And, a new take on guess culture vs ask culture

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There’s a piece of advice I see thrown around on social media a lot that goes something like:

“It’s just a comment! You don’t have to respond! You can just ignore it!”

I think this advice is (a little bit) naïve, and the situation is generally more complicated than that. The person claiming that there’s no obligation to respond is often color-blind to some pretty important dynamics.

To get the obvious part out of the way: yes, it’s true in a literal sense that you never “have” to respond. It’s also true that this is an option people often fail to notice, or fail to take seriously, and so the advice “no, really, recognize the fact that you could just stop typing and walk away” is frequently useful.

(It’s easy to get triggered or tunnel-visioned, and for the things happening on the screen to loom larger than they should, and larger than they would if you took a break and regained some perspective.)

But it’s absolutely not the case that you can reliably just ignore and not-respond and this will have no real costs. There’s a certain kind of person who believes that their own commenting is costless, because the author has no obligation to respond, and that person is mistaken.

For example: if Person A makes a claim, and Person B raises a challenge to that claim, and Person A fails to meet that challenge, many of the people in the audience watching the interaction will conclude that Person A doesn’t have a response, is wrong, is weak, is cowed, etc. Not literally every onlooker will conclude this, but enough of them will that, if the opinion of the audience matters to Person A at all, it creates real pressure.

(This is the driving force behind dynamics like Brandolini’s Law—it’s profitable to spout bullshit, because bullshit is very very cheap to produce, and so the bullshitter wins either way. Either the other party effortfully refutes it, and the bullshitter has burned 10 of their minutes at a cost of 10 seconds, or the other party ignores it, and the bullshitter has burned 10% of the other party’s credibility with the masses. There are a lot of people in the crowd that simply won’t bother to track whether a given comment was fair or in good faith or worth the effort to rebut. All they see is (what looks like) telling silence.)

For example: it’s pretty common that someone will start a conversation by saying “A!” and someone else will reflexively equate A to B (often without even being aware that A and B are two different things), and write a comment that takes for granted that the conversation at hand is about B, and responds as if the author just said B.

(A sort of blunt and depressing example from contemporary politics: one person criticizes the actions that the Israeli military is taking in Gaza, and another person responds as if the first person was expressing broad, generic anti-Semitic sentiment.)

When someone leaves a conclusion-jumping comment like this, it can serve as a sort of black hole or attractor, dragging the conversation toward that other, nearby topic. If you don’t do anything about it, then that comment has the power to fully recontextualize everything you said in the mind of future readers, and cause the conversation to be about topic B, in practice. Now, not only is the original poster unable to have the discussion they wanted, about topic A, but also people skimming the post and then diving into the B discussion down below will tend to actually believe that the thing was about B all along. If the author doesn’t laboriously correct the misinterpretation, they’re stuck having the strawman version of their argument attributed to them forever.

For example: people often punish “non-punishers,” i.e. if there is scurrilous behavior going on in the comments underneath your post and you don’t visibly object to it, many audience members will make a (sometimes small, sometimes large) update toward assuming that you endorse or condone the scurrilous behavior, and are platforming it. This can result in you getting into quite a lot of trouble for no action at all.

Those are just three examples. There are others (e.g. people will often dock you social points for rudely ignoring them).

(There are yet others. I’m trying to show that my “etc” here is a real etc, and not “that was the end of the list but I’m going to pretend there’s more.”)

I have some friends and colleagues who are frustrated about this, and wish that it were not so. They come from certain high-decoupling debate-y subcultures where it’s considered costless and prosocial to just keep dropping thoughts ad nauseam, and they really want it to be true that other people can respond or not, according to their genuine pleasure, with no one losing any points of any kind.

But (as far as I can tell) that’s not the world we live in, if your commentary is anywhere reasonably public. The audience exists, and while we-as-monkeys are prone to exaggerate, in our own minds, how much its aggregate opinion matters, it nevertheless does actually matter. You can accumulate all sorts of miasma from not caring enough about how the comments on your work are landing, and what they’re doing in the eyes of the people watching.

(It’s probably possible to build small, tight-knit bubbles that follow the rules my friends and colleagues would prefer, but it doesn’t scale.)

And—knowing all this—I actually find it super frustrating when someone leaves commentary which, in one way or another, obligates me to effortfully respond, with more time and energy than I properly have to spare…

…and then, if I express grumpiness about that fact, they blink innocently and go “What? You could’ve just not responded!”

Often those people are innocent. The blinking-innocently isn’t a pretense. But it’s grounded in naïveté. You can’t just wave your hands and make it so.

Again: it’s often wise to pay the cost. It’s not terrible advice to say “hey, have you considered that not replying here might actually be the lesser of the two evils?”

But (often) when I take that advice and walk away, it’s not that I’m winning. It’s that I’m merely losing less hard, losing fewer points, than I would have lost if I’d engaged. My options were “burn an hour of my life” or “just tank the damage.” There’s significant cost either way, and it rankles that the person who forced me into this lose-lose situation just … pretends like it’s my fault?

