Guess/Ask/Tell Culture - LessWrong

Suppose four friends need to agree on pizza toppings. Depending on what culture they are from, they might follow several different procedures: We could call the first type of system Guess Culture. In a Guess culture, it's considered rude, or costs face, to refuse a direct request. This means that if you ask somebody for the wrong thing - like "Can I have a cookie?", when they actually want all their cookies - they have to give it to you, and may be silently angry and resentful. This in turn means that you have to Guess whether the request is welcome before asking for anything. No one in Guess Culture can ever take the last slice of pizza. (You would think that a similar argument would then make it impossible to take the second-to-last slice, but Guess Culture pretends that other people are allowed to do what they want even though they're not actually allowed to do what they want. So you can take the second-to-last slice because anyone else who wants a slice is theoretically allowed to

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• Yusha Dulkina