Tell Culture

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.

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.

I hope rationalist culture doesn't head in that direction.

Something like "I'm finding this conversation aversive, and I'm not sure why. Can you help me figure it out?" would be way more preferable. Something in rationalist culture that I actually do like is using "This is a really low-value conversation, are you getting any value? We should stop." to end unproductive arguments.

If I'm having some kind of internal experience that may color my interpretation of what my interlocutor is trying to tell me, I feel like I owe it to them and whatever we're discussing to stop the conversation as soon as I realize something is wrong, since if e.g., it turns out I'm sleepy, taking a nap wouldn't (I think) be sufficient to fully counteract the negative opinion of the topic I formed when I was crabby.

Could you give an example of a graceful exit? For me, interrupting a conversation without saying why I'm actually doing it feels dishonest/rude, especially if we're discussing something that's important enough for me to care that I treat it fairly.

"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 do not endorse that particular conversation move. Nor do I particularly discourage it, between Tell culture users.]

I observe that this objection to the exit strategy the problem is that 'Tell culture' is not being used by the receiving party. The receiving party is interpreting the information through the filter of some variety of non-Tell culture and essentially reading a different message than the one sent. This is a real problem but it is a real problem relating to speaking a language different to the audience, not a problem that applies to the communication via the language itself.

Speaking 'Tell Culture' phrases to someone who is not both familiar with the communication style and happy to use it should not be expected to work well.

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.

The complimentary risk here is that your opposing policy can become (or inherently is) an excuse to abdicate responsibility for ones own thoughts and behaviour onto someone else. Neither are particularly healthy habits.

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.

Note that the speakers words explicitly claim responsibility and even go so far as to propose that even if the other person can figure the stuff out the speaker still has to figure it out for herself before the condition is met. It also contains no more (in fact, almost certainly much less) information than is contained in the uncontrollable communication via facial expressions, voice tone and body language while ending the conversation. The difference is there isn't level of social 'role play' where people pretend that information has not been communicated and where if that information is formally acknowledged to be communicated it is the equivalent to shouting or using all-caps.

That's a non-negligible burden to dump on someone.

Or if looking at from the perspective of assigning responsibility to the active party that's a non-negligible burden that, someone walked up and forcibly took as there own because it wasn't kept hidden. The speaker actually set up boundaries around the aversion-experience-analysis territory that imply that would be somewhat presumptive (or irrelevant) if the listener assumed responsibility for the analysis. The listener's problem is that she has incompatible 'Guess culture boundaries.

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.

Being able to reliably suppress natural body language is a powerful (and rare) skill and makes all sorts of social tasks easier. Of course even in the limit of perfect emotional emulation and poise any listener familiar with your skill an propensity to hide aversion is, on average, left with exactly the same p(I did something that caused an aversive reaction) as they would with the transparent person. The probability mass is simply shifted away from the correct outcome to the false ones. ie. You have to spend effort guessing whether as well as what.

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,

(I do actually agree entirely. There is no way I'm going to go about sharing half-baked emotion revelations. That gives people the impression that can or should interfere with my internal decision making structures that my emotions are part of. I'll tell people things when it is useful for me and I know what I want.)

and making them my problem only if (upon reflection) you decide that it would be helpful to do so.

Again, as a Tell culture communication (to an appropriate audience) this isn't making it their problem. And this isn't just referring to 'ideal Tell Culturites in a vacuum'. In my experience more as a recipient of that kind of statement than a speaker it really doesn't provoke stressful rumination or analysis of fault. It is a whole heap more relaxing than the inevitable underlying friction that aversive feelings produce.

Conclusion: The moral here is that making (incompatible) Tell Culture revelations to people living in a Guess Culture mindset can be tactless, selfish, ineffective and frustrating to both parties.

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.

That can easily be exploited, however. If people know this is your reaction, then they have an easy button to push to exclude you from any conversation where they don't want your voice heard.

EDIT: I will retract this statement if someone explains what's wrong with it.

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.

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.

Signaling pleasantness is sometimes near to signalling low status. In some situations it will give you benefits in others it might not.

