather go out of my way to make it possible for me to agree, or failing that, to help your underlying need as much as I can.
I realize now this is a form of typical mind fallacy - I wouldn't ask you for something if it wasn't really fucking important or I had any other option available, therefore I naturally assume that your act of asking already proves the request is very important to you.
I guess I just learned I'm a Guesser :).
That's the really painful part. They ask you for something, you say 'yes' thinking it's important for the person, only to learn that it wasn't that important at all. It's like giving something that you don't want to give to someone that doesn't need it. Really annoying.
A uni pal with the samey attitude had a wonderful motto - "better to look stupid than to be stupid".
Except a lot af askers will put you in an uncomfortable spot. No I don't want you and your family staying at my house while you are in town.
Discomfort is present only if you suspect they're a Guesser and thus one of you has greatly misjudged the relationship and social context.
If you know or suspect they're an Asker the discomfort disappears because you say "No" and they say "OK, cool".
I think guessers agonise over HOW to say "No" in contexts like this, and what it says about them as people.
"Can my family and I stay for two weeks?".
Then:
"No." (looks cold and heartless; do I want to project cold and heartless? Will they hate me?).
"I'm so sorry but I'm not able to. The house is a mess and it's really small" (performative, hand-wringing reluctance; we both know I'm lying).
"I just don't like to share my environment" (most truthful; might look petty to those who don't understand the need for privacy to that degree).
All this rings true, which brings me to this question: are Guessers just a bunch of Overthinkers?
They are, yes
Having said that, I have become a lot better at being direct these past few years, so I'd likely just say "I'm not able to, sorry. I can recommend some good hotels though".
Default No is fine, just go with it. That’s a huge ask. It was a 2 week stay, that’s a hell no unless you’re my nuclear family then maybe we can discuss it. Even then, there’s some family I don’t want as overnight guests and I usually put up in a nearby hotel when they visit.
No reason to feel guilty saying no when the ask is that large. I feel bad sometimes saying no to small things. Because it’s trivial on the surface and I don’t have a good reason for saying no except I just don’t want to do it. In any case, I like treating no as my default answer to everything then I have to be convinced to say yes (even if it’s a quick internal negotiation with myself).
If you’re consistent, the most abusive askers learn not to ask. The ones that ask with expectations of a yes, the ones that try to make you feel bad for saying no, those people go away. And that’s my ideal position, I’m only being asked for reasonable things so actually end up saying yes more often than I say no.
This is fairytale advice.
The askers who make you feel bad don't go away. They go up your org chart or get replaced by similar if your company culture tolerates it. You're the one who goes away or settles.
Why do you blame askers for how you feel?
You are responsible for your feelings and setting your boundaries.
Learning how to set boundaries is something most people learn as they mature. Yeah, not easy. I have especially noticed recently that some of my friends who are mums have learnt how to claim their own needs only after their kids have left home. Some people give too much.
Do you expect others to adivinate what your personal boundaries are?
Do you get frustrated when friends or family make the wrong assumptions?
If you have arseholes in your life that actually make you feel bad, then it is even more important to learn how set boundaries with them. If they don't respect the boundaries you set, or create conflict, then that is often very difficult to resolve.
I struggle with conflict avoiders because they have needs however they often act passive. Yet their hidden expectations remain, and their response if you fail to meet their expectations is often poor. One friend in particular also often guesses wrong to my detriment, instead of asking a simple question.
Do mind readers want others to read minds?
I strongly dislike passive people that blame others for their poor communications.
?
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I don't know where this is coming from as I didn't make these claims.
That said, your comment is disturbing.
It's a obnoxious to "strongly dislike" (read: hate) people who don't have resilient self-esteem. It lacks compassion. And if someone's bullying you, getting platitudes about "responsible for your feelings" and "boundaries" is useless.
Strongly dislike can also mean you just prefer to avoid those people or limit your interactions. It doesn’t mean hate.
If you want people like this to stop avoiding you, it’s an internal adjustment that needs to be made. That’s the responsibility for yourself part. Ignoring you is not hurting the other person one bit, actually they are benefiting from it as they skip dealing with your personality they dislike. It’s not to say they are biased against you, if you were more compatible they may change their stance without thinking about it. That wouldn’t happen if they hated you.
> Strongly dislike can also mean you just prefer to avoid those people or limit your interactions. It doesn’t mean hate.
Come on...the first Google result for hate [0] is "feel intense or passionate dislike for (someone)". Saying otherwise is too much.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=hate+definition
> Do mind readers want others to read minds?
It's not mind reading. It's basic empathy and respect. Expecting others to understand the norms of social behavior is not smart, but it is perfectly normal. Realizing that many people lack the ability to empathize or socialize politely and dealing with that is an unfortunate consequence of modern society making travel so easy. We're all mixed up and people from totally different cultures need to learn to deal with each other.
> I strongly dislike passive people that blame others for their poor communications.
Same. I struggle with the construct specifically because I think I am both an asker and a guesser. I do agree it exists however I can’t bucket myself into either side. The approach I choose to utilize at any given time is a contextual calculation. Do I have a strong opinion? Do I have a sufficient status to assert myself? Do I not care and just want to appease the other person? Do I intentionally want to stroke their ego?
But, choose an approach and use it as a tool. Miscalculations occur leading to outcomes I may not predict or prefer sometimes but that’s just a learning experience for me. I might adjust my internal algorithm for making that calculation in the future. I might decide I just don’t like interacting with that person, and that’s fine too. But I don’t blame anyone or expect them to change for me.
Then just say, “No, that won’t work out for us.” Done.
I have been searching for this!
