"I'm beginning to find this conversation aversive, and I'm not sure why. I propose we hold off until I've figured that out."
I read this suggested line and felt a little worried. I hope rationalist culture doesn't head in that direction.
There are plenty of times when I agree a policy of frankness can be useful, but one of the risks of such a policy is that it can become an excuse to abdicate responsibility for your effect on other people.
If you tell me that you're having an aversive reaction to our conversation, but can't tell me why, it's going to stress me out, and I'm going to feel compelled to go back over our conversation to see if I can figure out what I did to cause that reaction in you. That's a non-negligible burden to dump on someone.
If, instead, you found an excuse to leave the conversation gracefully (no need for annoyed body language), you can reflect on the conversation later and decide if there is anything in particular I did to cause your aversive reaction. Maybe so, and you want to bring it up with me later. Or maybe you decide you overreacted to a comment I made, which you now believe you misinterpreted. Or maybe you decide you were just anxious about something unrelated. Overall, chances are good that you can save me a lot of stress and self-consciousness by dealing with your emotions yourself as a first pass, and making them my problem only if (upon reflection) you decide that it would be helpful to do so.
Interesting, I have the exact opposite gut reaction. It could be rephrased in slight variations, e.g. "until we've figured that out", or, as shokwave below suggested, with a request for assistance, but in general, if someone said that to me, I would, ceteris paribus, infer that they are a self-aware and peaceful/cooperative person and that they are not holding anything in particular against me.
Whereas when someone leaves a conversation with an excuse that may or may not be genuine, it leaves me totally stressed-out because I have no idea what's going on and now I have the burden of figuring everything out on my own, about another person who is obviously intent on not sending many informative signals. Great.
Yes, my version of this always goes, "I'm finding this conversation aversive and I don't know why. Hold on while I figure it out." In other words, it doesn't delay a conversation until later, but it does mean that I close my eyes for 60 seconds and think.
If you speak the words fast enough and with enough conviction, your audience's brain will fill in the gap with whatever pleases them while you retain full plausible deniability. Win!
I also find that line a bit strange. In nearly all cases where I would expect that someone says: "I'm beginning to find this conversation aversive, and I'm not sure why" I think I would take it as a topic change to why the conversation might bring up negative emotions in the person.
If we are in an environment of open conversation and I say something that brings up an emotional trauma in another person and that person doesn't have the self-awareness to know why he's feeling unwell, that's not a good time to leave him alone.
To the latter, your interlocutor says (or likely, thinks to themselves):
"Uh, actually, I was rather enjoying that conversation. I thought it had value. But I guess I was wrong; it seems you do not find me interesting, or think that I am annoying. That hurts."
Working as intended?
Yeah, absolutely.
Having been raised in a Guess culture and subsequently indoctrinated into a strong Ask culture, I have in the decades since evolved a strong personal version of what you're calling a Tell methodology here (what I personally think of as a high-context Ask culture).
I first noticed it explicitly in my twenties, upon hearing myself say to a departing guest "I invite you to think about how many times, in your culture, someone has to invite you to take leftovers home before you're allowed to accept, and then behave as though I'd invited you that many times." Which caused the entire room to burst into good-natured mockery, but many of them took leftovers.
My experience since has been mixed. It works well within communities where self-awareness is prized, and frequently elicits hostility elsewhere. Ask-culture people tend to appreciate it, Guess-culture people are frequently irritated or offended by my insistence on making explicit what is properly left obscured. (This makes sense to me... I, too, am irritated when people do publicly what I've been conditioned to treat as private.)
I first noticed it explicitly in my twenties, upon hearing myself say to a departing guest "I invite you to think about how many times, in your culture, someone has to invite you to take leftovers home before you're allowed to accept, and then behave as though I'd invited you that many times." Which caused the entire room to burst into good-natured mockery, but many of them took leftovers.
This being what wit (which is a synonym for "intelligence" for good reason) is for.
Tragedy of the commons, the shared resource being mutual trust. The first one to defect reaps the rewards of his faux signals being taken at face value ("I don't mind at all sticking around", wow, such pleasantness, many social laurels, wow), degrading the network of trust a "tell culture" relies upon.