Like they have nothing to do with it. Like they didn’t create the burden that I am now having to shoulder.

Grmbl. Hrmbl. Hrmph.

On guess culture and ask culture

The “guess culture vs. ask culture” frame is one many readers will already be familiar with. In brief: in “guess culture,” you do not make direct requests; you track subtle cues and drop veiled, plausibly-deniable hints. If you’d like to stay with your friend, you say things like “Guess I’d better start figuring out a hotel,” leaving them an opening to offer you a room but not putting direct pressure on them to do so.

In “ask culture,” you just … ask. “Can I stay at your place?”

The assumption in ask culture is that the question is honest, and not a trap; that people will defend their own needs and boundaries, and will say “no” if it’s not a good idea, and will not be punished for saying “no.”

I’ve often felt a little bit squinty at this distinction, even though I agree it’s super useful as a model. Like, it seems to me that many people do cleave pretty close to one culture or the other, and that the guess-ask distinction explains a lot of discomfort and social conflict; I’ve seen a lot of people successfully avoid or repair conflicts after learning about the dichotomy.

But like …

Like …

It’s made of … two things?

Two things, guys. Sus.

I sort of always wanted there to be one substance that explained both strategies, not Two Fundamentally Different Ways Of Being. Proposing two different cultural fluids (or whatever) always struck me as complex in a way that made me feel like we hadn’t hit on the real explanation yet. Like believing in Tall People™ and Short People™ as distinct buckets and not having a concept of variable height.

My new take on guess culture versus ask culture: both are fake, and what’s actually happening is that they’re natural clusters in something like how much responsibility do you take, for anticipating the impacts of your next action?

Imaginary person Bailey is blunt. Bailey just … says what’s on their mind. Bailey either believes that other people’s reactions are their business, or (more likely) has never actually bothered to think about it.

Bailey tracks zero echoes. Bailey doesn’t think “If I say X, they will feel A; if I say Y, they will feel B. Therefore, I should choose between X and Y in part based on whether I want to elicit A or B.”

No—Bailey just says whichever of X or Y feels right to say, and damn the torpedoes.

This is something approximate to ask culture—just make your requests, and trust other people to handle their shit in response to your requests. It’s not your job to guess whether they’ll say yes or no—that’s why you’re asking.

Cameron, on the other hand, is considerate.

(Considerate in the literal sense as well as the connotative one!)

Cameron does think about whether X or Y is more likely to result in their conversational partner feeling good (as opposed to feeling judged, obligated, pressured, attacked, extorted, etc).

Cameron tracks one echo. “If I ask my parents whether my best friend can spend the night in front of my best friend, who’s here with us at the dinner table, this will cause my parents to feel extra obligation and pressure to say yes, so as not to seem mean or unwelcoming in front of my friend.”

(Cameron then either doesn’t ask, because they don’t want to pressure, or does ask, but in the guess-culture-esque environment where both Cameron and Cameron’s parents know that Cameron is well aware of the dynamic, Cameron is then judged as having done a Machiavellian pressury thing, on purpose.)

Guess culture is about reading the room, and predicting how your next action is likely to make people feel, and then taking that prediction into account as you choose your next action.

(You can’t just pretend that your words don’t have an impact on other people! Grow up! Take responsibility! Think before you speak!)

But wait—there’s more!

(Part of why the two-ness of guess vs. ask always bothered me is that it didn’t allow for what comes next.)

Bailey tracks zero echoes, and Cameron tracks one.

Dallas tracks two. “If I say X, they’ll probably feel A about it. But they know that, and they know that I know that, and thus their X→A pattern creates pressure on me that makes it hard for me to give my honest opinion on the whole X question, and I have some feelings about that.”

(Maybe Dallas tries to change the other person’s X→A pattern, or maybe Dallas just lets the other person’s X→A pattern influence their behavior but feels kind of resentful about it, or maybe Dallas stubbornly insists on X’ing even though the other person is trying to take Dallas hostage with their emotional X→A blackmail, etc.)

Elliott, on the other hand, grew up around a bunch of people like Dallas, and is tracking three echoes, because Elliott has seen how Dallas-type thinking impacts the other person. “If I say X, they will respond with A, and we all know that the X→A pressure causes me to feel a certain way, and they probably feel good/bad/guilty/apologetic/whatever about how this is impacting my behavior.”

(Examples beyond this point start to get pretty complicated, but they still feel realistic to me, e.g. Finley wants to smooch Gale, but doesn’t want to proposition Gale directly, for fear of putting too much pressure on Gale such that maybe Gale will agree to stuff that they weren’t really an enthusiastic “yes” to. But Gale knows that their own waffling pushoveriness is causing Finley to creep and cringe, and that makes Gale feel sort of guilty, but also sort of resentful (can’t Finley own their own emotions a little better?) which creates this pressure in Finley to just push past their own hesitation and pretend like they’re not all tangled up about Gale’s boundaries…)

Guess culture and ask culture don’t seem distinct, to me, but rather as general prescriptive buckets on how many echoes you ought to track.