One the web you find plenty of material that recommends that you will get more social success by being more confident. One way to be confident is to go the ask road instead of the guess road.

I have read a lot of self help and didn't come across one that substantially focuses on acting in a guess culture way.

Is the Prisoners' Dilemma really the right metaphor here? I don't really get what the defector gains. Sure, I like them better for being so accommodating, but meanwhile they're paying the costs of giving me what I want, and if they try to invoke some kind of quid pro quo than all the positive feelings go out the window when I find out they were misleading me.

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.

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 beating about the bush when she wants something, and wins because of it. More generally, from what I gather as a spectator, there seem to be a lot of techniques or behaviours on instrumental, emotional, and interpersonal fronts that are making the Bay Area awesome and an ever-stronger attractor to rationalists around the world, but which the broader rationalist/LW community does not necessarily hear about.

The success of the Bay Area subcommunity's approach seems somewhat unknown. And I think that means that when someone comes along from there and says to the broader community, 'Hey, we should try Telling more,' there is a lot of cultural context (of the Bay Area generally, and all the interrelations with communication systems, openness, etc.), experience, and success underlying that suggestion that is not visible. I think if enough commenters adopted this approach, it would becomes recognised, not be misinterpreted, and work. Now Brienne's posted this, possibly even people can link to this post to try to prevent being misinterpreted when they are Telling on LW.

A lot of the Bay Area's success seems to come from people taking simplifying approaches to communication seriously and cooperating. When you say

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.

that pretty much feels like the complete opposite, i.e. writing off the suggestion and anyone who takes it seriously. I'm not sure if I'd call it defection, but it has a similar feel. On a collective level, both the receptive and the skeptical attitudes are self-fulfilling, because these kinds of things really do seem to work when enough people take them seriously, and will certainly fail if everyone scorns them. (E.g. look at how many memes from the Sequences are pretty much unanimously taken seriously.)

(I acknowledge that I might have completely misread your comment.)

It's also not so obvious that you can effectively change conventions like these by just starting in and asking others to change.

I think there are plenty of subcultures that use methods like that to operate under different norms. Getting a local Lesswrong group to switch to a different norm seems pretty doable.

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 walk into a conversation with a Guesser and I have something at stake, I am likely to lose that stake. Dealing with them feels like dealing with a negative utility monster; I must sacrifice too much to avoid offending.

(Please don't vote this post up because it bashes the hateful Guess enemy; evaluate it on its merits.)

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. Once I noticed this, I tested it experimentally - even when you know you're doing it for science, it hurts to offend a Guesser.

1: "Giving a negative response when someone asks for evaluations on their appearance / idea / whatever" is banned. (The only way you can provide that information is to guess at their personal evaluation, and then give the least warm approval you think has a plausible interpretation that agrees with their actual personal evaluation, which will be revealed only after you've made your social move. Yech.)

2: Gossip is frowned on. You can gossip all you like until you say something they don't like hearing, at which point you've offended them by gossiping.

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".

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.

imposing intimacy on them - making yourself vulnerable and demanding they do the same

Yeah, this is pretty terrible. I (being on the autism spectrum) am definitely in favor of Ask culture over Guess culture — and I still find the quoted practice... somewhat repellent.

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.

Can you give me a concrete example of how your use of tell culture had disastrous effects? I'm having trouble imagining it.

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 think it is unfair to get angry at another person (or equivalently, to label him/her "rude") for asking or saying anything when he/she doesn't have good reason to know that the speech is unwelcome.

However, I don't like the notion of these protocols as "cultures" because I don't think anybody follows, or should follow, any one of them consistently all or nearly all the time.

Instead, I believe reality is and should be, that the meaning of a statement which can be parsed as a request depends on how reasonable it would be if the asker (1) expects compliance (perhaps to the point of getting upset if it doesn't happen), (2) intends it merely as a request ("asker culture"), and/or (3) would only dare ask if he is fairly sure the hearer will not take offense. Obviously, as a request goes up the spectrum from something trivial ("Excuse me" as I push through a crowd to get out of a bus) to something the hearer is likely to find quite burdensome, both speakers and hearers tend to move up from interpretation (1) to (2) to (3). Familiarity with the other person also modifies this calculation, but that change can go in either direction depending on what you know about that person and about how he views you.