It's like saying "wouldn't we as a society benefit overall if hidden negative externalities were internalized", yea well, first one to secretly pollute the river gets some bonus shares next quarter (wow, such money, many boni, wow)! Same with a trust culture ending in a race to the bottom.
I'm not suggesting all of society is ready for this. I'm suggesting we work toward it among highly rational peers and allies. This is how, and much of why, my close social circles work. Now that I'm used to it, I'd have it no other way.
among highly rational peers
Tricky (like most anything).
I wouldn't say "among rational peers" so much as "among EA-oriented peers". For our specific community, there is significant overlap in the Venn diagram depicting those two qualities, but those two are very much distinct qualities nonetheless.
A community of HPMOR!Quirrell variations would have your very post in main, with plenty of upvotes, all the while secretly whetting their blades. Perfectly rational.
The more established the trust culture, the more vulnerable it would be to a traitor, a cunning red-pill bastard who plays the trust-network like a fiddle to the tune of his/her egotistical agenda.
Trust -- the quintessential element of your so-called "tell culture" -- and vulnerability are two sides of the same coin.
When the social circle is small enough as to resemble an expanded family unit, a clan, it may work. A strong sense of ties that bind to keep the commitment to honesty honest would tend to keep a "tell culture"' social circle's cardinality well below Dunbar's number.
If they all started off in a symmetrical position, they'd use Unbreakable Vows to keep from killing each other and then proceed to further affairs, not necessarily cooperatively.
Ya know, after thousands of years of trying it out in all kinds of environments, it seems as though almost every culture on Earth settles on "Guess", with maybe a touch of "Ask" in the more overbearing ones. A common modification to "Guess" is "Offer", where the mere mention of a possible opportunity to help out is treated as creating almost a positive obligation to notice the need and make a spontaneous offer.
From where I sit, that's pretty strong evidence that "Guess" or maybe "Offer" is more suited to collective human nature. There's a pretty heavy burden of proof on any "rationalist" who wants to change it.
It's also not so obvious that you can effectively change conventions like these by just starting in and asking others to change. If you tried your "developing trust" tactic with me, I'd probably play along to avoid conflict on one occasion, and avoid YOU after that.
It's evidence that Guess is the Nash equilibrium that human cultures find. Consider that the Nash equilibrium in the Prisoner's Dilemma (and in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with known fixed length) is both defect. It's a common theme in game theory that the Nash equilibrium is not always the best place to be.
Ya know, after thousands of years [...] every culture on Earth settles on "Guess",
As far as my knowledge of cultures goes I'd guess that this is indeed the optimum for "settled" cultures where there are lots of rules and customes everybody knows from early on (precisely the conditions I gave in my earlier comment).
But that just means that it is applicable to 'normal' situations. Not under stress. Not for fast societal change. And maybe not for rationalists dealing with each other.
Ya know, after thousands of years of trying it out in all kinds of environments, it seems as though almost every culture on Earth settles on "Guess", with maybe a touch of "Ask" in the more overbearing ones.
That's a strong claim. Is it really true? I'll grant that it certainly seems like the overall culture would be at least leaning towards Guess almost everywhere. But I don't think that the original Metafilter post and various other posts that were inspired by it would have been so broadly linked and discussed if there weren't also strong enough strains of Ask culture that lots and lots of people intuitively recognized the existence of both. I seem to recall seeing people talking about how they grew up in an Ask or Guess family and how that led to conflicts when they ran into people raised differently, etc. That makes it sound like the two cultures are very much co-existing.
I don't have sociological statistics on that, and will have to retract "almost every culture" as a statement of fact.
My general impression is that the US and Western Europe are about as "Ask" as it gets, and in a lot of other cultures you're pretty unlikely to find any "Ask families" at all. I do know that "Offer" exists.
If I'm understanding your comment correctly, I strongly disagree with this way of framing such suggestions. It seems anathema to the rationalist enterprise. Many rationalist simplifications of or modifications to (social) interaction, or other not-strictly-rationalist approaches that are regardless endorsed by us, are hit by your argument. E.g. requesting tabooing words, requesting predictions of differing anticipated experiences, Crocker's rules, confessing noticing confusion, etc. etc. on through the Sequences et al.
