A little more than a year ago, Brienne invented the idea of Tell Culture, a variation of Ask Culture and Guess Culture.
The two basic rules of Ask Culture: 1) Ask when you want something. 2) Interpret things as requests and feel free to say “no”.
The two basic rules of Guess Culture: 1) Ask for things if, and *only* if, you’re confident the person will say “yes”. 2) Interpret requests as expectations of “yes”, and, when possible, avoid saying “no”…
The two basic rules of Tell Culture: 1) Tell the other person what’s going on in your own mind whenever you suspect you’d both benefit from them knowing. (Do NOT assume others will accurately model your mind without your help, or that it will even occur to them to ask you questions to eliminate their ignorance.) 2) Interpret things people tell you as attempts to create common knowledge for shared benefit, rather than as requests or as presumptions of compliance.
Let me place my biases upfront: the concept of Tell Culture makes me go AAAAAAAAAAAAA and want to hide in a corner and never talk to anyone ever again. (This is not meant as criticism of anyone I know who practices Tell Culture in general or of Brienne in specific; Brienne and all other Tell Culture practitioners I’ve interacted with are lovely people.)
The difference between Ask, Guess, and Tell Culture is essentially how much is left in subtext. In Guess Culture, the request is left in subtext; in Ask Culture, the request is text, but the reasons for the request are often left in subtext; in Tell Culture, there is no subtext.
The problem is that you can’t eliminate subtext from human interactions.
I bite my boyfriend Mike Blume’s nose; his wife Alicorn says I should not eat her husband; I say I will get her a new one. The actual interaction is somewhat pointless. Instead, what matters is the subtext: “we like each other; we are comfortable enough together to countersignal our affection; we are all clever enough to find a witty new thing to say in response to the previous statement.”
It seems like about half of human interaction is this sort of signaling and social grooming; the idea of removing it would probably make everyone quite unhappy.
And a lot of requests also take this form. There’s a reason that flirting is full of subtext and ambiguity: it’s because a lot of people find subtext and ambiguity fun. I agree that “don’t ever ask someone for sex explicitly!” norms are bad for people who are bad at reading subtext, because it means that getting a basic human desire met is dependent on your ability to play a stupid social game that not everyone likes. But think of it like a literal game: surely it would be bad if someone said “you have to win at Arkham Horror or you don’t eat!”, but it would also be bad if someone said “no one can ever play Arkham Horror ever again.”
“Okay, Ozy,” you might say, “but Brienne clearly did not suggest using Tell Culture all the time and replacing our countersignal-y flirting with endless repetitions of ‘I like you.’ She suggested using Tell Culture when you have needs or requests; you can Tell Culture your important requests, and leave subtext for things you don’t mind someone misunderstanding.”
The problem is that you can’t actually stop people from putting subtext in their interactions.
To pick a personal example: I have suicidal fits. While I am very open about being suicidal, I am very private about when I am currently acutely suicidal. (People who read my tumblr: posts about wanting to kill myself are usually an expression of low-grade/chronic suicidality, rather than the acute kind. If I’m coherent enough to post a Tumblr post, I’m not acutely suicidal.)
This is for a couple of reasons. I am worried people will think “Ozy is suicidal! This overrides all my preferences and boundaries!”, even though that is not a healthy or sustainable way to react to someone as often suicidal as I am. Many people will freak out and start crying and then I have to comfort them about the fact that I want to die. Many people will behave according to their models of how to help a suicidal person (calling the cops, telling me people will be sad if I die, being extremely earnest about how I am Beautiful and Good), which cause me harm. And I have enough experiences with the first three that the idea of telling someone when I’m acutely suicidal when I don’t trust them a hell of a lot is liable to cause me dead panic. Being panicked is not very helpful when you already want to die.
On the other hand, I actually do have needs while I am acutely suicidal: I commonly ask for food, for tea, for distraction, or for a safe person to take me someplace private where I can freak out.
So I feel like with Tell Culture I have four options. First, obviously, I can say “I need to watch a movie right now because I’m suicidal” and just deal with the fact that this consistently hurts me and my conversational partners. Second, when I think there is a fairly high risk I’ll be suicidal, I can refuse to interact with anyone whom I don’t trust. Third, I can violate the rules of Tell Culture and conspicuously not mention my reasons for needing to watch a movie right now. Fourth, I can say “I need to watch a movie, but I am not going to tell you the reasons because I don’t trust you.”
