Upon further consideration, it seems to me that while it being enforced can make it worse, much of the prosociality cluster (e.g. guess culture) is oppressive in itself.
No, I mean this more strongly than that. I literally do not think it’s possible to interact with humans without using guess culture. all of human interaction is the same as the thing that got labeled guess culture; sometimes it can also be ask culture or also tell culture, but I think it’s meaningfully true that ask culture is just different defaults for guess culture, and you’re still actually doing just as much guessing. I do think you can reduce guessing via trust, and that guessing with the goal of building trust is something people automatically do, but I think people who say[1] that guess culture only exists some places are meaningfully confused.
I also think that “tell culture” is a subset of interaction that only works with high trust—and I think people who “are” guess culture will naturally do things that look more like tell culture when trust is high.
[1] (or have said in the past, before updating on my saying this)
I think people who say[1] that guess culture only exists some places are meaningfully confused.
Or maybe they just don’t fall prey to the fallacy of gray and realize it sometimes might make sense to call something black even though it doesn’t literally scatter exactly no light at all (otherwise there’d be no point in having a word if it didn’t apply to anything at all).
I understand that. I wrote the post you’re replying to with that in mind. I think the thing that people call guess culture actually applies almost everywhere, and anything but high trust between very close friends will secretly be only using different words, but have the same guessing patterns. I’m not making some wordplay claim here, I actually think there is a high magnitude error in the theory and that the update is to apply guess culture almost everywhere.
Upon further consideration, it seems to me that while it being enforced can make it worse, much of the prosociality cluster (e.g. guess culture) is oppressive in itself.
It might be my German background but not everybody who’s social operates on guess culture.
I don’t think you can escape guess culture. you only can pretend you don’t have it, and then pay the price.
Sometimes you can escape it literally, e.g. move to a different city or find a different social circle.
No, I mean this more strongly than that. I literally do not think it’s possible to interact with humans without using guess culture. all of human interaction is the same as the thing that got labeled guess culture; sometimes it can also be ask culture or also tell culture, but I think it’s meaningfully true that ask culture is just different defaults for guess culture, and you’re still actually doing just as much guessing. I do think you can reduce guessing via trust, and that guessing with the goal of building trust is something people automatically do, but I think people who say[1] that guess culture only exists some places are meaningfully confused.
I also think that “tell culture” is a subset of interaction that only works with high trust—and I think people who “are” guess culture will naturally do things that look more like tell culture when trust is high.
[1] (or have said in the past, before updating on my saying this)
Or maybe they just don’t fall prey to the fallacy of gray and realize it sometimes might make sense to call something black even though it doesn’t literally scatter exactly no light at all (otherwise there’d be no point in having a word if it didn’t apply to anything at all).
I understand that. I wrote the post you’re replying to with that in mind. I think the thing that people call guess culture actually applies almost everywhere, and anything but high trust between very close friends will secretly be only using different words, but have the same guessing patterns. I’m not making some wordplay claim here, I actually think there is a high magnitude error in the theory and that the update is to apply guess culture almost everywhere.
I wouldn’t conflate guess culture and prosociality—I think those are pretty different axes.