A core of the rationalist ideal is to take approaches that promote the discovery, recognition, and sharing of truth except where there are situational reasons to hold off on doing so in those specific cases. For example, I agree with warnings that have been raised in the comments on this post about trying Telling without a cooperating or rationalist receiver. But that's in the same way that asking a Muggle to taboo their words can be a not-so-great idea.
I suspect that high-profile Bay Area (and possibly New York?) rationalists would bear this out. As a specific example, as far as I can tell, Alicorn seems to be the rationalist master of Telling and generally avoiding ...
So, as long as we're Telling, I'm going to talk about my own internal state. I think at least some aspects of my reactions may be shared by other people, including people whom readers of this thread may be interested in influencing or interacting with. Anybody who's not interested in this should definitely stop reading. I promise I won't be offended. :-)
Although I still think I had a point, if I look back at why I really wrote my response, I think that point was mostly "cover" for a less acceptable motivation. I think I really wrote it mostly out of irritation with the way the word "rationalist" was used in the original posting. And I find myself feeling the same way in response to some of your reply.
My first reaction is to see it as an ugly form of appropriation to take the word "rationalist" to mean "person identified with the Less Wrong community or associated communities, especially if said member uses jargon A, B, and C, and subscribes to only-tangentially-rational norms X, Y, and Z". Especially when it's coupled with signals of group superiority like "don't try this with Muggles" (used to be "mundanes"). It provokes ...
This may be getting into private-message territory. I haven't paid enough attention to the norms to be sure. But it's easy to not read these...
your comment makes me think that avoiding ambiguity and not appropriating is not enough and perhaps even using it among ourselves is to be avoided, e.g. for the benefit of those 'looking in from the outside' who might be preemptively alienated.
I am, perhaps, "looking in from the outside". I have a lot of history and context with the ideas here, and with the canonical texts, and even with a few of the people, but I'm an extreme "non-joiner". In fact, I tend toward suspicion and distaste for the whole idea of investing my identity in a community, especially one with a label and a relatively clear boundary. I have only a partial model of where that attitude comes from, but I do know that I seem to retain an "outsider" reaction for a lot longer than other people might.
I may be hypersensitive. But I think it's more likely that I'm a not-horrible model of how a completely naive outsider might react to some of these things, even though I can express it in a Less-Wrongish vocabulary.
And of course these posts are ind...
I am really very pleasantly surprised with how this comment tree turned out and these are useful warnings. The level of internal insight was higher than I would have expected even if our first two comments hadn't been vaguely confrontational. Thank you!
I'm coming to this party rather late, but I'd like to acknowledge that I appreciated this exchange more than just by upvoting it. Seeing in depth explanations of other people's emotions seems like the only way to counter Typical Mind Fallacy, but is also really hard to come by. So thanks for a very levelheaded discussion.
This is a horrible thing to do to a Guesser. When you Ask out of turn, you're forcing them to either comply or be rude, and they resent you. When you Tell, you're imposing intimacy on them - making yourself vulnerable and demanding they do the same, and underlining exactly how a refusal would hurt you. That causes terrible guilt.
This is a horrible thing to do to a Guesser. (I agree denotatively, but...)
It took me almost six months from meeting a particular Guess person to realise this: the times I offended them clustered according to whether I was a soldier in their war, not by my actual actions.[0]
Lots of things, maybe most things you can do in a conversation are horrible things to do to a Guesser. I'm well above average for social skills plus a few points above LW average IQ and even I find it hard to navigate conversations with a Guesser (I swear I have better social skills than that previous arrogant statement implies). The way I have found to not constantly insult and offend them is to take a lot of time to learn their particular 'dialect' of Guess.
I didn't grow up in a Guess culture, so at my first exposure to it I was already a mind that could think for itself - and my thought was "Guess culture is manipulative." It stacks up complicated laws, some of which are enforced ridiculously strictly[1] and others that are loosely enforced, if at all[2], so a skilled Guesser has both a minefield of rules, and an arsenal of selectively enforced rules, to use in conversation.
This is scary. If I...
0: I could use ableist slurs (insane; crazy) freely to deride people, institutions, papers etc that argued for no gendered pay gap, for biological difference between race, etc. But it was a serious transgression to use the same slurs to describe people, institutions, or papers that argued for parapsychology, telepathy, etc.
