I agree for the most, but it might be better to phrase it as this culture differs from my culture because my value X is incompatible with my value y. Because otherwise you are only making a one sided statement, I can’t assume to know what your values are.
Most political debates here for instance would be a lot shorter if people stated their cultural values upfront, rather than concealing them and arguing about something tangential.
"Ask" culture is prevalent in places where people come from diverse backgrounds. Cultures might also not be uniformely "ask" or "guess" across all topics. Therefore, when people with different value systems and communication cultures meet, "guess" culture simply doesn't work because other person's needs and intentions are often unexpected.
Sorry for the tacit assumption of the audience of HN, but I think that demanding constant awareness of all possible cultural differences is quite inadequate.
Anyway, I don’t see how those links disprove my point? Those cultures have different expectations; and my point is that those expectations are valid.
No I'm sorry but you are continuing to miss the point.
Sure, the asker can be a "demanding idiot". But a guesser can also expect everyone to be able to read their mind -- which is being just as much of a "demanding idiot".
You seem to actually be insisting that one cultural pattern is better than the other, when there's simply no objective basis for that assertion whatsoever.
You're concluding that the article/analysis is written from one bias, but I think it's actually revealing your own personal bias here. The article seems entirely objective and neutral to both viewpoints, whereas your reactions are clearly not.
It's possible and likely that they think that neither is better than the other, but with a change from one to the other, some cultural elements are lost and that can be a shame.
Because, if we acknowledge that more than one culture exists, then we will attempt to compare them. However, as everyone knows, all peoples are equal in all ways - any other conclusion is literally fascist and deserving of public shaming. Thus there is no culture because there are no differences.
Hmm, I know it's frowned upon generally to say one culture is better than another, but I grew up in guess culture and I tend to gravitate towards that naturally, but a lot of my maturing as an adult has come from adopting more of ask culture and being more direct.
Guess culture sounds exhausting because it is. I can't count the number of times I've had a resentment towards someone for something they inadvertently did without even realizing. And the converse is just as annoying, when someone is upset at you and you have to play 20 questions to figure it out.
I think if you're high in agreeableness saying no to someone can be hard, which is where guess culture comes from IMO; but on the other hand, that's just a super important life skill even if you are highly agreeable.
I feel like this should all be short-circuited by the fact that cultures are not a fixed value that can be compared for equality. Congruence, perhaps, but there are too many moving parts in culture to be able to rank them, which is an implication of solving for a single (imaginary) term.
People are often very naive about different cultures. In the west we're trained to view them as an interchangeable package of foods, languages, and perhaps dress. The differences are real and substantial, and fundamental assumptions about how the world works or ought to work are definitely not shared.
On top of that, you have an epistemological problem. How can you separate culture and biology in something like this without repeating the same experiment in a wide range of people in different types of cultures?
I think the point being made was that the issue of communication across cultures is inherently low context, so it is not reasonable to assume a shared cultural context when talking across this boundary. This may mean it would be better to be clear and direct as to minimize misunderstandings.
Doesn't matter, we can still talk about Western culture (meaning mostly Anglosaxon in this context, and including Europe in others) and Japanese culture.
It's about defaults and majority/average preferences, not about "every single one does this" and it gets tiring to remind people otherwise, as if they don't know.
If that is so, then the problem is that people refuse to see that certain cultures are incompatible with each other, and so the solution is them coming to terms with that and adjusting their worldview accordingly.
> when there is a cultural question, and there can only be one answer, one of the two will always have to adopt the other's answer.
Are there really this many differences where we must only adopt one?
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