But where I part ways from the article writer is where he talks about "ask culture" as being superior to "guess culture". About the only place I see anything resembling "guess culture" is where a request (or a statement being parsed as a request, maybe erroneously) is about a subject the hearer has issues about{1}, for instance, when trying to get laid. And as I see it, the mere fact that a typical woman hearing such a request interprets it as a demand (and/or "an example of the guess culture") does not mean that the asker should be blamed for anything of the kind.

{1} I have phrased this to step on as few toes as possible, and thus am avoiding conclusions about what such "issues" may imply about anyone's rationality. And for the same reason I should probably stop here.

I'm not sure. If someone Tells you some things that end with a request, that doesn't mean you need to be as detailed with your response.

Like with the example given in the OP, "It would be awfully convenient networking for me to stick around for a bit after our meeting to talk with you and [the next person you're meeting with]. But on a scale of one to ten, it's only about 3 useful to me. If you'd rate the loss of utility for you as two or higher, then I have a strong preference for not sticking around."

Perfectly valid response: "Yeah, it's over 2. Thanks for preferring not to inconvenience me!"

Upvoted for making me experience hindsight bias. I feel surprised that nobody seems to have brought up this kind of problem until now.

^_^ I'll move it to Main then.

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 generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other's intentions with high confidence.

Ask/tell/demand/etc. culture treats direct communication as the norm where desires/wishes/requests are concerned, while guess/hint/give/etc. culture treats indirect communication as the norm. Both have plenty of advantages and disadvantages. In a community where people come from very different backgrounds, often haven't spent 10+ years routinely interacting, or have mediocre or subpar social perception, ask/tell culture is probably superior (in spite of the fact that it punishes shy people), since it's more generalist, teaches people to better understand and express their own preferences, pushes back against typical mind fallacy, and desensitizes folks to offense from controversy and dissent.

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.

Worse, everyone's going to have a different set point for stated preference strength even if they don't intentionally overstate or understate their preferences. We can get away with using verbiage like "rate X on a 1 to 5 scale" for collecting statistics, because set point variations will average out over a large enough data set -- but that doesn't fly for interpersonal interactions.

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.

This is false. This reduction only occurs if you also assume that the agents are also compelled to do some degree of sloppy utilitarian aggregation.

Stating strong preferences doesn't compel people to give you more stuff. It tells people that to whatever extent they wish to give you stuff, which kind of stuff you would prefer to have.

Consider Bob:

• Bob values being given a chocolate cake 9.
• Bob values a foot massage 2.
• Bob values being given a beer 1.

Bob could lie and say:

• I value being given a chocolate cake OVER 9000!.
• I value a foot massage OVER 9000!.
• I value being given a beer OVER 9000!.

Consider Alice:

• Alice giving a chocolate cake costs 4.
• Alice giving a foot massage to Bob costs 3.
• Alice giving a beer costs 2.
• Alice wishes to spend 5 on Bob (either in trade or out of altruism) and to do so in the most effective way.

Since Bob has overstated Alice concludes that giving a foot massage and a beer will give Bob OVER 18,000! value while giving Bob a chocolate cake will give Bob a mere OVER 9,000! value.

If Bob had stated his preferences accurately then Alice would have given him the cake and he would have got his 9 value. He lied, so he got a mere 3 value. That was silly of him.

It isn't Tell Culture that makes Bob's communication devolve to Ask culture. Bob being bad at decision theory makes him devolve to Ask Culture. Alice should go hang out with Jack, who is less of an ineffectively-demanding-jackass.

Can you clarify how overstating preferences reduces 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.

Tell culture with a preference weight cost certainly does devolve. It doesn't devolve into guess culture (as described in the post), but into something different and arguably (but not strictly) worse. Guess culture works passably well when the asker/guesser is able to reliably model the response of the listener. This 'stating preferences is costly' system doesn't handle that situation correctly.