"You're free to insult the things that I don't have much respect for, but not the things that I do respect" sounds like the standard policy of most humans, Guesser or not.
There's not really a better way to interact with Guessers, though. You either Guess yourself and spend a lot of effort in low-bandwidth discussion with lots of misunderstanding and weirdness, or you be mean to them in order to communicate and get your needs met.
I grew up in a strong Guess culture, and really one of the best things you can do for your mental health is to get out of that kind of place. It's a way to passive-aggressively get concessions from those around you while making yourself miserable. Guessing is a terrible, terrible way to "win".
My usual approach for dealing with culture-clashes in ongoing relationships is to work on the issues primarily in low-stakes contexts at first.
Beyond that, it helps to get some explicit agreement, first, that this culture-clash exists and what properties it has, and second, about what you collectively want to do about it.
If they are willing to meet you halfway, for example, they can practice explicitly verbalizing requests and expectations, and commit explicitly to not treating your silence as a refusal of a request even if it seems like one to them, and commit explicitly to not treating your explicit requests as demands even if they feel that way. You can make that easier by asking them whether they have a preference and if so what it is, framing questions open-endedly (e.g. "what would you like to do for dinner?" rather than "wanna do chinese?"), and vocalizing any uncertainty you may have ("wait... this feels weird. did I just miss an implicitly expressed preference?")
If you are willing to meet them halfway, for example, you can study their pattern of cues and learn to recognize their implicit requests and responses. They can make that easier by ...
I have unusually low social anxiety, so I don't experience Askers this way, but it is my impression that most Guessers would experience it in roughly that way, and yeah — that's kind of a mean thing to do to someone.
I use the tell culture with close friends, the ask culture with acquaintances and guess culture with everyone else, including family. Not on purpose - perhaps this isn't the best way of interacting with people.
I tried the tell culture when trying to get out of aversive conversations with my parents to disastrous effect. I do think that it is unfair, and a common failure mode, to use the guess culture and then get angry if the other person doesn't read you correctly.
I do think that it is unfair, and a common failure mode, to use the guess culture and then get angry if the other person doesn't read you correctly.
Definitely.
But there is another unfair failure mode, perhaps not quite as common: to endorse to the use of the guess culture and then fail to deliver by failing to guess anything right. This has been driving me nuts in my interactions with some people. And yes, I'm pretty sure for a number of reasons that they aren't merely pretending to be oblivious, but actually fail to notice the hints.
It is also a mistake that I have made myself.
The problem here is that, as far as I can tell, a "Tell" culture would immediately become a "Lie Ineptly" culture.
Most of the time, in my experience anyway, when you don't want to help someone it's usually for a reason you couldn't say without nuking or at least damaging the relationship. Even worse, the level of detail / emotion in the "Tell" is much higher than the straightforward "Ask" which makes the usual evasions seem hollow and requires more elaborate excuses. And most people suck at spontaneous deception, since usually the only ones of us who get any practice tend to get weeded out of normal society pretty quickly as is.
"Telling" sounds great if your goal is to quickly burn up your social capital for favors, which can be a smart move if you're not planning on seeing someone again anyway. But you can't really build a useful relationship that way; blunt honesty and bad lies aren't going to get you trust / comfort and without that you're fighting uphill for every little thing.
Relevant video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU
Steven Pinker argues that things like guess culture exist so that while she knows I was "asking" to crash at her place, she doesn't know that I know that she knows that I was asking to crash at her place.
Yes, that's a good video! You can find more detail in Pinker's article. Abstract:
...When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to genera
Who asks and who guesses has a lot to do with social roles.
If I'm out dancing Salsa it's usually men doing a lot more asking and on the other hand woman often being more indirect about wanting to dance. That doesn't mean that woman never ask a man to dance but usually it's the role of the man to ask.
It took me quite a while to get to the point where rejection in those situations doesn't trigger much in me anymore most of the time and there are still situations where it does. Some cases where I don't feel any pain then when I meet the girl another day and we dance I'm more held back and the intimacy between us is less even if the girl would want a bit more.