Thank you for reposting this, OP. I have been (w)racking my brain trying to find this article and used HN search dozens of times. I couldn't remember what the title was, or the specific terms "ask" and "guess", so it was impossible to find.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182058
This is one of the chief cultural differences between Southern and Northern culture.
Southerners (not transplants) will "ask" without imposition: they "ask" when giving, and "guess" when receiving.
Any inversion of these norms is an affront to "Southern hospitality" and will be met with the equivalent "Bless Your Heart".
Ask what you can do for someone, never what you can have. Assume someone will do right by you (you should never have to ask), and if they don't - people say not so nice things about those folks.
I need to articulate this better when it's not 4 AM, but it's an almost perfect descriptor of the cultural differences.
I've lived in the South and the midwest and it really isn't any different in either place
I'm pretty sure Japanese are guessers (would love to hear counter examples)
To them, the etiquette is that if you ask you've put the other person in a bind. Even if they want to say no, they feel pressure to say yes. You putting then in that situation is considered bad. So, don't ask, at least not directly. You can say "Guess what, I'll be in town next week!" and see if out of the blue they offer a place to stay. But even then there is subtly of reading between the lines, of do they actually want you to stay or are they just being polite but hope you'll read between the lines and not take them up on the offer. Generally you're supposed to refuse "Naw, I couldn't possibly stay and get in your way" and then they can come back and say "No really, it'd be great" if they really want you to stay and you might have to do this dance once or twice more to really verify it's ok.
The usual dichotomy / terminology for this stuff as it relates to painting national and business cultures with broad brushes is "high context" versus "low context". In a high context culture like Japan people would be expected to code switch between Asking and Guessing behaviors depending on their audience, relative status, social rapport, etc.
I think in Japan the culture is almost 100% Guessing.
I read this anecdote online about a US business dealing with Japanese partners (clients?). There's an item they'd like to discuss, in their regular meeting they bring it up, and the Japanese said "Hmm, this is possible. Let's discuss it next meeting.". Next meeting, they ask again, and the reply was the same. It took them a few rounds to realize that the actual (never uttered) answer is "No, this isn't possible."...
Here is my personal observation. Humans start by default as “Askers,” but society shapes them into either the “Askers” or “Guessers.” Kids don’t guess, they ask.
I have also observed that Eastern countries/regions are generally “Guessers,” while Westerners are generally “Askers.”
Growing up as an introvert, I remember many times when my guardians (uncles, aunties, grandparents, and parents) would interpret things differently than I thought they were. “My friend’s mom told me to come, play, and eat at their place today.” “No, they don’t. You need to come back after a while, not spend the whole day there.”
I learnt a lot of Guesses in school and social settings: Yes, that meant No, and Nos that were weirdly Yes, etc.
When I started working in the early 2000s, I worked with almost all US (and some UK and Australians) Companies and customers, from teachers and physicians to founders and businesspeople. Things were straightforward, “cut to the chase”, “get to the point real fast”, and the like.
Eventually, I have also worked with many Indian companies and teams. We are mostly Guessers. My colleagues and bosses have called me aside to explain the interpretation of quite a few interactions, which I thought I was doing the right thing, but I should not have (even when the clients agreed). I’ve also worked with the Japanese, and they were all Guessers to a degree, and I would love to, hopefully, take the time and effort to learn the culture a lot more.
I don't think that's the case; I have a son who has been a "Guesser" from a fairly young age, despite our family encouraging people to be "Askers" all of his siblings are "Askers" and can't understand why he won't ask for things that he wants.
For completeness sake, I should point out that most of our kids (including this one) are adopted so it's not impossible that there could be a genetic predisposition to being an asker or guesser.
I live in a Dutch community in the midwestern US, which is very much a "Guesser" culture, while our ancestors in the Netherlands are one of the most "Asker" societies. The difference is incredibly stark despite having a very similar genetic base
> Eastern countries/regions are generally “Guessers,” while Westerners are generally “Askers.”
See also the concept of high-context and low-context cultures.
I think this is the correct dichotomy for the difference in cultures and better explains the Guesser vs Asker thing. High context cultures (Asia, South America, Mediterranean) tend to be Guessers because they already have the context and that context is the more important part of their communication. In low context cultures (Northern European, Russia, US) communication is more direct and words are more important than non-verbal cues.
I found a good discussion that I keep referring to on Jean Hsu's blog: https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/ask-vs-guess-culture and https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/bridging-the-ask-vs-guess-cul...
It's been quite illuminating for people in multicultural teams...
Did you see the HN comments for Jean Hsu's 1st article?[1] Did any stand out?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176703
Thanks for the pointer, I hadn't.
I think there is a couple of interesting things. First, it's still somewhat orthogonal to the High context versus Low context cultures (see the Culture Map), as in you can have people with more ask versus guess culture in either communication contexts from my observations (at least among some low to mid context cultures, I don't have a lot of experience with very high context cultures).
Another way to think about it is that it's a lot more local than the broader culture of a country, down to the family level, and you can see this in the US as many commenters have reported where they grew up in various different places in the ask vs guess spectrum.
Finally, the US work environment is generally very "Ask"-leaning, in particular in Silicon Valley and it can take a significant amount of time to recognize where you have been raised on this spectrum versus what is required of you to be effective at work.
Oh, hmm... I must be an asker.
I've done a lifetime of code review over the last decade. Let me tell you, the number times I have asked what I assumed were simple yes/no questions like "Would it make sense to do X?" or even "Why did we do it this way?" in cases where I'm looking for a discussion and it's been taken as a call to action is just wild.
They're competent developers, I just want to understand the code and the context behind it. I want to understand what their thoughts were while building it. Yet so many times a simple question like "Why X and not Y?" results in the person whose code I am reviewing going ahead and refactoring the entire PR without return comment, or in rare cases getting angry with the question. We actually had a DBA with a history of flying off the handle over simple questions but from what I've heard this is common among DBAs? He eventually got let go over it.
