'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)
theatlantic.com175 points by BoorishBears a day ago
175 points by BoorishBears a day ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250831074424/https://www.theat...
https://archive.ph/GBZBf
One aspect of that which is interesting is that what the article calls "Guess culture" is fundamentally exclusionary. If you aren't initiated into how the signalling system works by an insider or in a position of sufficient stability to fail socially many times there isn't a good way to break in. That gives the culture a lot of interesting properties that promote its ability to identify and coordinate against out-groups (which to the people involved would manifest as a "these barbarians just don't know how to be polite and we can't work with them"). One of those adaptions that is a bit crazy in the micro (could just ask for what they want, geeze) but makes a lot of sense in the macro. It's a matter of different protocols, not exclusivity. An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients. The way to deal with it is having some kind of handshake that indicates what protocol is being used. Only on HN do we explain social interactions using network protocol analogies, and not the other way around! > An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients. The metaphor might be a bit strained, because a congestion protocol is fundamentally determining the system state by testing it with an optimistic request for what the client wants then responding based on the server answer or lack thereof. Which is to say, the typical asker strategy. Having a protocol at all might be more of a guesser thing though - good luck getting to index.html by sending "Hey my server friend can I have a copy of index.html pls?" to port 80 in with netcat. Very clear request, unlikely to get much consideration by nginx even if it is willing to hand over the page. Any type of culture is "fundamentally" exclusionary if you don't know how it works. Let me guess which culture you're from :) And, importantly, there isn't one single "guess culture"; there are a myriad of different micro-cultures with their own local signals and codes for subtly communicating the information that isn't spelled out in speech. So even if you are a consummate Guesser, and have been one all your life, if you move across the country (or even just across town!) and find yourself in a group with a different set of Guessers, you may be nearly as badly off as if you were an Asker in that subculture. As usual, if both sides exist, it's because they both provide benefits. The guessers' benefits are just not obvious at first glance. Taleb has a nice bit on that, explaining that if something exists for long, it must have enduring beneficial properties, and if you think it's stupid, you are the one having a blind spot. Dawkins led to the same conclusion: stuff that works stays and multiplies. You may not like it, but nature doesn't care what you think. It's true for entities, systems, traits, concepts... Everyone mocks Karens, until your flight is delayed and that insufferable lady tires up the staff so much that everyone gets compensation. I dislike lying but it works, and our entire society is based on it (but we call it advertising). Don't like mysandry? Don't understand why nature didn't select out ugly people? Think circumcision is dumb? All those things give some advantages in some context, to such an extend it still prospers today. In fact, several things can be true. Something can be alienating, and yet give enough benefits that it stays around. A huge number of things are immoral, create suffering, confusion, destruction, even to the practitioner themselves, and yet are still here because they bring something to the table that is just sufficient to justify their existence. See your friend making yet again a terrible love choice, getting pregnant, and stuck with a baby and no father? From a natural selection standpoint, it could very well be a super successful strategy for both parties. The universe doesn't optimize for our happiness or morality. Enduring survival properties aren't the same as enduring beneficial properties. Feudalism and slavery stuck around for quite a long time and were mostly forced out against their will. Oh, hmm... I must be an asker. I've done a lifetime of code review over the last decade. Let me tell you, the number times I have asked what I assumed were simple yes/no questions like "Would it make sense to do X?" or even "Why did we do it this way?" in cases where I'm looking for a discussion and it's been taken as a call to action is just wild. They're competent developers, I just want to understand the code and the context behind it. I want to understand what their thoughts were while building it. Yet so many times a simple question like "Why X and not Y?" results in the person whose code I am reviewing going ahead and refactoring the entire PR without return comment, or in rare cases getting angry with the question. We actually had a DBA with a history of flying off the handle over simple questions but from what I've heard this is common among DBAs? He eventually got let go over it. If I wanted you to change it, I would have said so. My question is not wrapped up in insinuation or hidden intent. It's