The first strategy involves me sacrificing my emotional needs for deontological Tell Culture points. The second strategy is somewhat impractical, because I’m borderline so my moods change very very fast, and the list of people I trust is like ten people and doesn’t include two of my roommates, so it would essentially mean confining myself to my room, which is also sacrificing my emotional needs for deontological Tell Culture points. And the second two involve me signaling that I don’t like someone.
Yes, of course under Brienne’s rules of Tell Culture people should interpret “I don’t trust you” as neutral information about my relationship with them and not as an insult or a sign that I don’t like them. It’s just that I think we would both not benefit from you having this particular information! Of course this shouldn’t impact our relationship in any way.
I am certain that is how everyone reading this blog post would respond to someone telling them that they don’t trust them.
In general, in our culture, people don’t say negative things about other people. That means that when you do say “your hair looks like a rat’s nest”, people don’t just get the information “I should go to a different barber”, they also get the information “this person doesn’t like me and wants me to be sad”. And I am not sure that this is shiftable by saying “in this subculture, everyone interprets ‘your hair looks like a rat’s nest’ like it is totally irrelevant to everything except choice of barber.” You can’t make people’s emotions go away by telling them that they shouldn’t have them.
It’s possible I could phrase my request in a tactful, respectful way, probably similar to how I’m writing this blog post. Suicidal people are, of course, known for their immense powers of forethought and self-control.
It gets worse. Tell Culture is the death of plausible deniability. Imagine someone on the stand who says “no” when asked if she’s ever murdered, assaulted, or stolen from someone, and “I take the Fifth” when asked if she sold drugs. It’s pretty obvious she sold drugs, because she only refuses to give information if she is trying to conceal something important. On the other hand, if she took the Fifth on all crimes, it wouldn’t be any evidence one way or the other.
In Ask Culture, people are constantly going about not giving information about their emotional needs. If everyone says “can we watch a movie?” without adding “because this would be an excuse for me to snuggle you”, “because I really want to see Winter Soldier”, or “because I need to relax”, it’s not conspicuous if I just say “can we watch a movie?” However, if everyone else gives information about their desire for snuggles, relaxation, and Steve’s gay love affair with Bucky, it is really obvious that I’m refusing to give the information because I want to keep it secret– which means that other people work out that I’m suicidal, which means all the disastrous effects I talked about before, plus they’re upset because I didn’t tell them.
I agree that probably a lot more interactions would go better if people talked about the needs they wanted to get met rather than just the requests they were making. However, I think making doing so a rule of etiquette risks hurting people.
Thing of Things 
As a person who wants to tell people things a lot and generally doesn’t because she feels this is not socially acceptable (and wants people to tell her things) my standard on this is, it is not OK to expect me to tell people things when it is not safe for me to do so/when there is not space for me to do so.
So if it is desired that I tell people when I don’t trust them, it has to be OK for me to tell people I don’t trust them. Which – I very much fully favor working on making that OK! But you can’t put the cart before the horse and ask me to do the telling *before* the space exists.
I feel like this is kind of considered in the thing you quoted, maybe. With “Tell the other person what’s going on in your own mind whenever you suspect you’d both benefit from them knowing.” – well, you’re making it clear here that *you* would not benefit from them knowing, and in fact would suffer from them knowing. Therefore, you should not tell them.
(Meanwhile the issue that immediately occurs to me is that a culture like this would be majorly ‘promoting’ introspection. Like, at the moment of requesting to watch a movie, my reasons for wanting to are not organized and in words in my head! So, either this would prompt me in the habit of thinking it through (which… certainly has both pros and cons), or I would need some kind of ‘not introspecting’ ‘suffix’ (since that would then actually be the answer to what’s going on in my mind). Which would however mean that I would be consciously recognizing that, which in me at least sends me down introspection anyway. So, interesting!)
But anyway, personally this is a thing where I wouldn’t want it to be a rule of etiquette that you must do it, but I do want it to be OK and accepted to do it, if you want to. And more work etc on the details of how that can work and stuff.
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>Steve’s gay love affair with Bucky
Okay, I’ve got to watch this movie now.
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It’s mostly subtext, if it’s there at all.
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I don’t even think there is any. I think they were just trying to depict committed male friend-/comradeship and because this isn’t really a thing in contemporary Western culture, such attempts get read as implications of homosexuality.