It quite easy to say: "You are completely free to say ‘no’". On the other hand it's hard to not feel rejected. When someone I consider unconfident says: "You are completely free to say ‘no’", I might translate that into that they might hurt emotionally from getting a "no" but won't actively hold it against me. Even if the don't want to hold it against me, they might still put up emotional shields that prevent further rejection from hurting.
I think the framework of Nonviolent-Communication works quite well. You are open with what you are feeling and don't judge. If the emotions are out in the open it's a lot easier to deal with them.
People's feelings do sometimes get hurt when you say "no". And people's feelings get hurt when you're honest with them sometimes. My thesis is that it's easier, as a community, to recover from hurt feelings than from ignorance and deceptions.
My thesis is that it's easier, as a community, to recover from hurt feelings than from ignorance and deceptions.
If you pretend that someone's "No" won't hurt you is often deception.
Take a sentence from your examples: "I just realized this interaction will be far more productive if my brain has food. I think we should head toward the kitchen."
This is not open communication. It hides the main motivation of the feeling of hunger and instead tries to find a intellectual justification for a proposal. The nonviolent communication (NVC) way would be to say: "I'm hungry, how about we head towards the kitchen?"
That sentence has the emotion motivating it in it. It also contains no should.
There no need to invented a new "tell culture" framework when frameworks like nonviolent communication are out there.
A lot of the "This kind of trust does not develop overnight." comes from the fact that you are not open. If I'm completely open with emotions and don't put a intellectual front and intellectual justifications before them I can sometimes go quite deep in 10 minutes.
If I have a deep conversation with you that might leave you hurt I care about what you feel more than I care whether you tell me "You are completely free to say ‘no’, or to tell me what you’re thinking right now, and I promise it will be fine."
I agree with both of you. I would phrase this as something like: "My hunger is making it hard for me to focus; I'd prefer to go to the kitchen for some food before we continue."
In that sentence you disassociate your hunger. You aren't focusing on feeling your hunger but you are treating it as an external object.
That makes it harder for the person you are talking with you to empathize with you and go with you to the kitchen because that would make you feel better.
If you are my friend and I'm talking with you I want to make you feel better. That's often enough to agree with a proposal like going to the kitchen.
You are still turning what could be an exchange about your desire and the other person having a option to make you feel better into a straight cold utility calculation.
If I'm on a Lesswrong meetup and someone appear to communicate as if he's a Straw Vulcan, I don't mind. In most cases you however don't want to signal being a Straw Vulcan. Your sentence doesn't send that signal as strong as the original one, but to me it still goes in that direction.
Being open about your emotional needs and expecting that your friend cares about them enough to want to make you es...
It seems to me that Tell culture is unstable: if there is no social cost for stating strong preferences, people will be incentivized to overstate their preferences, and it will de facto reduce to Ask culture. If stating strong preferences is costly, people will be incentivized to undrestate their preferences, and you'll end up with Guess culture.
I typically act in accord with Guess culture because that's what the vast majority of Americans do, and what they expect from others, and I don't want to randomly shock people and stress them out, because that's just not very nice.
I might have adopted a different strategy if my brain's software had ended up being relatively poor at reading body language / tone of voice / etc., though.
I use Tell a lot and also think it superior if applied mutually but I also find that it has the following disadvantages:
It has the highest cost on the Teller - you just have to tell more than in the other cases.
The teller has the risk of telling things that can be used against him (think not of blackmail but rather small passed opportunities due to gossip etc.).
Tell and Ask can also run into trouble: Tell: Ask: "Come to the point. What do you want? So I can say yes or no."
I think we have to identify in which environment each of those methods work best and use the appropriate strategy. That would be rational. Some thoughts:
Tell is expensive (on both parties, but more on the teller) but allows quick establishment of rapport. It is suitable if initial trust has been established or can be assumed (e.g. in a date or in a rationalists meetup).
Ask is cheap and efficient but puts a burden on longer relationships (any kind). Use it in highly dynamic situations or if you are under time or ressource constraints aka stress. Do not use it for longer time spans.
Guess is extremely cheap on the receiver end but expensive on the teller. It is inefficient in situations where Ask wins but it is efficient where rules and norms are many and well-known as it minimizes conflict and overall cost. Use it for long term cooperation.
Of course it is probably hard to master all of these together.
