I remember reading tangerine’s* ask_metafilter answer when it was posted and got hundreds of upvotes (favorites in their jargon) and I thought it was a brilliant few paragraphs.
A couple years later it got some publicity in The Guardian and there was a complete thread on the single topic of the ask versus guess thing.
I am interested but I am not at all convinced. Anthropologists have been writing about gifts and exchange and reciprocity since as long as anthropology has existed. It is very complex. After family and clan relations, it is perhaps the second most studied topic in the field. I suppose the most likely explanation is the ask versus guess thing (tangerine later updated it by describing it more accurately as ask versus hint) is that we have a false dichotomy of folk psychology here, which may be useful in spots but needs to be taken with a grain of salt. There are a number of professional anthropologists and sociologists who regularly post there on any number of topics, and if they commented on this one, I missed it. I looked closely for exactly such a comment when the original threads were active.
I remember reading tangerine’s* ask_metafilter answer when it was posted and got hundreds of upvotes (favorites in their jargon) and I thought it was a brilliant few paragraphs.
A couple years later it got some publicity in The Guardian and there was a complete thread on the single topic of the ask versus guess thing.
I am interested but I am not at all convinced. Anthropologists have been writing about gifts and exchange and reciprocity since as long as anthropology has existed. It is very complex. After family and clan relations, it is perhaps the second most studied topic in the field. I suppose the most likely explanation is the ask versus guess thing (tangerine later updated it by describing it more accurately as ask versus hint) is that we have a false dichotomy of folk psychology here, which may be useful in spots but needs to be taken with a grain of salt. There are a number of professional anthropologists and sociologists who regularly post there on any number of topics, and if they commented on this one, I missed it. I looked closely for exactly such a comment when the original threads were active.
*tangerine is the author’s metafilter user I D.