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I’m finding what you’ve written rather difficult to parse. I agree it’s important we give people plausible deniability for a variety of things, and it’s obvious that you being acutely suicidal is one of those things. I can’t tell if you’re saying more than “plausible deniability is good in certain circumstances and we should have social norms which allow it in certain circumstances”. In particular I can’t tell if you’re prescribing any boundaries about roughly how far this should go beyond “we shouldn’t make actively suicidal me say I’m actively suicidal” and “people should not be expected to engage in intercourse with neither of them acting based on subtle social clues games” both of which seem true, but the difference between them seems cavernous.
(This is intended as a critique)
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I’ve written about Guess/Ask/Tell Culture before in response to a piece that was critical of the concepts, and I think a lot of what I said is relevant to this discussion:
‘Taken to its extremes, any social heuristic can be made to look ridiculous. Of course extreme, inflexible Ask Culture sounds overbearing. Extreme, inflexible ANYTHING would be horrible.
‘When people say “Ask Culture is good; Guess culture is bad,” it’s like saying “kale is good for you; sugar is bad for you.” It’s a useful general rule, but taken to it’s extremes, it’s ridiculous and harmful. Very large quantities of kale can cause hypothyroidism. Your brain literally cannot function without sugar. However, this doesn’t change the fact that, for almost everyone, reducing sugar intake and increasing kale intake would be beneficial.
‘The same goes for Ask and Guess Culture. While extreme, inflexible Ask Culture sounds like a nightmare, and a complete lack of regard for people’s unstated needs isn’t healthy, the fact remains that almost every society would benefit from moving toward Ask Culture and away from Guess Culture.’
I think this is equally applicable to Tell Culture. Of course there are situations where Tell Culture shouldn’t apply, and if we form social environments where Tell Culture is mandatory in all situations, that would be a disaster! But I suspect that it would be easier to actually get people to stop putting subtext in their communications than to establish such a culture, as trying to implement it would lead to many of the poor outcomes you’ve identified.
I advocate for Ask and Tell Culture because I’m not part of any subculture that wouldn’t benefit from being being encouraged to communicate with less subtext. Some subtext is a necessity, but I can’t think of any group that is anywhere near minimum useful subtext, so in general, I say “Ask/Tell Culture good! Guess Culture bad!” If things start getting out of hand, I may have to start advocating for Guess Culture, but I seriously doubt I’ll see that in my lifetime.
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(of course, I’ve never spent any significant time with the Bay Area rationalist crowd, so your experience may be vastly different than mine and may be way lighter on subtext)
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The problem isn’t Ask, Tell, or Guess… it’s rules.
There are times, places, and specific personal interactions for which each strategy is best. Even Guessing. Mistakes will absolutely be made, but only when there are fixed strictures and policies is anybody forced into situations where they are guaranteed discomfort and frustration.
We’re more than a bit too complicated to define in pithy lists.
Mediating one’s one expectations is a lot easier than mediating everybody else’s behavior. Learn from mistakes, communicate trespasses maturely, and always try to do better next time.
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“There are times, places, and specific personal interactions for which each strategy is best. Even Guessing. Mistakes will absolutely be made, but only when there are fixed strictures and policies is anybody forced into situations where they are guaranteed discomfort and frustration.”
I generally agree with this. I just wish there was a way, when all else failed, to tell people you’re needs and have it not be a huge deal, even if ‘guess’ or ‘ask’ would have been smoother and perhaps better in other ways. I wish a “tell culture” last resort was available and socially acceptable.
I just find there are situations in my life where I feel like there is *no* socially acceptable way to signal my needs, or at least no way that I can figure out. As a straight man, this mostly comes up in situations having to do with asking for more platonic affectionate touch from friends (or any at all beyond handshakes), or finding casual sex partners in places without copious amounts of alcohol.
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I suspect nothing can simultaneously be a last resort and socially acceptable, because having to resort to it will always create a negative impression.
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More socially acceptable?
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The problem is, these high-stress, social crisis situations are exactly the ones that require the most social grace. Which is means the people least skilled to deal with them will end up there the most.
This is probably true for many high-stakes situations. What kind of boxer can best pull it out in the final round? Well, the kind of boxer who often wins in the first round.
Anyway, so yeah, you can look at certain scripts and keep them around for the high stress periods, which is what I do and it seems to work okay.