EDIT: typos
Crucial Conversations promotes what you're calling Tell Culture, and is a useful primer for learning more techniques of how to do this, and various pitfalls that you can run into if you don't use this.
I'm, 'gratified' I guess, to see other comments here about autism. As I read through the post, I immediately began having the impression that "rationalist community" was being used like a euphemism for "community with high rate of autism". I know it isn't, literally, but there are aspects of rationalism and this type of explicit communication that I have always thought of as 'gifts' that people on the autism spectrum bring to humanity.
I'm mostly solitary, but even I've used these patterns before. It seems to correspond roughly to who has the power in a given conversation.
Tell:
Walter: I want to buy a pizza. It should have bread and cheese and pepperoni on it. Bring it to Address, and I'll give the delivery minion its cost, plus a tip if it is within time X.
Pizza Human: Alright.
Ask:
Walter: Am I in your way, would you like to use this exercise machine?
Gym Human: No, I'm waiting for a friend.
Guess:
Walter: Despite it being only 3 o'clock, many people have gone home for the day on this, the day we set aside to celebrate Martin Luthor King.
Boss Human: You may leave early.
I just came across an example of Guess Culture being troublesome.
I'm visiting my grandparents in a few weeks (my dad lives near them). My aunt is visiting too. We're both flying in from different cities. My aunt sent out an email to me, my dad and my grandparents with her flight info. I then went to do the same.
I saw that my aunt's email came from her work email address. I had an old personal email on file for her, but it had been a while since I used it, and I wasn't sure if she still uses it, so I used her work email.
She then responde...
This seems a close relative to a culture clash I've experienced, which I'll call Pull vs. Push. It is well exemplified by how the culture handles passing food at the table. Note that the obvious ease of the task pretty much eliminates the guess/ask/tell distinction: "I'm out of rice", "Could you please pass the rice", and "I am out of rice and would like more" are all functionally identical.
I grew up in a Pull household, where, when you're out of something on your plate and want more of it, you ask for it. But my girlfriend's ...
A lot of the comments are ignoring the fact that this game has multiple equilibria. Saying "humans evolved into X, so therefore there must be a logic to X" makes as much sense as saying "Americans drive on the right side of the road, so therefore there must be a logic to using the right side of the road."
Also, when traveling outside the monastery, our first priority should be to figure out how the other people drive.
This seems like a really good idea, except that defecting is easy and appealing, Guess people will (as you pointed out) lose their shit, and worst of all, people just seem to get weirded out by the making explicit of things like actually understanding other people, or honestly talking about the full set of preferences - especially socially awkward ones. That said, I'd like to be able to do this with people.
I think there are a few people who act inconsistently: They want to be asked so they can say "no". But they also want to be guessed so they don't need to say "yes" because of the guilt it brings.
Have you encountered such and how does one deal with them?
I have tried Tell but it prompts the reply: "Ask or don't ask but don't babble."
Here's a new strategy.
Use guess culture as a default. Use guess tricks to figure out whether other communicator speaks Ask. Use Ask tricks to figure out whether communicator speaks Tell.
Guess culture has, I think, been the standard way for humans to hume for many thousands of years. My inclination is to imagine that, therefore, it's probably optimal, at least for typical people.
Am I missing something? Is there some factor that is pushing rules of social etiquette in a bad direction throughout human history?
In my experience, Guess culture (which I think is more fair to describe as "Hint culture") works really well when most people around me were raised in the same culture. We all know each other's expectations because we grew up together, and we all know how to communicate messages to one another implicitly, in ways that allow for a request to be turned down without the need for explicit rejection and all the emotional consequences of that, and we make use of that shared context in our daily interactions to reduce social friction.
Of course, it makes life difficult for outsiders who interact with us, and haven't grown up with that context, and therefore don't know how to communicate messages implicitly in our culture, and don't know how to interpret the implicit messages we send them. Outsiders are either mute or boorish (or perhaps both).
Conversely, Guess/Hint culture works really poorly in culturally heterogenous environments, when basically everyone is an outsider.
I observe that culturally heterogenous environments are a lot more common in the world than they were, say, 200 years ago; advances in transportation and communication tech probably account for that.
So that's one factor that seems relevant. (Of course, one could apply your argument again to claim that cultural heterogeneity is a new development and therefore suspect, and it's probably optimal for us to live in small isolated tribes.)