Well, then... have a moderate social cost for stating strong preferences? I mean, it seems like you're saying that it's hard to get that balanced close enough that people can approximate optimal strategy as 'just tell the truth'.

And you haven't at all argued that the change in this cost over time would be away from balance rather than towards, which is what unstable means.

(It's cheap, not cheep)

Tell and Ask seem to be more compatible than Ask and Guess. I have no intuition for how compatible Tell and Guess are. I think Ask is cheaper for the teller than Guess is (in Guess, you have to formulate a plausible sentence that contains a subtle request, unless you want to force the receiver).

I really like the idea of Tell on a date; I think it's already somewhat present in the rationalist meetup I attend.

My wife and I run into your third point pretty frequently. I Tell too many details (but how am I supposed to know which ones are already assumed?) and she Asks me to get to the point. I agree that Ask tends to be cheap and time-efficient. Except when it leads to mistakes, often because something false was assumed about what the other person's needs or situation were.

Differently, so does Feeling Good Together. Or at least it promotes an interesting special case of it, and one that the author claims works well with a diversity of people from varied cultures.

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.

Tell

Pizza Humans' piece of paper:

We offer boring pizzas (with just cheese and pepperoni) for $9. We offer other pizza with decent toppings X, Y and Z for $14. We have a family deal that comes with two pizzas and a free coke and garlic bread and home delivery for $20. If you don't get your pizzas within 45 minutes your order is free.

Walter: I'll order the family deal with pizzas 3 and 7. Address is ....

The interaction can be described either way just as comfortably. Of all the common forms of interaction this kind of exchange has among the least (relevant) power inequality. A market that is more or less efficient. In fact, a slight variation on your model may emphasise the importance not just of who has the power but to what degree there isa difference at all.

Your "ask" example is actually "guess" or "offer," in which you guess that Gym Human wants something so you make then an offer. "Ask" would be more like "Can I use that exercise machine you are using?" "Yes, I will go use that other type of exercise machine now and make this one available to you."

Kalium is right that your Ask example isn't really an example of Ask culture. But I'm also not seeing the supposed correlation with power - Walter seem to be lower status in both the Ask and the Guess example. Is the idea that Ask would be the paradigm used among equals?

Interesting, why?

I'm curious: how would you anticipate someone from your girlfriend's household/culture reacting to your language-choices in this comment?

If there are multiple equilibria, you should expect to see all of them in different cultures. The apparent tendency for general Guessiness is then left unexplained.

Autism turns this into Hard Mode, Boss Level.

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.)

Hint culture acts as a secret handshake that will reliably detect outsiders (they can't possibly learn the rules without identifying themselves as outsiders for a period of years). It will also help identify people who have less interest in helping others (because it costs more to recognize requests plus fulfill them and costs less to ignore requests). I don't think these are especially important reasons, but I mention them because I don't think anyone else has. These aspects would obviously have been more useful and less costly when mankind was more tribal, and less so with increasing globalization.

I think the common cause for this is that there is more of mutual trust and respect in Northern Europe, something that leads to more guessing/waiting

Huh. I would have put these associations the other way around, in that "guess" is what you do when dealing with people whose reactions you can't anticipate, who have emotional issues with saying no, or who have the power to harm you if they do get offended. Whereas "ask" is used in situations where you can trust the other people to police their own boundaries, and who also trust you not to take offense even if they do decline.

At least "guess = low trust, ask/tell = high trust" is the pattern that I generally follow when dealing with people: strangers mostly get the "guess" treatment, friends may be "upgraded" to "ask" if it seems sufficiently certain that they won't mind it.

My guess is that while many people would like to be able to ask others whatever they like or tell other whatever they like, they don't like when others do the same to them. But that's just a hunch.

I have frequently noticed that when geeks advocate untrammelled honesty in communication, they mean sending it; the same geeks reliably hit the roof when they receive it.

Relevant post: Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People

[First paragraph removed because I didn't read the parent properly...]

