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NancyLebovitz comments on Ask and Guess - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've seen it suggested that "Guess" is an unfair portrayal-- it's how Infer cultures look to people who don't know the rules.
Yup. This became particularly clear to me when I dated someone in college who was from an equally "Guess" but different culture than the one I was raised in (1). I understood perfectly well what was going on, but I didn't know the cues.
It would not surprise me too much to discover that the whole idea of "a Guess culture" is actually an illusion, similar to the idea that one's own native language is inherently easier to understand than other people's, and that all cultures are equally opaque to outsiders. (I don't think that's likely, but it's not impossible.)
(1) I came from a Hispanic immigrant background, she came from an upper-class New England background. Together, we fought crime.
That's an awesome comment. I'm interested which specific cues came up that you realised each other didn't get :)
Heh. It was twenty years ago, I'm probably confabulating more than I'm recalling.
To pick an example... I remember observing that both my family and hers had highly specific ways of communicating the difference between a demand, a request, and a question, but the mechanisms had almost nothing in common. In my family, if it was phrased as an interrogative it was either a question or a demand, but never a request. and I was expected to recognize demands by context. In her family, it seemed everything was an interrogative; whatever the cue was, I never really figured it out.
Sorry for the necromancy - I'd call Guess cultures Hint, Subtle, or Infer/Imply/Implicit cultures, and Ask cultures Blurt, Overt, or Explicit cultures, for the full range of connotation.