a question I want the answer to. There are no layers to the meaning. I basically never mean anything I do not explicitly say. I have gotten so frustrated with this that I have started specifying "You can say no", "I'm just trying to understand the thought process", or "I'm just curious, no need to change it". Things I still feel like I shouldn't have to tell another person with an engineering mindset, especially someone with many years of experience. The “why did we do X and not Y?” style of question is a commonly used passive aggressive crutch to tell someone to do Y instead, while attempting to not look mean/harsh. Its the same reason people use “we” in the first place. You may not be using it this way but because many others are that’s how it’ll typically be interpreted I found this 10+ years ago, and it was one of the most important things I ever read. As a consummate Guesser, it reframed my perspective completely. I started to be much happier and understanding with Askers. I also realized how frustrating, as a Guesser, I could be to Askers, and shifted more toward being clear about what I want or need. My family is almost 100% Asker. When I got to college, I drove Guessers nuts. They thought I was so selfish and would blow up at me (from my perspective) out of nowhere. "No" is always a perfectly fine and polite answer from my perspective It's a shame more people don't assume good faith so we can have more direct and honest communication with each other. Guessers don't believe Askers are asking in bad faith at all. If Guessers did believe that, it would be way easier for them to say no to Askers. It's precisely because the Guesser believes in the sincerity of the request that it becomes painful to deny it. Indeed. It's the immediate assumption that since you're asking me, it must be important to you - otherwise you wouldn't be asking in the first place. I want to be the kind of person that helps others where it matters, and here you are, asking, thus proving it matters. Refusing becomes really uncomfortable, so I'd rather go out of my way to make it possible for me to agree, or failing that, to help your underlying need as much as I can. I realize now this is a form of typical mind fallacy - I wouldn't ask you for something if it wasn't really fucking important or I had any other option available, therefore I naturally assume that your act of asking already proves the request is very important to you. I guess I just learned I'm a Guesser :). That's the really painful part. They ask you for something, you say 'yes' thinking it's important for the person, only to learn that it wasn't that important at all. It's like giving something that you don't want to give to someone that doesn't need it. Really annoying. A uni pal with the samey attitude had a wonderful motto - "better to look stupid than to be stupid". Except a lot af askers will put you in an uncomfortable spot. No I don't want you and your family staying at my house while you are in town. Discomfort is present only if you suspect they're a Guesser and thus one of you has greatly misjudged the relationship and social context. If you know or suspect they're an Asker the discomfort disappears because you say "No" and they say "OK, cool". I think guessers agonise over HOW to say "No" in contexts like this, and what it says about them as people. "Can my family and I stay for two weeks?". Then: "No." (looks cold and heartless; do I want to project cold and heartless? Will they hate me?). "I'm so sorry but I'm not able to. The house is a mess and it's really small" (performative, hand-wringing reluctance; we both know I'm lying). "I just don't like to share my environment" (most truthful; might look petty to those who don't understand the need for privacy to that degree). Having said that, I have become a lot better at being direct these past few years, so I'd likely just say "I'm not able to, sorry. I can recommend some good hotels though". All this rings true, which brings me to this question: are Guessers just a bunch of Overthinkers? I have been searching for this! Thank you for reposting this, OP. I have been (w)racking my brain trying to find this article and used HN search dozens of times. I couldn't remember what the title was, or the specific terms "ask" and "guess", so it was impossible to find. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182058 This is one of the chief cultural differences between Southern and Northern culture. Southerners (not transplants) will "ask" without imposition: they "ask" when giving, and "guess" when receiving. Any inversion of these norms is an affront to "Southern hospitality" and will be met with the equivalent "Bless Your Heart". Ask what you can do for someone, never what you can have. Assume someone will do right by you (you should never have to ask), and if they don't - people say not so nice things about those folks. I need to articulate this better when it's not 4 AM, but it's an almost perfect descriptor of the cultural differences. I'm pretty sure Japanese are guessers (would love to hear counter examples) To them, the etiquette is that if you ask you've put the other person in a bind. Even if they want to say no, they feel pressure to say yes. You putting then in that situation is considered bad. So, don't ask, at least