Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I've also heard of "Tell" culture. To use the moving example:

You call up your best friend and say, "Hey, I'm moving on Saturday, come over and help me." Your friend either says "Sure, I'd love to" or "Sorry, got a hot date, catch you at your housewarming party."

Ironically, Ask culture is usually used in transactional settings where you barely know someone, Guess culture is usually used in smaller community settings where you have a lot of personal context, but Tell culture (which is a level beyond Ask in directness) is usually used in intimate settings where you have a strong bond with someone - either family or very close friends. At that level of intimacy, it's expected that someone can say no to a direct request without hurting the relationship. It's the same reason close friends frequently make fun of each other or horse around in mock physical combat - it demonstrates that your relationship is strong enough that insult doesn't hurt it.

Mixed feelings on this. Tell culture allows people to express their feelings directly without prompting, but can also be used manipulatively when insisted on as a behavioral standard by someone who's overbearing relative to the people they're around.

For further reading, here's the blog post that named the concept: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rEBXN3x6kXgD4pLxs/tell-cultu...

And further discussion within the same community: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/against-tell-...

There were a bunch of tumblr posts on this as well which are more work than it's worth to go recover.

Also, in certain groups, people will deliberately troll each other in order suss out how they’d act under pressure… and whether they can be trusted to perform as part of a team under pressure.

Hazing is the term.

Hazing is about proving your lack of boundaries and proving you are easy to make do what told. It is about picking people who won't tell "no" and will act as enablers when needed.

Which is why well run organizations do not engage in hazing. While organizations that do it tend to be the ones engaged in bullying in general - whether internal or external.

None of that is about seeing a person under pressure, because they do nothing useful with the information. At best, information is ignored and at worst, used to pick bullying targets.

I think that's actually just an example of either ask culture or guess culture, depending on the context.

If the friend should only say yes if they really want to, then that's ask culture.

If the friend should feel obligated to say yes, then that's guess culture.

The only difference here is that the request is worded differently (as a statement rather than as a question), which is simply close friends adopting their own language conventions, a slightly-related but independent concept.

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