I suppose guess culture would be very nice if it really worked smoothly, but on an individual level, I've only seen it fail and cause a lot of pain to most people involved except the most callous individuals.

My instinct is to agree with this. I spent decades learning the intricacies of North-European politeness and I think I've finally more or less got it. Now that I've learned it, I might be motivated to think that there is some actual point to all this dancing around!

I like Stefan's idea of connecting guess/ask with wait/interrupt. We might also want to bring the guilt/shame axis into this.

It sounds like ask/interrupt/shame should make for a more honest and efficient society. The guess/wait/guilt stuff sounds pretty frakked up when it is described. But in practice it seems to be correlated with the best places to live in. Maybe this is one of those Chesterton's fence things:

If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Or for a more recent version, xkcd on drama.

+1 for the hugeness-of-the-hypothesis/question/word-space argument.

I wrote a blog post a few months ago exploring the relationship between trust and Crocker's Rules. An excerpt:

I want to touch on the question of efficiency. Are Crocker’s Rules optimally efficient as a communication paradigm? On an information level, theoretically yes, as it tautologically eschews adding extra information. On a meta-information level it is very efficient as well, as the act of declaring Crocker's Rules is a very succinct way to communicate to someone else that you want to be efficient in this way.

However, there’s more to communication than information, especially when it comes to interpersonal dynamics. I talked about this in my post on feedback a few months ago. Sometimes the feedback you most need isn’t efficient. Sometimes it’s vague and hard to express clearly in just a few words, and would become garbled in the process. Sometimes the feedback is a feeling. It’s saying “when I experience you doing X, it makes me feel Y.” And this requires vulnerability on the part of the person giving the feedback, which can’t be caused by any amount of you self-declaring Crocker’s Rules. For that, you need trust.

In the short-term, trust-based communication can be incredibly slow. I thought of using an adverb like “excruciating”, but I actually find it very pleasurable. It’s just frustrating if you’re in a rush. In the long-term, however, building trust allows for even more efficient/optimal interactions than Crocker’s Rules, because you have a higher-bandwidth channel.

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The big problem with habitually "telling" is that you just about need to already be in an intimate relationship with the person you Tell before you do it more than once or twice. Otherwise you will be dismissed as either a bore or a wimp.

Thinking a bit more about this, in an unhealthy Guess culture, empathy starts to become problematic when fewer and fewer bits are provided until empathy is expected to essentially replace a string of zeros. Eventually, the expectation is not just that you’re supposed to anticipate what another person is thinking and feeling, but you’re required to act on it. You have a responsibility for it, until finally you bear the responsibility for how they think and feel. This evolution occurs when the distinction between people as discrete agents is blurred. Those suffering from borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder are particularly inclined to erase those distinctions.

Guess culture acknowledges that there is a social cost to outright denying a request. A good example from Yvain's comment:

Consider an "ask culture" where employees consider themselves totally allowed to say "no" without repercussions. The boss would prefer people work unpaid overtime so ey gets more work done without having to pay anything, so ey asks everyone. Most people say no, because they hate unpaid overtime. The only people who agree will be those who really love the company or their job - they end up looking really good. More and more workers realize the value of lying and agreeing to work unpaid overtime so the boss thinks they really love the company. Eventually, the few workers who continue refusing look really bad, like they're the only ones who aren't team players, and they grudgingly accept.

Only now the boss notices that the employees hate their jobs and hate the boss. The boss decides to only ask employees if they will work unpaid overtime when it's absolutely necessary. The ask culture has become a guess culture.

I don't see this is worst. If most people reading your comment responded to it, like I'm doing now, you would have too many replies. That would be unhelpful. So it works better if most people ignore it.

Yes, that's definitely a problem. But then I'd say you're trying to use it on the wrong group of people.

Many people here (I hope) would very much prefer it if you told them "hey you're dull" to you making up excuses every time you come across them and they try to talk to you, whether it be to reflect on why you think they're dull, or to stop wasting both of your time by trying to interact with you if you aren't even interested.