not directly. You can say "Guess what, I'll be in town next week!" and see if out of the blue they offer a place to stay. But even then there is subtly of reading between the lines, of do they actually want you to stay or are they just being polite but hope you'll read between the lines and not take them up on the offer. Generally you're supposed to refuse "Naw, I couldn't possibly stay and get in your way" and then they can come back and say "No really, it'd be great" if they really want you to stay and you might have to do this dance once or twice more to really verify it's ok. The usual dichotomy / terminology for this stuff as it relates to painting national and business cultures with broad brushes is "high context" versus "low context". In a high context culture like Japan people would be expected to code switch between Asking and Guessing behaviors depending on their audience, relative status, social rapport, etc. I think in Japan the culture is almost 100% Guessing. I read this anecdote online about a US business dealing with Japanese partners (clients?). There's an item they'd like to discuss, in their regular meeting they bring it up, and the Japanese said "Hmm, this is possible. Let's discuss it next meeting.". Next meeting, they ask again, and the reply was the same. It took them a few rounds to realize that the actual (never uttered) answer is "No, this isn't possible."... I found a good discussion that I keep referring to on Jean Hsu's blog:
https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/ask-vs-guess-culture
and
https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/bridging-the-ask-vs-guess-cul... It's been quite illuminating for people in multicultural teams... Did you see the HN comments for Jean Hsu's 1st article?[1] Did any stand out? Thanks for the pointer, I hadn't. I think there is a couple of interesting things. First, it's still somewhat orthogonal to the High context versus Low context cultures (see the Culture Map), as in you can have people with more ask versus guess culture in either communication contexts from my observations (at least among some low to mid context cultures, I don't have a lot of experience with very high context cultures). Another way to think about it is that it's a lot more local than the broader culture of a country, down to the family level, and you can see this in the US as many commenters have reported where they grew up in various different places in the ask vs guess spectrum. Finally, the US work environment is generally very "Ask"-leaning, in particular in Silicon Valley and it can take a significant amount of time to recognize where you have been raised on this spectrum versus what is required of you to be effective at work. Here is my personal observation. Humans start by default as “Askers,” but society shapes them into either the “Askers” or “Guessers.” Kids don’t guess, they ask. I have also observed that Eastern countries/regions are generally “Guessers,” while Westerners are generally “Askers.” Growing up as an introvert, I remember many times when my guardians (uncles, aunties, grandparents, and parents) would interpret things differently than I thought they were. “My friend’s mom told me to come, play, and eat at their place today.” “No, they don’t. You need to come back after a while, not spend the whole day there.” I learnt a lot of Guesses in school and social settings: Yes, that meant No, and Nos that were weirdly Yes, etc. When I started working in the early 2000s, I worked with almost all US (and some UK and Australians) Companies and customers, from teachers and physicians to founders and businesspeople. Things were straightforward, “cut to the chase”, “get to the point real fast”, and the like. Eventually, I have also worked with many Indian companies and teams. We are mostly Guessers. My colleagues and bosses have called me aside to explain the interpretation of quite a few interactions, which I thought I was doing the right thing, but I should not have (even when the clients agreed). I’ve also worked with the Japanese, and they were all Guessers to a degree, and I would love to, hopefully, take the time and effort to learn the culture a lot more. I don't think that's the case; I have a son who has been a "Guesser" from a fairly young age, despite our family encouraging people to be "Askers" all of his siblings are "Askers" and can't understand why he won't ask for things that he wants. For completeness sake, I should point out that most of our kids (including this one) are adopted so it's not impossible that there could be a genetic predisposition to being an asker or guesser. > Eastern countries/regions are generally “Guessers,” while Westerners are generally “Askers.” See also the concept of high-context and low-context cultures. I think this is the correct dichotomy for the difference in cultures and better explains the Guesser vs Asker thing. High context cultures (Asia, South America, Mediterranean) tend to be Guessers because they already have the context and that context is the more important part of their communication. In low context cultures (Northern European, Russia, US) communication is more direct and words are more important than non-verbal cues. Discussed (in a singleton sort of way) at the time: Askers