Guess culture says “consider the impact your words are going to have on others before you say them, and tweak what you say with their predicted impact taken into account. Also, other people will assume that you did that sort of thinking, so any kind of ‘obvious’ reactions to your words are going to be considered more or less intentional.”

(One echo.)

Ask culture says “fuck that noise, I don’t want to track all that and besides, I’d probably get it wrong; I can’t see inside your head; let’s just say our actual thoughts and then let’s just respond honestly.”

(Zero echoes.)

And there are other cultures that don’t have catchy names that assume you should track two, or three, and there are also shifting norms around what even constitutes a predictable reaction, i.e. two people might both be “guess culture” in that they’re attempting to track one echo but one of them might take “thinking about the other person’s reaction” so thoroughly for granted that they’re always operating on the level of “think about how my own visible contortion and curation in response to predicting their response will cause them to feel,” i.e. “am I making them feel like everyone has to walk on eggshells around them all the time?” or “am I making them feel like their emotions aren’t okay because their emotions cause other people to get all tangled up?” etc.

(I think that cultures tend to naturally end up tracking more and more layers deep, as more of the “obviously X will make somebody feel A” gets taken for granted, and written into children’s books.)

But yeah—thinking in terms of “how many echoes is this person tracking?” feels more useful to me, than pretending that “guess culture” and “ask culture” are real, distinct things that are on opposite ends of a binary and exhaustively cover the whole space of possibility.

Looping back around:

Obligation to respond is (more or less) a one-echo issue. It’s something that, in my experience, people who are more comfortable with guess-style cultures will notice and account for more easily, and it’s something that people who are askier-by-default seem to me to be more baffled or confused or surprised by (sometimes to the point of thinking it isn’t there at all).

I sort of want to separate the “should you track this?” question from the “are you obligated to do something in response?” question—there’s a way in which “guess culture” lumps those two things together.

Often, I find myself typing a comment, and noticing that it’s going to produce some sort of obligation to respond, and thinking/feeling something like yes, exactly, this person should respond to me, here; if they don’t, they should lose the social points.

I don’t think that’s bad, or off-limits.

But I do think that a grown, responsible, mature person should do something like … owning the above? …should acknowledge it, and stand by it, rather than doing the eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too motion of creating the obligation, and then disavowing it.

I feel like people can, in fact, pretty easily and reliably predict whether their words are producing this obligation, if they try at all. And furthermore I think it’s actually not that hard to let the pressure off?

For example:

“I don’t know if [author] will even see this comment, but [blah blah blah]”
“I’m not sure that I’ve actually understood your point, but what I think you’re saying is X, and my response to X is A (but if you weren’t saying X then A probably doesn’t apply).”
“Yo, please feel free to skip over this if it’s too time-consuming to be worth answering, but I was wondering…”

…and so on. In essence: take five seconds to think about what the audience will obviously conclude, if the person doesn’t answer, and if you’re not trying to cause the audience to conclude that, then take some cheap action to short-circuit the conclusion-jumping.

(“But that’s so much work!” idk, bro, you’re about to leave a comment that will force the author to choose between burning an hour of their life or giving up a substantial fraction of their status and credibility, maybe you should put in a smidge more work? It’s not that hard to leave them a visible escape hatch, if you genuinely want them to feel like they don’t have to answer.)

Sorry—my own cultural bias is clearly showing, here. Again, I think it’s actually fine to not put in that extra work! I just think that, if you don’t, it’s kinda disingenuous to then be like “but you could’ve just not answered! No one would have cared!”

Thirty seconds of thought should suffice to realize that nope, false, if a hundred people happen to glance at this exchange then ten or twenty or thirty of them will definitely, predictably care—will draw any of a number of close-to-hand conclusions, imbue the non-response with meaning. It might not be fair, it might not be ideal, but it’s definitely going to happen.

(I think part of why this goes squirrelly, in practice, is that it’s easy for a certain type of person to feel like they’re engaging in a purely one-on-one interaction, in places like Facebook or Twitter or LessWrong or wherever. Like, if one is already a pays-less-attention-to-the-audience type Pokémon to begin with, then it’s easy for the audience to fall completely out of your thoughts as you tunnel-vision on the person you’re directly responding to. But I sort of can’t ever not-notice the other monkeys watching.)

The main thing I want isn’t for people to adopt my own idiosyncratic level of audience-awareness, but rather just to be able to cause them to notice, on request. Like, if a given person is creating a whole bunch of response-obligations on me, left and right, I like to have the language to say “yeah, so … you’re doing this thing, and I really need for it to happen less; I can’t keep up.”

(To be able to say that, and not have it taken personally, as if I’m asking them to shut up in some fundamental sense. Like, it’s not your questions are bad, it’s your questions are costly, and I don’t have the spare resources to pay the costs; I’d like to not keep receiving bills and invoices from you, please.)

Going forward, this essay is my tool for doing so. Hopefully it’ll be useful to some of you, too.

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