The joking comment, “Well, that just got awkward” can help, but it requires a certain level of charity from those around you. If you’ve already offended, then it won’t work. But if you’ve made them uneasy, acknowledging that goes a long way to settling them down. They’ll think, “That was a little out of line, but at least she get’s what she did wrong.”
(Note, you don’t need to totally see what you did wrong, just that *something* was wrong. People aren’t usually going to grill you about something awkward. Everyone sees it was awkward (even if actually you don‘t quite) and so we can all drop it.)
(I literally pulled a “well that got awkward” fifteen minutes ago. Then I joked about how much my edit function sucks. Cuz my edit function sucks. And indeed, the people I was talking to know my edit function sucks, but they like me anyhow. What matters is I *sensed it happening*.)
Often you’ll need to accept the conversation is over at this point. Time to move on. Which, trust me, being able to move on is a good signal. It shows that you are unselfish about attention, and thus are safe to *begin* conversations with.
Person: “Yeah, veronica can bit a bit of a goofball, and she *fucking talks too much*, but she can be funny. Anyway, I like having her around. She seems to get the ‘small doses‘ thing.”
Other person: “OMG don’t invite her, that girl won’t shut up.”
In social situations, don’t be afraid to move around, and yeah, if someone kinda seems to recoil at you a bit, move on. See, now you’ve been *weird* but not *tedious*. People like a certain amount of weird. They deplore tedious.
The cool thing is, over time they can get comfortable with you and begin to see your value as a person, even if your communication patterns are whack.
Let other people talk. If you’re in a group of neuro-typicial people, let them guide the topic, at least at first, until you know each other well, and then only in small, highly trusted groups. Play the witty observation game.
(You might say, veronica, I don’t want to hang out with people like that. Then don’t.)
I’m dating a neuro-typical woman. Most of her friends are neuro-typical. It took her a while, but she “gets” me. It takes her friends a while also, but she explains to them what is what.
They ask why she likes me. She tells them.
Final move: “This conversation went terribly. I’m so sorry. I’ll leave you alone.”
Then leave them alone. At least for a while. Next time you try to talk to them, go slow. Let them guide the topic.
It’s really fucking hard to let others guide the topic.
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Note: I have a hard time not being ‘pushy’ in conversation, and like taking over and going into monologues. Anyway, I know I do this and try to avoid it. In fact, my friends have permission to tell me to back down. They don’t always do this as gracefully as I like, but we’re all a work in progress.
My point is, you might have different weaknesses from me, but knowing what they are is half the battle. This stuff comes naturally to some people. We have to learn it as a skill.
Also note, some of you may have the opposite problem, not that you talk to much and take over the conversation, but that you talk too little and end up a quiet little wallflower. In your case, you probably want to talk more. I guess. You’ll probably want guidance from someone more like yourself and less like a pontificating loudmouth, such as me.
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Not telling someone why you want to watch a movie with someone isn’t signaling that you don’t like them, because even if you did like them, you wouldn’t say “I want to watch a movie with you because I like you”. (It seems unlikely that someone would respond to a simple statement of “I want to watch a movie” with “Why do you want to do that?”) This complies with the rules of Tell Culture because you’re not telling them something because you and the other person wouldn’t benefit from them knowing.
As for plausible deniability, it’s important to keep in mind why it’s “Tell Culture” and not “Tell Unilateral Decision” – because it combines a norm of you telling people what’s on your mind with the reciprocal norm that others won’t punish you for being honest. If you can’t expect someone to take it well, then you’re already not in Tell Culture, so you shouldn’t hold yourself to its norms.
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This reasoning has the same caveats as ‘Soviet Russia wasn’t *real* communism’.
This is not a judgement for or against your post, but a statement.
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Could this problem be fixed by instead of having group norms for one culture each individual person chooses what culture they prefer to use? So when you meet someone (or when it becomes relevant) you can just say “I prefer ask culture” and then they will expect you to act that way. And if you use Ask culture all the time you have plausible deniability when you are suicidal. And two people who prefer Tell culture can still interact the way they prefer.
