This was a fun post. I liked the way the “how many layers deep” idea was foreshadowed and built up to.
I see you are mostly on substack now, so you probably won’t see this.
I was trying to think of a clean example of a many-layer deep interaction, and I think I have identified it in the way that my parents and their friends pay bills at a restaurant. (Obviously you are socially obligated to offer to pay, so you do. But they know that was a “forced move”, which means that they can’t take your offer to pay as a strong sign that you are genuinely happy to pay, so they don’t accept the offer. But, you know that they know all that, so you can see that them rejecting your offer is also a somewhat forced move on their side, so you don’t accept their rejection of your offer … ).
This seems a good characterisation of the way that “guess culture” isn’t “one echo”, but “one or more echoes”. A lot of guess culture seems predicated on ideas like “we certainly wouldn’t just say X, because that would be frightfully uncomfortable for everyone, but we wouldn’t say Y either, because B would have to reply either affirmative or negative which would make C feel like we haven’t considered how C’s response would make D feel...” I don’t know, I find it hard to model guess culture accurately, but it certainly feels to me like native guess culture speakers model a lot more than one echo in their expectations. You could take this as making ask culture feel all the more revolutionary.
This was a fun post. I liked the way the “how many layers deep” idea was foreshadowed and built up to.
I see you are mostly on substack now, so you probably won’t see this.
I was trying to think of a clean example of a many-layer deep interaction, and I think I have identified it in the way that my parents and their friends pay bills at a restaurant. (Obviously you are socially obligated to offer to pay, so you do. But they know that was a “forced move”, which means that they can’t take your offer to pay as a strong sign that you are genuinely happy to pay, so they don’t accept the offer. But, you know that they know all that, so you can see that them rejecting your offer is also a somewhat forced move on their side, so you don’t accept their rejection of your offer … ).
This seems a good characterisation of the way that “guess culture” isn’t “one echo”, but “one or more echoes”. A lot of guess culture seems predicated on ideas like “we certainly wouldn’t just say X, because that would be frightfully uncomfortable for everyone, but we wouldn’t say Y either, because B would have to reply either affirmative or negative which would make C feel like we haven’t considered how C’s response would make D feel...” I don’t know, I find it hard to model guess culture accurately, but it certainly feels to me like native guess culture speakers model a lot more than one echo in their expectations. You could take this as making ask culture feel all the more revolutionary.
I think this is a great example. Thanks for thinking of it and putting it here.