vs. Guessers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1956778 - Dec 2010 (1 comment) Edit: plus this! Ask vs. Guess Culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176703 - Aug 2023 (479 comments) I'm not that autistic but I simply can't deal with Guessers. The idea that I have to play some kind of 4D chess game to figure out what I am and am not allowed to ask or do makes me extremely stressed out. How am I supposed to map out the wishes and expectations and goals of everybody involved? Isn't that, in fact, borderline rude? What if I guess wrong? Everybody loses when that happens and it happens all the time. Growing up in the east of the Netherlands made this worse; the Dutch are widely known as rude and direct (ie Askers), but in the rural east this is very much not the case. Everything there runs on a mixture of "what will the neighbours think" and "what will people expect me to do?" and it's just maddening. Fortunately I was sufficiently tone deaf as a youth to not notice when I was getting it wrong, and when I grew old enough to figure that out I moved to places where you can just ask stuff. It's nuts that such a small country can have such a widely varying cultural differences but it's very real. I live in the south now and here I can ask everybody everything and people won't feel bad for saying no. It's lovely. I also figured out that my mom (a total Guesser like everybody in my family) loves me even if I get this wrong! So I just began to treat her like an Asker and verrry explicitly spell out that it's totally fine to say no, no really it is, I'm not asking for a favour, I just want to know what you want, really mom it's true. It stresses her out! The idea of being asked point blank for her personal, disregard-other-people preference is just entirely outside her normal way of thinking. She has to do hard effort to disregard other people's wishes, it's just all totally mixed together in her brain. I know it's not nice of me, but the alternative is that we (my wife and I) keep getting it wrong and accidentally visit too often or too little or invite them to parties they don't want to go to and so on. So yeah, protip for askers, treat guessers who love you as askers. They'll forgive you for it and everything else becomes easier. That makes sense if it's in moderation. An overzealous asker can disproportionately eat up people's time. Context as to why you're asking helps set priorities. Yeah ofc. I mean as someone who grew up in Guesser Land and got taught that it’s important to be able to read people’s minds, discovering that I can just, you know, ask, felt like a superpower. I don’t think I’m overdoing it. I'm born Guesser but evolved into an Asker. However, it depended on whether I was the requester or not; if I wanted to invite someone, I would try to avoid putting them in a position where they had to say "no". However, I didn't mind saying "no" myself. I would argue with other people that it's impolite to put them in such a position as they may not like to decline. After discussing it openly with friends and family, I realized that it was okay to say no and people wouldn't mind. This changed me into an asker. What's funny is that my parents were askers. I guess being introverted made me more of a guesser initially. you may like this thought: if you have a weak no, then it makes your yes weak. I think it requires emotional intelligence to know if you should ask or guess. I've encountered a few people that just won't stop asking for unreasonable things, and it destroys the relationship very quickly, because they just won't take no for an answer. I also have one child that I used to have to firmly say "stop asking for things" once it would get out of hand. But those are extremes in ask vs guess. An asker who won't take no for an answer is just an asshole. As is a guesser who continuously hints when they want something and you don't offer. I don't necessarily think it is how you were brought up, and probably more to do with personality. As an introvert, I don't have the talk time to continuously put out feelers, I just gotta ask. Interesting, I feel the opposite. I always tend to associate askers and extroverts, and feel us introverts are tired all the time because of all the guessing going on during human interactions. But of course, your opposite takeaway also makes sense! I am timid: I conduct myself like a Guesser, and treat others' requests as though they are Askers. Labelling people this way is a blunt instrument. It seems like the introvert/extrovert split, where few people are near the poles and there's a lot more going on in the middle. E.g. I might check if someone has weekend plans before asking if I can stay with them. Or, I might ask outright, but specify it's not important, I just want to catch up, and the nearby hotel looks nice. These seem like important differences even though they're both in the middle of ask and guess. Yes, I don't support labelling people as one or the other, but defining and articulating the two kinds of behaviors and expectations relative to each other is incredibly useful for communication and understanding. If these behavioral models are indeed good and close enough to the reality. But that whole stuff comes from some internet comment! I agree it's better to label behaviors or situations