If I wanted you to change it, I would have said so. My question is not wrapped up in insinuation or hidden intent. It's a question I want the answer to. There are no layers to the meaning. I basically never mean anything I do not explicitly say.
I have gotten so frustrated with this that I have started specifying "You can say no", "I'm just trying to understand the thought process", or "I'm just curious, no need to change it". Things I still feel like I shouldn't have to tell another person with an engineering mindset, especially someone with many years of experience.
This isn’t really a guess vs ask distinction, this is you just not understanding people. Those initial questions you asked are:
1. Often an implicit call to action from the person asking the question. Maybe YOU don’t mean it that way, but people have learned to be cautious
2. A distraction from actual work, and not worth it personally for a public discussion. Maybe the answer is “I don’t know” or “This is the fastest good-enough thing I could build to satisfy a dumb requirement”. But no one wants to say those things publicly, so they are cautious before answering
It’s especially aggravating when you get those questions from someone new in authority
The “why did we do X and not Y?” style of question is a commonly used passive aggressive crutch to tell someone to do Y instead, while attempting to not look mean/harsh. Its the same reason people use “we” in the first place.
You may not be using it this way but because many others are that’s how it’ll typically be interpreted
You call it passive aggressive, I call it "acknowledging that you might know something I don't".
I agree, and why I hate that this has become a thing. I encountered the same thing as the GP which is from where my experience comes. I'd ask "Why did you choose X over Y" as I'm genuinely curious to know what tradeoffs were considered that led them to choose X. Perhaps there's something I don't know. But I also see it get used all the time to mean "you should have done Y".
The "we" stuff is similar. There was a movement several years ago to try to remove blame/harshness from the tone of code reviews, and this is what we got out of it.
I used to run into this type of problem frequently. I've found that personally adopting something like https://conventionalcomments.org really helps with ambiguity.
Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/2010/05/askers-vs-guess...
Discussed (in a singleton sort of way) at the time:
Askers vs. Guessers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1956778 - Dec 2010 (1 comment)
Edit: plus this!
Ask vs. Guess Culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176703 - Aug 2023 (479 comments)
A 2023 submission of a similar article received 481 comments.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176703
Good catch—added. Thanks!
I think it requires emotional intelligence to know if you should ask or guess.
I've encountered a few people that just won't stop asking for unreasonable things, and it destroys the relationship very quickly, because they just won't take no for an answer. I also have one child that I used to have to firmly say "stop asking for things" once it would get out of hand.
But those are extremes in ask vs guess.
An asker who won't take no for an answer is just an asshole. As is a guesser who continuously hints when they want something and you don't offer.
> As is a guesser who continuously hints when they want something and you don't offer.
That's usually when I state that "I can't read minds."
I'm a guesser. What is the correct negative response to the asker in the article? 1. "No", without further elaboration 2. "No", followed by a graceful excuse 3. "No, I don't want you in my house because I can't be bothered to share my space with you" I always found that 3 is too aggressive, and 1 and 2 trigger the asker working around the issue (asking why not, or trying to "solve" the graceful excuse). Being aggressive is ok, but sometimes it's bad (for example, if the balance of power is skewed in the relationship)
From the other replies in the thread, it seems like there is a contingent of people who believe that if someone doesn't take the first "no" as a final "no" then they are no-true-asker, and instead is just an asshole.
In my life I've never met an asker who took no as final. Maybe they said they respected it, but at least they wanted to understand why not and what could they do to help me make it a yes. At that point you're not just asking, you're wasting my time.
I'm born Guesser but evolved into an Asker. However, it depended on whether I was the requester or not; if I wanted to invite someone, I would try to avoid putting them in a position where they had to say "no". However, I didn't mind saying "no" myself.
I would argue with other people that it's impolite to put them in such a position as they may not like to decline.
After discussing it openly with friends and family, I realized that it was okay to say no and people wouldn't mind. This changed me into an asker.
What's funny is that my parents were askers. I guess being introverted made me more of a guesser initially.
you may like this thought:
if you have a weak no, then it makes your yes weak.
I'm not that autistic but I simply can't deal with Guessers. The idea that I have to play some kind of 4D chess game to figure out what I am and am not allowed to ask or do makes me extremely stressed out. How am I supposed to map out the wishes and expectations and goals of everybody involved? Isn't that, in fact, borderline rude? What if I guess wrong? Everybody loses when that happens and it happens all the time.
Growing up in the east of the Netherlands made this worse; the Dutch are widely known as rude and direct (ie Askers), but in the rural east this is very much not the case. Everything there runs on a mixture of "what will the neighbours think" and "what will people expect me to do?" and it's just maddening. Fortunately I was sufficiently tone deaf as a youth to not notice when I was getting it wrong, and when I grew old enough to figure that out I moved to places where you can just ask stuff. It's nuts that such a small country can have such a widely varying cultural differences but it's very real.
I live in the south now and here I can ask everybody everything and people won't feel bad for saying no. It's lovely.
I also figured out that my mom (a total Guesser like everybody in my family) loves me even if I get this wrong! So I just began to treat her like an Asker and verrry explicitly spell out that it's totally fine to say no, no really it is, I'm not asking for a favour, I just want to know what you want, really mom it's true. It stresses her out! The idea of being asked point blank for her personal, disregard-other-people preference is just entirely outside her normal way of thinking. She has to do hard effort to disregard other people's wishes, it's just all totally mixed together in her brain. I know it's not nice of me, but the alternative is that we (my wife and I) keep getting it wrong and accidentally visit too often or too little or invite them to parties they don't want to go to and so on.
