The way to deal with it is having some kind of handshake that indicates what protocol is being used.
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.
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.
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.
"No" is always a perfectly fine and polite answer from my perspective
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 :).
If you know or suspect they're an Asker the discomfort disappears because you say "No" and they say "OK, cool".
"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).
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.
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.
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."...
It's been quite illuminating for people in multicultural teams...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
See also the concept of high-context and low-context cultures.
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.
It could be just between family. I should ask my wife what's the go.
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.
I agree it's better to label behaviors or situations than people.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Sure it does. Data is actually plural of anecdotes. That's how most actual research started. The difference between "science" and "armchair science" of this kind is a matter of degree.
Guess culture is playing defense against the outcrowd. Ask culture is playing offense to achieve higher-level thinking and goals.
This isn't always a deliberate thing. Still, everyone has to pick their plays with every interaction they have.
But of course, your opposite takeaway also makes sense!
I was in a relationship that was constantly strained by something similar to this. My partner would never ask for help with anything and would just get frustrated when I didn't pick up on her struggling and jump in to help. Conversely, I only ask for help when I really need it but she would see me struggling and jump in, which would annoy me because I didn't ask for help.
But I'm not an asker in the sense of this article. I would never randomly ask someone to stay at someone's house, for example. This strikes me as like a child constantly testing their boundaries. I know where the boundaries are.
But, there is still some truth to it. I've often found that non-native speakers in my country tend to be askers. This can come across as quite shocking and lead one to believe, as I had, that this is actually part of their culture. But I have another theory: to be successful as a non-native you have to be an asker, because you will find it difficult or impossible to be a guesser. So it's a survivorship bias, essentially.
By the title I also thought this was going to be about another phenomenon: when given a task, some people will continue to ask for confirmation until they're confident they get it, while others will just "fill in the blanks" and deliver something, even if it's wrong. LLMs, of course, being the ultimate "guesser" in this sense.
Original comment below for posterity and because there are answers.
----
I'm not sure this stuff is really that helpful. You might be tempted to put people into these categories, but you might have a somewhat caricatural and also wrong image of both which could worsen interactions.
By the way, that article doesn't cite any studies!
It's probably helpful to know people are more or less at ease asking direct questions or saying no or receiving a no, but it's all scales and subtleties. It could also depend on the mood, or even who one interacts with or on the specific topic).
The article touches this a bit (the "not black and white" paragraph).
We human beings love categories but categories of people are often traps. It's even more tempting when it's easy to identity to one of the depicted groups!
I wonder if this asker-guesser thing is in the same pseudoscience territory as the MBTI.
In the end, I suppose there's no good way around getting to know someone and paying attention for good interactions.
Yes, it is not a black or white thing, more a spectrum. But for many people, including me, just naming the categories is very clarifying, even eye opening, akin to beginning to know an alien civilization. It allows you to consider a different point of view, a way of interacting, taking decisions and actions very different to what you are used to.
Damnit, that seemed interesting! Thanks for sharing though, I'll still read about this.
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.
The dichotomy feels true enough even if the data is fuzzy.
Later in that Wikipedia article:
> A 2008 meta-analysis concluded that the model was "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".
Difficult to beat a meta analysis (assuming it was well done of course).
To be clear, "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped" is scientific speak for "bullshit".
It can also mean exactly what it said: there might indeed be truth to the thesis, but it has not yet been substantiated or fully developed.
Having to use circumlocution like that—and thus making the meaning unclear—seems like an aspect of a Guess, or high-context, culture, doesn't it? ^_^
Ah ah :-)
Well, not really. Scientifically stating something doesn't exist is very bold, usually you can't formally do this. Your best way is to say "so far, we have no evidence of this existing".
Several studies or a meta analysis stating "we have no proof of this existing" is a strong hint towards this indeed not existing, usually that can't be for sure.
To prove something wrong usually you need a counter example, but in this stuff it's hard even imagining what's a counter example.
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
The correct term is high context vs low context culture, not "askers" and "guessers"
That's fine. I think we need to get away a little bit from the implication that any thought not connected to studies or statistics makes it borderline worthless. We need to lean a little bit more toward humanism ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).
But it also runs the risk of building palaces of elaborate BS with no relation to reality and pure garbage filler content, like article presenting three different non-evidence-based ideas of how a dichotomy itself not grounded in evidence supposedly plays out in reality, with no effort to do look at any evidence or do any analysis as to whether any of them or the underlying dichotomy is connected to reality.
Wrong social models can have bad human implications. It seems to me that being careful with these models and requiring rigor is the humanist thing to do.
Go ahead and present hypotheses, that can be very interesting, just don't present them as facts.
(Now maybe this asker-guesser thing is indeed studied, I don't know)
The article called it a provocative opinion described in a comment which became a meme.
At least the article is honest with its source.
Thanks for emphasizing this.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here by suggesting an elite class of people above the "average person" who do not require objective evidence. That's not really aligned with the core tenets of humanism.
You probably know the rest
Knowing and using etiquette is often more effective.
But I agree with you, it should switch to align from the perspective of the person wanting something.
I don't pay for the Atlantic and thus am limited by paywall, but this ignores power dynamics.
Seriously though, it depends on the boss and the relationship you have with them. It can really fall into either camp and it might even be situational with the same person!
I would say that, generally, I would prefer to be direct in these relationships unless you both know each other really well. It does make things easier for all involved.
Those are the power dynamics the GP is referring to.
That’s not to say power dynamics can’t exist, just that it’s not a thing you can apply to every conversation or situation.
No, they're impossibly intertwined and cannot be treated separately.
> That’s not to say power dynamics can’t exist, just that it’s not a thing you can apply to every conversation or situation.
To the contrary, it's not something your can ignore in any conversion between subordinate and a boss, which is the point the GP was trying to make.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250831074424/https://www.theat...
IMO it is totally fair and fine to just respond to the part of the discussion that the publication decided to make publicly available.
This wastes the time of people who read the article.
No.
> it isn’t the reader’s fault that the publisher decided to only make a little bit of it accessible to us.
It is a commenter's fault if they comment on an article they did not read.