than people. But it is useful if you apply that labeling to yourself. It also helps with empathy. Labelling can be a shortcut around empathy. Empathy is the real deal. It’s hard to imagine what a guesser is feeling if you don’t understand the differences between their expectations and yours as an asker, and vice versa. You are presupposing that the internet forum comment on which all this is based has correctly modelled the world and that this asker-guesser thing is indeed real. Usually it takes one or ideally several studies, with large groups of people, with a solid hypothesis and some strong, rigorous protocol. Until then, it's not worthless, but it's at best an inspiration. Social stuff is rarely that easy, seducing, cute, with two clear, beautiful categories of people. All models are wrong. Some are useful. It makes sense to judge models by how useful they're in some situation, and compare them by usefulness in context[0]. It doesn't make sense to ask which is right, because they're all wrong. Here, at least for me, but I guess(!) many other HNers, the "Askers vs. Guessers" model is very useful. Would some RCT studies be nice? Sure. I don't expect them to prove the model to be accurate. But it doesn't have to be, that's not the point. Just pointing out that there's some variability between people along these lines is very useful. Diverse modes loosely held, eh? -- [0] - Consider Newtonian vs. relativistic motion. The latter is more accurate and gets you better results at large scales - but in almost all circumstances in life (up to and including landing a probe on the Moon, or landing a shell in someone's back yard), the Newtonian model is much simpler and therefore much more useful. Of course we could say that all models are "wrong" because they are simplifications of the reality. But there's wrong and wrong. We don't usually say a model like the Newtonian motion is wrong, it's not a very useful way to deal with models. Newtonian motion has been shown to be repeatable and to accurately predict motion within limits. It has scientific backing. The asker-guesser model isn't even shown to be a simplification of the reality. And actually, later in that High-context and low-context cultures [1] Wikipedia article: > A 2008 meta-analysis concluded that the model was "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped". Which is scientific speak for bullshit. There's a world between scientifically backed "wrong" Newtonian movement and random internet forum comment backed social model found to be "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped". The Newtonian movement is an evidence-backed simplification. The asker-guesser model is a persuasive illusion. Are you really comparing some internet commenter with Newton and the broader scientific community? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c... > The Newtonian movement is an evidence-backed simplification. The asker-guesser model is a persuasive illusion. Both are evidence-backed simplifications. The difference is in the amount of evidence and degree of simplification. Both are better than random in their respective domain, and can be useful depending on your tolerance for errors. Sometimes even a very broad simplification is useful. E.g. it's perfectly valid to assume that π = 3 or even π = 5 to simplify some calculations, if you don't need the value to be more accurate than "non-negative and less than 10". It'll probably cost you something somewhere (e.g. you end up ordering too much paint), but being able to do the math in your head quickly is often worth it. I could keep inventing examples, but surely you'll be able to come up with some of your own, once you realize there's no hard divide between what's scientific and not. These are just rough categories. In reality, you have models of varying complexity, correlation with reality, and various utility. It's a continuum. Also: > Are you really comparing some internet commenter with Newton and the broader scientific community? Yes. Don't be biased against Internet commenters. Papers don't write themselves ex nihilo, and are generally distillation of existing ideas, not the first place where new ideas are ever published. And scientists are Internet users too. > Both are evidence-backed simplifications Which evidences do we have for this asker-guesser thing? Naive intuition doesn't count. That's not how robust knowledge works. There's a freaking meta analysis finding we don't have strong enough evidence. This is pseudo science. It could be discovered later that this stuff indeed works, but we don't know yet. It's a sexy topic, the lack of any convincing publication for all this time makes this pretty unlikely. > Yes. Ok, I'm done here. If you don't see how an internet comment from a random person and a proper paper written by Newton (or even by a random scientist) are fundamentally different when it comes to robustness and reliability of the described knowledge, even accounting for all the flaws scientific publishing has, I don't see how this discussion can be productive any longer. This won't lead to anything interesting. I think I've written everything I had to write on the topic, several times. I'll leave you with your pub / armchair science. You do you.
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