So yeah, protip for askers, treat guessers who love you as askers. They'll forgive you for it and everything else becomes easier.
That makes sense if it's in moderation. An overzealous asker can disproportionately eat up people's time. Context as to why you're asking helps set priorities.
Yeah ofc. I mean as someone who grew up in Guesser Land and got taught that it’s important to be able to read people’s minds, discovering that I can just, you know, ask, felt like a superpower. I don’t think I’m overdoing it.
I am timid: I conduct myself like a Guesser, and treat others' requests as though they are Askers.
Postel's law in action :)
I think this has a lot of truth to it, but I think it is ultimately an oversimplification or even a false dichotomy.
I was in a relationship that was constantly strained by something similar to this. My partner would never ask for help with anything and would just get frustrated when I didn't pick up on her struggling and jump in to help. Conversely, I only ask for help when I really need it but she would see me struggling and jump in, which would annoy me because I didn't ask for help.
But I'm not an asker in the sense of this article. I would never randomly ask someone to stay at someone's house, for example. This strikes me as like a child constantly testing their boundaries. I know where the boundaries are.
But, there is still some truth to it. I've often found that non-native speakers in my country tend to be askers. This can come across as quite shocking and lead one to believe, as I had, that this is actually part of their culture. But I have another theory: to be successful as a non-native you have to be an asker, because you will find it difficult or impossible to be a guesser. So it's a survivorship bias, essentially.
By the title I also thought this was going to be about another phenomenon: when given a task, some people will continue to ask for confirmation until they're confident they get it, while others will just "fill in the blanks" and deliver something, even if it's wrong. LLMs, of course, being the ultimate "guesser" in this sense.
Labelling people this way is a blunt instrument.
It seems like the introvert/extrovert split, where few people are near the poles and there's a lot more going on in the middle.
E.g. I might check if someone has weekend plans before asking if I can stay with them. Or, I might ask outright, but specify it's not important, I just want to catch up, and the nearby hotel looks nice.
These seem like important differences even though they're both in the middle of ask and guess.
Yes, I don't support labelling people as one or the other, but defining and articulating the two kinds of behaviors and expectations relative to each other is incredibly useful for communication and understanding.
If these behavioral models are indeed good and close enough to the reality. But that whole stuff comes from some internet comment!
I agree it's better to label behaviors or situations than people.
But it is useful if you apply that labeling to yourself. It also helps with empathy.
Labelling can be a shortcut around empathy. Empathy is the real deal.
It’s hard to imagine what a guesser is feeling if you don’t understand the differences between their expectations and yours as an asker, and vice versa.
You are presupposing that the internet forum comment on which all this is based has correctly modelled the world and that this asker-guesser thing is indeed real.
Usually it takes one or ideally several studies, with large groups of people, with a solid hypothesis and some strong, rigorous protocol.
Until then, it's not worthless, but it's at best an inspiration.
Social stuff is rarely that easy, seducing, cute, with two clear, beautiful categories of people.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
It makes sense to judge models by how useful they're in some situation, and compare them by usefulness in context[0]. It doesn't make sense to ask which is right, because they're all wrong.
Here, at least for me, but I guess(!) many other HNers, the "Askers vs. Guessers" model is very useful.
Would some RCT studies be nice? Sure. I don't expect them to prove the model to be accurate. But it doesn't have to be, that's not the point. Just pointing out that there's some variability between people along these lines is very useful.
Diverse modes loosely held, eh?
--
[0] - Consider Newtonian vs. relativistic motion. The latter is more accurate and gets you better results at large scales - but in almost all circumstances in life (up to and including landing a probe on the Moon, or landing a shell in someone's back yard), the Newtonian model is much simpler and therefore much more useful.
Of course we could say that all models are "wrong" because they are simplifications of the reality. But there's wrong and wrong. We don't usually say a model like the Newtonian motion is wrong, it's not a very useful way to deal with models.
Newtonian motion has been shown to be repeatable and to accurately predict motion within limits. It has scientific backing.
The asker-guesser model isn't even shown to be a simplification of the reality. And actually, later in that High-context and low-context cultures [1] Wikipedia article:
> A 2008 meta-analysis concluded that the model was "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".
Which is scientific speak for bullshit.
There's a world between scientifically backed "wrong" Newtonian movement and random internet forum comment backed social model found to be "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".
The Newtonian movement is an evidence-backed simplification. The asker-guesser model is a persuasive illusion.
Are you really comparing some internet commenter with Newton and the broader scientific community?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
> The Newtonian movement is an evidence-backed simplification. The asker-guesser model is a persuasive illusion.
Both are evidence-backed simplifications. The difference is in the amount of evidence and degree of simplification. Both are better than random in their respective domain, and can be useful depending on your tolerance for errors.
Sometimes even a very broad simplification is useful. E.g. it's perfectly valid to assume that π = 3 or even π = 5 to simplify some calculations, if you don't need the value to be more accurate than "non-negative and less than 10". It'll probably cost you something somewhere (e.g. you end up ordering too much paint), but being able to do the math in your head quickly is often worth it.
I could keep inventing examples, but surely you'll be able to come up with some of your own, once you realize there's no hard divide between what's scientific and not. These are just rough categories. In reality, you have models of varying complexity, correlation with reality, and various utility. It's a continuum.
Also:
> Are you really comparing some internet commenter with Newton and the broader scientific community?
Yes. Don't be biased against Internet commenters. Papers don't write themselves ex nihilo, and are generally distillation of existing ideas, not the first place where new ideas are ever published. And scientists are Internet users too.
> Both are evidence-backed simplifications
Which evidences do we have for this asker-guesser thing? Naive intuition doesn't count. That's not how robust knowledge works. There's a freaking meta analysis finding we don't have strong enough evidence. This is pseudo science. It could be discovered later that this stuff indeed works, but we don't know yet. It's a sexy topic, the lack of any convincing publication for all this time makes this pretty unlikely.
