I like this as a description of things that actually happen… but thinking about what should happen, ask culture seems to me like the clear winner. Ethics is a difficult subject, but I like Kant’s attempt at grounding it in reason: if your action makes it impossible to act in that very way, that can’t be a good action. It’s the behavioral equivalent to a logical contradiction. And I think that’s the case with guess culture; it’s impossible to sustain, in part because people will get things wrong, and in part because it leads to more and more echoes and they will become impossible to track. So acting in alignment with guess culture works towards the end of guess culture. Just like lying; it’s an action that leads to the impossibility of that very action. So the reasonable thing to do is to refuse to participate in that, and assume your interlocutor is also reasonable and will do the same, and then everything will work out. While the opposite won’t: if you assume your interlocutor is unreasonable and will guess who knows what from your words, then there’s no telling what they’ll do; your guess is as good as anyone’s, and we’ll all just be guessing until the guesses degrade enough that this becomes a meaningless ritual, or someone gets tired and just spits it out already (which is what I think tends to happen).
I lean toward ask culture for reasons similar to this, but I’m wary of there being something like a Chesterton’s Fence that I’m not fully accounting for.
Suppose you’re a manager in a corporation. There’s an urgent and difficult problem that needs attention, and you want to know if anyone would want to work unpaid overtime so they can make more progress. You don’t want to force unpaid overtime on anyone if it would be a significant inconvenience for them, but you also know that someone might say yes anyway in order to look like a better worker (and become more likely to get raises and promotions). So you can’t just ask everyone outright and expect an honest answer—you’re stuck implementing some version of guess culture with regards to asking people to work unpaid overtime, because a clear and unambiguous request isn’t going to be refused even if you think it ought to have been.
I like this as a description of things that actually happen… but thinking about what should happen, ask culture seems to me like the clear winner. Ethics is a difficult subject, but I like Kant’s attempt at grounding it in reason: if your action makes it impossible to act in that very way, that can’t be a good action. It’s the behavioral equivalent to a logical contradiction. And I think that’s the case with guess culture; it’s impossible to sustain, in part because people will get things wrong, and in part because it leads to more and more echoes and they will become impossible to track. So acting in alignment with guess culture works towards the end of guess culture. Just like lying; it’s an action that leads to the impossibility of that very action. So the reasonable thing to do is to refuse to participate in that, and assume your interlocutor is also reasonable and will do the same, and then everything will work out. While the opposite won’t: if you assume your interlocutor is unreasonable and will guess who knows what from your words, then there’s no telling what they’ll do; your guess is as good as anyone’s, and we’ll all just be guessing until the guesses degrade enough that this becomes a meaningless ritual, or someone gets tired and just spits it out already (which is what I think tends to happen).
I lean toward ask culture for reasons similar to this, but I’m wary of there being something like a Chesterton’s Fence that I’m not fully accounting for.
I have an example of how ask culture can fail.
Suppose you’re a manager in a corporation. There’s an urgent and difficult problem that needs attention, and you want to know if anyone would want to work unpaid overtime so they can make more progress. You don’t want to force unpaid overtime on anyone if it would be a significant inconvenience for them, but you also know that someone might say yes anyway in order to look like a better worker (and become more likely to get raises and promotions). So you can’t just ask everyone outright and expect an honest answer—you’re stuck implementing some version of guess culture with regards to asking people to work unpaid overtime, because a clear and unambiguous request isn’t going to be refused even if you think it ought to have been.