This would also obviously need to be combined with a group norm of “People can prefer whatever culture they want, don’t shame people for being a different culture to you”
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Is there an Unspoke Rule of Tell Culture that relies on absolute specificity of language? Because using your movie/suicidal example, I am a Tell Culture-y person (I think), who would be VERY likely to say “Guys, I’ve been feeling pretty blue, I could really use some company, can we watch a movie?” That way I run less risk of people thinking I’m just asking as a “meh, whatever” request, that would be no big deal if they have other plans. IME, while saying the EXACT MAGNITUDE of your feelings sometimes freaks people out in a way that hurts you, giving them a heads-up is usually a really good idea– hence, “pretty blue” vs. “suicidal”, but as opposed to (my) default setting of “eh, whatever works”. See also: “I really like talking to you” vs. “I HAVE A GIANT CRUSH ON YOU” but as opposed to (my) default “We could hang out if you like I guess, but it’s fine if you’re busy.”
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> Many people will behave according to their models of how to help a suicidal person (calling the cops, telling me people will be sad if I die, being extremely earnest about how I am Beautiful and Good), which cause me harm.
This strikes me as bad, and at least the first two made me cringe, and struck me as obviously bad. My usual reaction to acute suicidality is to simply ask “what do you need? Can I get you a glass of water?” and change the music if there is any. I wonder if that’s because I’m more acutely aware of mental health issues than the average person (for example, because I’m reading this blog), or because I’m on an extreme end of Ask Culture.
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Wait, so what *are* you meant to do. All I know about is what depressives say people do that really annoys them.
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Here’s what I have to say from personal experience:
Acknowledge their feelings as valid and show them that you like them nonetheless. Spend time with them without giving the impression that you’re impatient for them to get better because you want to get away. It can work to show that you’re anxious for them to get better because of all the awesome things you want to do with them, but you need to know exactly when and how to express this so that it won’t make them feel useless and inadequate.
The offensive reactions are offensive because they all either push the problem onto someone else – which, to a suicidal person, reads as you not valuing them enough to deal with this personally, or to even switch on your brain and realise that calling the cops cannot do anything but mess up their life even more – or imply that the feelings in question are inappropriate or somehow invalid. Giving a long list of people who would allegedly be sad if they died is extra-offensive because it both invalidates someone’s feelings and comes across as cheap and epistemically irresponsible (the suicidal person is going to think that you misjudge those people).
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I can’t remember where I read this, but someone suggested that “guess culture” is in fact the failure mode of what should be called “offer culture”.
In other words, in cultures where direct requests are seen as rude, there is an onus on other people to anticipate the needs of others and offer the amount of assistance they are willing/able to give without being asked.
In Japanese there is the word “omotenashi”, which is usually translated as “hospitality”, but actually refers to this concept.
I do prefer “Ask” culture myself, and I do think “Offer” culture might fail pretty badly where people with unusual or unintuitive needs are concerned, but most people writing about “guess” culture seem to think it’s pointless passive aggression where the givers deny things out of spite from not being asked subtly enough.
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Tell culture, if turned into a norm, seems *very* vulnerable to abusers in a way Ask and Guess are not, since it would end up assuming benevolence to an unhealthy degree if practiced to the letter. Tell-ish practices can be very useful though, but I think that trying to set up a X culture (rather than describing various communication patterns in US society as the original Ask vs Guess dichotomy was doing) is a deliberate lowering of number of communication strategies available, and therefore a bad plan.
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Very roughly, I practice “tell” with people I trust, “ask” with people I respect, and “guess” with people I don’t know very well. There was a time when I wished for a tell culture, but that wish has diminished as my social skills have improved. I’d be very uncomfortable in a culture where only one of these modes was allowed!
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That post is a great example of what’s off-putting to me about the rationalist community — and here I mean the community as it actually exists, not its principles. So much of it amounts to mere denialism. Communication is complicated and nuanced because it has to be; social cooperation and competition have driven so much of our evolutionary history that it’d be absurd to expect otherwise. (We probably have them to thank for consciousness itself, if consciousness is, as I strongly suspect, the reorientation of the mind’s empathy processes toward itself.)
The inevitable result of adopting “tell culture” would be an arms race to figure out how to hack it for advantage. You can make people play Settlers of Cataan instead of Arkham Horror for their supper (and really, who wants to deal with cleaning up all those tiny little cards?), but you can’t make them stop playing games, because it’s just what we do.
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Forgot to add: Telling people to stop playing games is, in fact, a move in the game. 🙂
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Yep. The game will expand to capture all layers of meta.
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I don’t think there is a meta layer to reality.
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