> Yes.
Ok, I'm done here.
If you don't see how an internet comment from a random person and a proper paper written by Newton (or even by a random scientist) are fundamentally different when it comes to robustness and reliability of the described knowledge, even accounting for all the flaws scientific publishing has, I don't see how this discussion can be productive any longer. This won't lead to anything interesting.
I think I've written everything I had to write on the topic, several times. I'll leave you with your pub / armchair science. You do you.
> Naive intuition doesn't count. That's not how robust knowledge works.
Sure it does. Data is actually plural of anecdotes. That's how most actual research started. The difference between "science" and "armchair science" of this kind is a matter of degree.
Anecdotes is already a plural, of anecdote. Data is not a plural of anecdotes, or anecdote, it is plural of datum (kinda, data is often used as a mass/uncountable noun, in which case it's not a plural).
Under which hypothesis (formulated before the observations), how you collect it and its statistical significance and then how you interpret it (guided by the hypothesis) are key.
Such data is nothing like anecdotes. Anecdotes are at best inspirations to formulate hypotheses.
Intuition is a core element in research (it guides the formulation of hypotheses) but doesn't constitute evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
I agree, but the fundamental problem is a blunt one to begin with. It should not be a way to label people, but decisions.
Guess culture is playing defense against the outcrowd. Ask culture is playing offense to achieve higher-level thinking and goals.
This isn't always a deliberate thing. Still, everyone has to pick their plays with every interaction they have.
Indeed. There is likely more of a spectrum. That said, I think applying the label to a given scenario, or a person's tendencies can be useful.
I don't necessarily think it is how you were brought up, and probably more to do with personality. As an introvert, I don't have the talk time to continuously put out feelers, I just gotta ask.
Interesting, I feel the opposite. I always tend to associate askers and extroverts, and feel us introverts are tired all the time because of all the guessing going on during human interactions.
But of course, your opposite takeaway also makes sense!
I'm going out on a limb and say that pretty much all human cultures are guess cultures. What if every woman was sexually propositioned thousands of times per day? Maybe I should ask every person I ever see if they'll give me $1,000, maybe some will say yes. And then I'll expand my horizons, since my normal day routine doesn't take me by enough potential benefactors. Spam is essentially an ask-culture failure.
I’m an asker, but I’m not going to waste my day asking everyone for $1,000 because I know it’s unlikely anyone will.
“Asking” is for things you don’t already know the answer to, and “no” or “I don’t know” are acceptable answers.
>I know it’s unlikely
That sounds like something a guesser would say. I'm only going to ask for something I'm already likely to get (going back to the original MetaFilter thread).
> That sounds like something a guesser would say.
No, it’s something anyone who wasn’t born yesterday would say.
As mentioned in the article, it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy. What you're describing seems to be on the very extreme end of ask culture.
Indeed. Most of human social interactions, throughout a lifetime, are non-verbal. That does not mean it's the most efficient or socially expedient way to communicate. I would say that it has a larger domain of communication failure states than direct questioning. Perhaps that's part of why language has persisted and supersedes non-verbal communication in most social domains.
It seems to me that it is much more symmetric. In both situations one side guess, due to fundamental uncertainties of human interactions -- each side knows their subjective costs/benefits, but not costs/benefits of the other side.
For 'guesser protocol', the initiatior guess whether the ask is appropriate (say initiator_known _benefit > responder_guessed_cost), while in 'asker protocol', the task of guessing is shifted to responder, as the responder has to guess whether the reject is appropriate (say responder_known_cost > initiator_guessed_benefit).
Relevant Fight Club scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbGw-fnlf1Q
I can think of birthdays when even the most diehard asker turns into a guesser - they would never go out of their way and ask to be coddled on their birthday but still don't mind bit of a fuss being made on their behalf.
... You haven't met Colombians. It could be just my extended family or it could be cultural; they love celebrating birthdays, including your birthday and theirs, and will actively and overtly tell you what they expect. In a strange way they're asking, it's a negotiation of wants and needs.
It could be just between family. I should ask my wife what's the go.
They sound like hobbits!
i wonder.. how much this maps into notion of cultural dimensions.
https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-ho...
it's not completely black-and-white, and it similarly depends on group-level - whole-country vs region vs suburb vs family, and even domain-in-question..
This has been posted like 20x: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=asker+guesser
This is really interesting to me because I don’t think I fall into either category, but I can easily place a majority of people in my life into these two categories pretty solidly.
Edit: this whole theory seems to come from some internet forum comment! I know a lot of people here are seduced (I was a bit too) but basing your social interactions and how you see others and yourself on this stuff might not be the best thing to do!
Original comment below for posterity and because there are answers.
----
I'm not sure this stuff is really that helpful. You might be tempted to put people into these categories, but you might have a somewhat caricatural and also wrong image of both which could worsen interactions.
By the way, that article doesn't cite any studies!
It's probably helpful to know people are more or less at ease asking direct questions or saying no or receiving a no, but it's all scales and subtleties. It could also depend on the mood, or even who one interacts with or on the specific topic).
The article touches this a bit (the "not black and white" paragraph).
We human beings love categories but categories of people are often traps. It's even more tempting when it's easy to identity to one of the depicted groups!
I wonder if this asker-guesser thing is in the same pseudoscience territory as the MBTI.
In the end, I suppose there's no good way around getting to know someone and paying attention for good interactions.
Not that helpful?
Yes, it is not a black or white thing, more a spectrum. But for many people, including me, just naming the categories is very clarifying, even eye opening, akin to beginning to know an alien civilization. It allows you to consider a different point of view, a way of interacting, taking decisions and actions very different to what you are used to.
