= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Ishaan comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - 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 (454)
Given the importance of communication style in interpersonal relationships, I am looking to create an OkCupid question to determine if someone is an asker/teller or guesser. I'm having difficulty creating an unbiased question. Any way I've written the question makes ask/tell seem obviously better, e.g., here are two possibilities:
When you want someone to do something for you, do you prefer to ask them directly or do you prefer to mention something related and expect that they infer what you want?
Should your partner "just know" what you want without you ever saying so explicitly?
That perception might just be my own bias. Quite a few people I know would probably answer #2 as yes.
Unfortunately, this question probably won't be answered very often, so it's also useful to look for a proxy. Vaniver suggested a question about gifts when I mentioned this at a meetup, and I believe he meant the question "How often should your significant other buy you gifts, jewelry, or other things more expensive than, say, dinner, cards, or flowers?" This question is a reasonable proxy because many guessers I know seem to expect people to "just know" what sort of gifts are appropriate for them. Unfortunately, many guessers might not care that someone buys things for them with any regularity.
Another possibility is "Imagine that a friend asks you to read a short story they wrote. Unfortunately, you find it to be very boring. Which is closest to how you might respond when they ask you what you think of it?" I think that indirectly gets to the core of the ask vs. guess issue. Saying negative things is considered inappropriate to most guessers. Any other potential proxy questions?
This sounds like a feature, not a bug.
Not if you want the question to actually be accepted for use on the site.
Ah. For some reason I thought it was a freeform question to be put to those potentially interested. (I don't actually know anything about OKC)
I'd hedge in the 'all the time' and 'never' to include 'nearly' variants of each.
And I'd split the “Sometimes” into “Often” and “Rarely”, otherwise a supermajority of people would just pick the middle answer (and also, ISTM that “how often” questions on OKC usually have four possible answers).
Great comment. I think your latter question is excellent, though I'm not sure that "drop hints" is the best way to describe guessing. I'll think about what might be better.
You could further simplify it to "How often do you directly ask for what you want?" -Almost Never, I hate asking for things, - Sometimes bla bla bla, - Almost always, clear communication bla bla bla
Also, some people take things really literally, so I'd take LukeASomers' advice and add the "almost" hedges