Fun fact: Linguists talk about this in the context of the Gricean maxims, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
Maxim of Quality[edit] Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of Quantity[edit] Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxim of Relation[edit] Be relevant. With respect to this maxim, Grice writes, "Though the maxim itself is terse, its formulation...
Tell culture seems pretty close to ask culture. I think guess culture is superior to both of them, even though guessing can go too far sometimes, obviously. (I should tell (!) you though that I am a guesser by inclination/personality so I might be doing motivated cognition).
In my view, the defences of both ask and tell culture are based on a defect picture of human cognition. You more or less always imply things by asking them or telling them things. The reason for this is that there are so many things you could ask and so many things you could tell so tha...
Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argued in a classic study that (US) Southern politeness is a reaction to high levels of aggression:
"(The authors also theorize that Southern politeness could be a response to Southern aggression—if Southerners are more likely to take offense than other regional cultures, it follows they would be less likely to give offense, for safety’s sake.)"
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/July-2012/American-Violence-and-Southern-Culture/
That seems to be very much in line with your line of thinking. According to this line of reasoning, "honour" cultures in which people are likely to take offence easily, should generally be more polite.
They made two kinds of experiments that seems to support this line of thinking. In the first, they compared how Southern and Northern young males reacted if you bumped in to them in a conspicuous fashio. Unsurprisingly, the Southerners got more angry. In the second experiment, the experimenters' collaborators nearly bumped into Southern and Northern young males - in which case the Southerners would be more likely to go out of way to avoid bumping. This makes sense - you should be more careful to a...
+1 for this pattern when it works. Be aware that there is no single policy that's universally applicable. Even with the same person, there can be different situations where a declined offer is going to sting regardless of how it's phrased. Compassion demands that you do so with the minimum of pain. Rationality (usually) demands that you do so with the maximum potential for future interactions. These are mostly in agreement: communicate using whatever conventions make the other person most comfortable.
For some, you can gently lead them down the path ...
If you’re occasionally dishonest and tell people you want things you don't actually care about--like their comfort or convenience--they’ll learn not to trust you, and the inherent freedom of the system will be lost.
Maybe I'm only thinking of trivial examples, but I haven't noticed this. If I have guests over at my house, of course I care about their convenience, as I want the social capital that comes with throwing a good party. I want my co-workers slaving at the same project as me to be comfortable as it will make them more productive. There are tons ...
I've found 'telling' to be invaluable in most intimate relationships, particularly because of whatever it is that results in 'many minds', e.g. expressing all of the conflicting feelings one has to better explain why one can't ask some particular thing.
Perhaps Guess culture has its origins in the expectation of empathetic engagement? The shirt ironing example suggests as much. Words are sufficient to express ideas, but they don't always efficiently relay all encoded information. To accomplish this - to fill in the missing bits - empathy can be a powerful facilitator. Perhaps the Guess cultures we find toxic are those in which this expectation of empathetic engagement has mutated into an expectation to anticipate and manage others' emotions.
My family has a guess-culture ("you must not love me enough if you don't notice that I'm too busy to for what you request!") I'm guessy about things by instinct.. but don't like being guessy about receiving requests - it feels manipulative to place the burden of my feeling offended on the person asking. From the perspective of receiving requests, I've started trying hard to play by Crocker's Rules (to the usual mixed success).
In making requests - I prefer to be telly and have tried to incorporate that into my life. But what I notice is that other...
I find it interesting to observe that my youngest who is moderately autistic operates exclusively in 'Tell' mode. Either he models everyone else as autistic, or he doesn't model other people at all, it is hard to tell from the outside, but in either case 'Guess' and 'Ask' modes are essentially unavailable to him.
I feel ask and tell culture are fairly similar in comparison to guess culture. Tell culture seems to me to be just ask culture a bit more explaining, which seems like a move in the right direction, balanced by time and energy constraints. Guess culture just seems rather silly.
Strongly agree! I sort of half-heartedly try to implement this...
To a Guess culture person, I imagine much of the above sounds passive aggressive or manipulative, much worse than the rude bluntness of mere Ask.
...and this is the reaction I often feel like I'm getting, although it's hard to tell; when I try the explicit explanation of what I'm doing, people sometimes seem to get confused.