The closest, actually academically studied concept that I know of is that of high versus low context cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.
Damnit, that seemed interesting! Thanks for sharing though, I'll still read about this.
Indeed, I personally take all this stuff not as scientifically merited theory, but just as some sort of artistic social commentary that at least has enough truthiness to be interesting/helpful. Sometimes the illusion of control and understanding is all you need in order to feel more secure in your social interactions, benefiting everyone as long as you don't fly off the handle with pseudoscience.
Not to spam, but the 2023 HN discussion brought up the excerpt from the first paragraph on Wikipedia:
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.
The dichotomy feels true enough even if the data is fuzzy.
It feels true indeed, which is why this is a trap.
Later in that Wikipedia article:
> A 2008 meta-analysis concluded that the model was "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".
Difficult to beat a meta analysis (assuming it was well done of course).
To be clear, "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped" is scientific speak for "bullshit".
Well, it can be.
It can also mean exactly what it said: there might indeed be truth to the thesis, but it has not yet been substantiated or fully developed.
Having to use circumlocution like that—and thus making the meaning unclear—seems like an aspect of a Guess, or high-context, culture, doesn't it? ^_^
> Having to use circumlocution like that—and thus making the meaning unclear—seems like an aspect of a Guess, or high-context, culture, doesn't it? ^_^
Ah ah :-)
Well, not really. Scientifically stating something doesn't exist is very bold, usually you can't formally do this. Your best way is to say "so far, we have no evidence of this existing".
Several studies or a meta analysis stating "we have no proof of this existing" is a strong hint towards this indeed not existing, usually that can't be for sure.
To prove something wrong usually you need a counter example, but in this stuff it's hard even imagining what's a counter example.
Generously, it could be that some relevant phenomenon does exist, but the studies are testing a hypothesis that is too strong or misaligned with the real phenomenon. Like, say, maybe the studies are attempting to show that people divide along these lines for all purposes, when the actual phenomenon only applies to matters of sufficient gravity; or maybe the studies are attempting to show that cultures divide along these lines, but actually individuals vary much more within cultures than between them. There's a million related hypotheses that you could try to parse, and finding that some of the strong ones are not supported by evidence is interesting but not evidence that the concepts aren't useful at some level.
Regardless of the above, it seems uncontroversial to say that some interactions have one or the other character -- and that it could sometimes be useful to name that character.
> it seems uncontroversial to say that some interactions have one or the other character
I don't know about uncontroversial, but I'm willing to say: there's probably some truth to this.
This was discussed on HN in 2023 . The whole "high context v. low context" model doesn't have scientific backing.[0]
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
I was going to make the same comment.
The correct term is high context vs low context culture, not "askers" and "guessers"
IMHO, Askers v. Guessers is more memorable and straight forward.
"High and low" labels trip up my quick word association with the types.
> but basing your social interactions and how you see others and yourself on this stuff might not be the best thing to do!
Why not? Just knowing that there is such different ways of thinking is useful especially when interacting with people.
I was a guesser until maybe 2 of 3 years ago until I talked about it with friends and family and I learned just today that it was called "asker" and "guesser".
If you spend time with people from different cultures, there clearly is a stark divide in behavior. Even inside said culture there might be situations in which someone becomes an asker.
Therefore this framework is good to understand how people think socially and have a better understanding towards one another. Some people may think you are rude to ask–or an idiot not to–and you will probably lose relationships if you don't realize it.
> Just knowing that there is such different ways of thinking is useful
We agree. People have different ways of thinking and interacting. Maybe that asker-vs-guesser thing made you / others realize that (and that's good! Possibly it made me realize that too, although having a flatmate years before had already done the trick tbh), but we didn't need it to know this.
> there clearly is a stark divide in behavior
How are you sure it's not confirmation bias [1]? When you have a hammer, everything looks like nails. When you have an asker-guesser theory, everybody look like askers and guessers, including yourself.
Odds are it is most likely, in fact, confirmation bias, since that theory was found to be unsubstantiated and underdeveloped, and since this is a sexy topic, it's hard to believe nobody tried to validate it rigorously (and the way scientific publishing is currently organized sadly doesn't encourage publishing negative results).
> Why not?
Because apparently, from what we actually know (robust, established knowledge), there's no good reason to think the following is actually true, even if it strongly feels like it for a host of reasons, which is my whole concern:
> this framework is good to understand how people think socially and have a better understanding towards one another
It's too easy to pick two half convincing categories that feel somewhat opposite and have the feeling that these two categories provide insight on how people work. Such theories are sugar for the brain.
I'd be most happy to be proven wrong in the future though! In the meantime, I'll pick cautiousness.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Oh, I see what you mean.
I agree with what you say regarding confirmation bias but then how do you separate that from what is considered the scientific consensus? What I mean is that Newton's Law is not scientifically accurate anymore (it's good enough, though) but the fact that it validated what we observed (i.e. gravity) is also confirmation bias.
What I'm getting at is that there is a fine line between confirmation bias and scientific theory. I hope I made sense, lol
Ooh that's a good question, how do you control for confirmation bias in studies?
I'm a bit embarrassed to have to admit that this goes beyond my knowledge. I'm sure there are answers to this, this must be well known in these areas of research. We also know that research itself can be biased too. I'll have to ask friends working on these topics! Thanks for the interesting discussion about this I'll probably live in the future.
On this topic specifically though, that meta analysis that concluded there was a lack of evidence was despite the potential confirmation bias (unless the authors of the meta-analysis where already suspicious about the theory… oh well… one can hope them following the scientific method provides strong enough guarantees. It's not completely bulletproof but it's the most reliable thing we have. I'll ask for sure!).
