= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Relsqui comments on Ask and Guess - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (64)
I was raised in a strong Guess culture, then went to a tech university where Askers predominated, and it took me some years to come to terms with the fact that these are simply incompatible conversational styles and the most effective thing for me to do is understand which style my interlocutor is expecting and use that.
This, amusingly, often leads me to ask people whether they are using Ask rules or Guess rules. Except, of course, in situations where I intuit that asking them would be inappropriate, and I have to guess instead.
Bringing college friends home for dinner was the most wearing version of this. On one occasion I had to explicitly explain to a friend that, for her purposes, it was best to assume that the last piece of chicken was simply unavailable to be eaten, ever, by anyone. (There actually was a method for getting it, but it was an Advanced Guess Culture technique, not readily taught in one session.)
Incidentally, my own experience is that Ask and Guess are sometimes misleading labels for the styles they refer to (though they are conventional).
For example, "Ask" culture is often OK with "So, I'm assuming here that A, B, and C are true; based on that yadda yadda" with the implicit expectation is that someone will correct me if I'm wrong. In "Guess" culture this sort of thing carries the equally implicit expectation that nobody will correct me. Here both groups are guessing, but they guess differently.
"Guess" culture also has an implicit expectation in some cases that you do ask, but that an honest answer is not actually permitted... the answer is constrained by the social rules. For example, growing up if a guest says "Well, we should get going." the host is obligated to reply "Oh, but we're having such a good time!" and none of that actually lets you know whether the guest is still welcome or not (or, indeed, whether the guest has any desire to stay or go). (On one occasion, when highly motivated to have a departing guest take leftovers home with her if and only if she actually wanted leftovers, but not knowing her default rules, I ended up saying "So, among your tribe, how many times do I have to repeat an offer to have it count as a genuine offer?")
And "Guess" culture has all kinds of rules for how you communicate to someone exactly what it is you want them to do without being asked.
(On one occasion, when highly motivated to have a departing guest take leftovers home with her if and only if she actually wanted leftovers, but not knowing her default rules, I ended up saying "So, among your tribe, how many times do I have to repeat an offer to have it count as a genuine offer?")
I once saw a friend ask our host, upon leaving a party, if he would like her to leave the rest of the cake she brought, which we'd eaten some of but hadn't finished. She's very asky, he's very guessy. However, she knows this, and immediately followed up with: "Please don't feel you need to take it--we'll happily eat it at home. I know I don't like it when people foist leftovers on me that I don't really want." He considered, and said since there was so much of it, he'd take a couple of pieces for himself and his roommate and let her take the rest home. Very asky question, very guessy answer, all parties satisfied.
What field do you go into if you want to study this stuff? Anthropology of some flavor? I find it fascinating.
Sociologists and sociolinguists study this sort of thing a lot. In particular, there's a lot of work in sociolinguistics on registers of politeness, and how different cultures construct and interpret questions.
My husband and I took over a decade to evolve a pattern where I can answer "What do you want to do for dinner?" with "Well, left to my own devices I would probably just heat up some soup, but if you want to go out that's OK with me too, but I don't feel like cooking anything."