I think that there is one more culture: Ignore culture. It has only two types or replies: "Wonderful" and no reply. The same is this reading posts in the internet. One could either comment or ignore them, and most times people choose to ignore. But as a result it breaks communication in small pieces. So it is worst but most popular form of culture.
Tell culture works only for equal rational and mutually interested friends, unfortunately.
I definitely want to thank you for putting all of this in clear words and introducing these abstractions.
However out of my personal experience I find the advocacy of Tell-mode to be a terrible practical advice. Especially for people who haven't yet figured out some sort of a model on these and how to interact productively with people in their environment. I suppose a lot of my younger self social hardships came from using sort of Tell/Ask way too often and utterly failing at Guess.
There are areas where people seem to use Guess almost universally. The whole...
I really do not understand how "ruthless truth telling" is supposed to work. Lots of behavior is motivated by reasons that cannot be said aloud with hurting people. What if my reasons are things like "I think X person is pretty dull and I am not interested in what they have to say." There are alot of unpleasant feelings in most people's heads (including mine). I would strongl prefer these unpleasant feelings not be spoken aloud.
I'm not sure how this differs from positive and negative politeness.
Followup to: Ask and Guess
Ask culture: "I'll be in town this weekend for a business trip. Is it cool if I crash at your place?" Response: “Yes“ or “no”.
Guess culture: "Hey, great news! I'll be in town this weekend for a business trip!" Response: Infer that they might be telling you this because they want something from you, conclude that they might want a place to stay, and offer your hospitality only if you want to. Otherwise, pretend you didn’t infer that.
The two basic rules of Ask Culture: 1) Ask when you want something. 2) Interpret things as requests and feel free to say "no".
The two basic rules of Guess Culture: 1) Ask for things if, and *only* if, you're confident the person will say "yes". 2) Interpret requests as expectations of "yes", and, when possible, avoid saying "no".
Both approaches come with costs and benefits. In the end, I feel pretty strongly that Ask is superior.
But these are not the only two possibilities!
"I'll be in town this weekend for a business trip. I would like to stay at your place, since it would save me the cost of a hotel, plus I would enjoy seeing you and expect we’d have some fun. I'm looking for other options, though, and would rather stay elsewhere than inconvenience you." Response: “I think I need some space this weekend. But I’d love to get a beer or something while you’re in town!” or “You should totally stay with me. I’m looking forward to it.”
There is a third alternative, and I think it's probably what rationalist communities ought to strive for. I call it "Tell Culture".
The two basic rules of Tell Culture: 1) Tell the other person what's going on in your own mind whenever you suspect you'd both benefit from them knowing. (Do NOT assume others will accurately model your mind without your help, or that it will even occur to them to ask you questions to eliminate their ignorance.) 2) Interpret things people tell you as attempts to create common knowledge for shared benefit, rather than as requests or as presumptions of compliance.
Suppose you’re in a conversation that you’re finding aversive, and you can’t figure out why. Your goal is to procure a rain check.
Here are more examples from my own life:
The burden of honesty is even greater in Tell culture than in Ask culture. To a Guess culture person, I imagine much of the above sounds passive aggressive or manipulative, much worse than the rude bluntness of mere Ask. It’s because Guess people aren’t expecting relentless truth-telling, which is exactly what’s necessary here.
If you’re occasionally dishonest and tell people you want things you don't actually care about--like their comfort or convenience--they’ll learn not to trust you, and the inherent freedom of the system will be lost. They’ll learn that you only pretend to care about them to take advantage of their reciprocity instincts, when in fact you’ll count them as having defected if they respond by stating a preference for protecting their own interests.
Tell culture is cooperation with open source codes.
This kind of trust does not develop overnight. Here is the most useful Tell tactic I know of for developing that trust with a native Ask or Guess. It’s saved me sooooo much time and trouble, and I wish I’d thought of it earlier.
"I'm not asking because I expect you to say ‘yes’. I'm asking because I'm having trouble imagining the inside of your head, and I want to understand better. You are completely free to say ‘no’, or to tell me what you’re thinking right now, and I promise it will be fine." It is amazing how often people quickly stop looking shifty and say 'no' after this, or better yet begin to discuss further details.