> but the fact that it validated what we observed (i.e. gravity) is also confirmation bias
Pretty sure that's wrong. The way it works is: we have this equation. It predicts where we expect such stuff to be in X seconds. In X seconds, we check it's indeed there. It's there: actual confirmation, not confirmation bias. That's how you check your hypothesis. Of course the initial hypothesis comes from intuition… formed by observing the world. Enough confirmations makes your model more reliable, and is the thing that will be used until a counter example shows its nose and a better model is found. Even then, the model can still be used for cases where we know it does the job; Newton's model is simpler to use than Einstein's so we keep using it.
I guess if you have a solid enough hypothesis, it also works like this in human sciences.
> Pretty sure that's wrong. The way it works is: we have this equation. It predicts where we expect such stuff to be in X seconds. In X seconds, we check it's indeed there. It's there: actual confirmation, not confirmation bias.
Exactly. My point is that since Einstein's theory, we know that Newton's Law is incomplete. Therefore proving that it was confirmation bias (i.e. that our equations just confirmed what we observed). Since we observed black holes, we knew that Newton's was incomplete as it couldn't fully explain their behaviors.
> i.e. that our equations just confirmed what we observed
No, no, it's the opposite, and it's key! What we had been observing kept matching what the equations gave us "so far". Without cherry-picking, or refusing to see the cases where the model doesn't apply (consciously or not), which would have been confirmation bias.
We did, in fact, question the model as soon as we noticed it didn't apply.
Confirmation bias implies "cognitive blinkers", I don't think this happened in this Newton vs Einstein stuff.
But I agree the confirmation bias risk is not very far away. It's an issue in the general population, it's also likely a big issue in research.
Don't we start the equations after observing a phenomenon? It wouldn't make sense to try to explain something before observing it..
For example, after observing black holes we understood that Newton's was not enough to explain them. Thus we had to find another theory that explained our observations. Now with quantum computing we know that Einstein's theory is insufficient, too (not very knowledgeable on quantum physics myself, though)
There's definitely a "Seeing an apple fall and intuiting a hypothesis" process which is early in the research process, which leads to formulating the equation as an hypothesis somehow.
So you observe stuff, intuit and formulate an hypothesis. The hypothesis is a model that you hope matches how the world works well enough. Developing a scientific hypothesis takes scientific rigor. Among other things:
- it needs to be testable (it needs to be possible to design some scientific protocol to check the hypothesis)
- it needs to be formulated before you start experimenting and collecting data (that doesn't mean you can't observe your world before, you just can't use these observations in the data that backs your thesis)
- it needs to be rooted in existing science, knowledge, it's not a simple "naive" guess. It certainly takes being deeply familiar with the research area.
Then you test your hypothesis with experiments. You design a significant number of them. You must not cherry pick here, that would be confirmation bias (but you can encode the limitations of the model in the previous step). You predict your expected results with the model you have in your hypothesis. You run your experiments, make your measurements, compute the deltas. Here too, you must not discard or tweak the results to your liking. That would be cherry-picking, or event outright falsification. If the deltas are small enough, and people review your work, and ideally reproduce it (same experiments, or other experiments), eventually there's a consensus that starts forming around your model. Congrats, the model is validated.
So, people start to use your model. They do exactly the opposite of what you did when you formulated your hypothesis: they don't try to come up with a model from preliminary observations, they assume the model works, and they use it to predict the future.
Until Einstein comes :-). And stumble upon a black hole. An observation that doesn't match. Then your model gets refined (with limits and restrictions) or even "deprecated".
But yeah, physicists model the world after the observations they make, not the contrary. Otherwise they are doing something else. Math, maybe, or philosophy, or whatever. It's just that designing the model is only the beginning, you have to check that it works… with carefully selected observations… before it can be validated.
With this asker-vs-guesser thing, we don't have convincing work that provides the validation step. This means asker-vs-guesser is an hypothesis, at best (at best, because we don't know if things required to formulate a scientific hypothesis have been respected).
>By the way, that article doesn't cite any studies!
That's fine. I think we need to get away a little bit from the implication that any thought not connected to studies or statistics makes it borderline worthless. We need to lean a little bit more toward humanism ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).
Thought not well grounded in objective evidence has a place, both on matters that are not subject to empirical inquiry and in preliminary speculation about matters that are.
But it also runs the risk of building palaces of elaborate BS with no relation to reality and pure garbage filler content, like article presenting three different non-evidence-based ideas of how a dichotomy itself not grounded in evidence supposedly plays out in reality, with no effort to do look at any evidence or do any analysis as to whether any of them or the underlying dichotomy is connected to reality.
Humanity / humanism and science aren't opposed.
Wrong social models can have bad human implications. It seems to me that being careful with these models and requiring rigor is the humanist thing to do.
Go ahead and present hypotheses, that can be very interesting, just don't present them as facts.
(Now maybe this asker-guesser thing is indeed studied, I don't know)
> Go ahead and present hypotheses, that can be very interesting, just don't present them as facts.
The article called it a provocative opinion described in a comment which became a meme.
Indeed! I didn't remember this (yes, I had already read that article a long time ago, I only scanned it quickly this time).
At least the article is honest with its source.
Thanks for emphasizing this.
> ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).
I'm not sure what you're getting at here by suggesting an elite class of people above the "average person" who do not require objective evidence. That's not really aligned with the core tenets of humanism.
Why is it "guesser" rather than, say, "hinter"?
I guess it's because they expect others to operate at the same level so they will expect to guess what others want.
But I agree with you, it should switch to align from the perspective of the person wanting something.
I've also seen responses saying that the framing of "ask" culture makes it sound as though it's all "ask" and no "tell", which is counterproductive.
What is the benefit, ultimately, of being a Guesser? How is it not better in every way for every one to choose to be an Asker?
Fitting into society. Guessers will actively exclude askers because they tend to not respect boundaries and cultural norms.
Asking for too much can damage relationships? Asking to have Greenland for one recent example.
... Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex ...
You probably know the rest
Human relationships are not computer code
Eliminating ambiguity from human relationships is neither possible not desirable
Reducing ambiguity by definition increases effective communication. Any number of social experts would undoubtedly herald an increase in effective communication an unequivocal boon to human relationships.
Not saying please or having to be polite is often simpler.
Knowing and using etiquette is often more effective.
Nothing in the article suggests forgoing politeness or etiquette. The grace with which a communication is delivered is orthogonal to it's explicitness.
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> Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline.
I don't pay for the Atlantic and thus am limited by paywall, but this ignores power dynamics.
Only if you’re a Guesser ;-)
Seriously though, it depends on the boss and the relationship you have with them. It can really fall into either camp and it might even be situational with the same person!
I would say that, generally, I would prefer to be direct in these relationships unless you both know each other really well. It does make things easier for all involved.
> Seriously though, it depends on the boss and the relationship you have with them.
Those are the power dynamics the GP is referring to.
That wasn’t the intention of what I wrote. I was referring more to how people speak. It’s very common in British English to phrase a request as a question. The “relationship” I refer to isn’t “they’re your boss,” it’s “how do you and your boss communicate,” which is a different thing altogether.
That’s not to say power dynamics can’t exist, just that it’s not a thing you can apply to every conversation or situation.
> The “relationship” I refer to isn’t “they’re your boss,” it’s “how do you and your boss communicate,” which is a different thing altogether.
No, they're impossibly intertwined and cannot be treated separately.
> That’s not to say power dynamics can’t exist, just that it’s not a thing you can apply to every conversation or situation.
To the contrary, it's not something your can ignore in any conversion between subordinate and a boss, which is the point the GP was trying to make.
For your hypothesis to work, it would mean it’s not possible for me to tell my boss “no.” Yet I do this all the time without repercussion. Trying to boil every relationship down to “power dynamics” is outright childish.
Do my boss and I have a formal relationship based on expectations we have of each other? Yes, absolutely. Are there consequences if I repeatedly go against those expectations? Yes. Are we friends? No. Does that give him unlimited control over me? Also no. Are there consequences for my boss repeatedly going against my expectations of him? Yes. Are they the same?
Are there people out there that abuse the position of boss to extract unreasonable concessions? Undeniably, yes. Is this relevant to a discussion of your boss asking if a task can be finished sooner? Not in the slightest.
I hope this clarifies things for you.
> Do my boss and I have a formal relationship based on expectations we have of each other? Yes, absolutely. Are there consequences if I repeatedly go against those expectations? Yes. Are we friends? No. Does that give him unlimited control over me? Also no. Are there consequences for my boss repeatedly going against my expectations of him? Yes. Are they the same?
What you are describing is what we call power dynamics, the effect of a power differential on the dynamics of a relationship.
> I hope this clarifies things for you.
This seems oddly passive aggressive and dismissive. I wonder would you speak to me this way if I was your boss, or the CEO of your company, or the majority owner.
> What you are describing is what we call power dynamics, the effect of a power differential on the dynamics of a relationship.
My wife and I have a formal relationship: our marriage contract. If I violate that contract then there can be consequences for me. Are there power dynamics at play?
I sign a contract with a supplier (or vice-versa). If one of us violates that contract, there are consequences. Are there power dynamics at play?
> I wonder would you speak to me this way if I was your boss, or the CEO of your company, or the majority owner.
I have done, yes.
It seems from your comments that you are confusing power dynamics with coercive control. Power dynamics doesn’t refer to coercion, but to asymmetric authority wielded, social status, risk distributed, or cost borne by individuals in a group. Even when refusal is possible, where the one or more of the above is uneven, power dynamics are at play.
> My wife and I have a formal relationship: our marriage contract. If I violate that contract then there can be consequences for me. Are there power dynamics at play?
I'm not sure this is landing the way you think it is, as yes, of course there are power dynamics at play in personal relationships, including between you and your wife.
>I sign a contract with a supplier (or vice-versa). If one of us violates that contract, there are consequences. Are there power dynamics at play?
Yes, of course.
> I have done, yes.
And of course you would speak to each differently as you would to me or to a subordinate, due to the power dynamics at play.
Power dynamics are definitely a factor. There have been many scandals around people in power asking subordinates to sleep with them, and it appears that the majority of the (Anglo) public now considers this morally wrong.
This analogy nails the problem.
The theory is predicated on askers being OK with a "no" and will move on.
This doesn't hold up for me.
I don't think you can refuse advances, a request from your boss to cancel your dinner to finish a presentation, etc. without repercussions.
You can read the original forum discussion that inspired this article: https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...
These both work for me (copied from the top):
https://web.archive.org/web/20250831074424/https://www.theat...
https://archive.ph/GBZBf
It’s conventional around here to share these sites. But they are basically unauthorized copies of the articles, right?
IMO it is totally fair and fine to just respond to the part of the discussion that the publication decided to make publicly available.
> IMO it is totally fair and fine to just respond to the part of the discussion that the publication decided to make publicly available.
This wastes the time of people who read the article.
The publicly accessible article is the article, it isn’t the reader’s fault that the publisher decided to only make a little bit of it accessible to us.
> The publicly accessible article is the article
No.
> it isn’t the reader’s fault that the publisher decided to only make a little bit of it accessible to us.
It is a commenter's fault if they comment on an article they did not read.
a link to the non-paywalled article is at the top of the hn post