..wow. Thank you for this post. This hit a lot of personal notes for me.
I usually think about this in terms of regional differences. I grew up in a fairly rural part of Florida, and literally everyone I knew there was Guess Culture and communicated implicitly; saying "I want" was considered incredibly rude and demanding. The same held true in other parts of the South that I visited or lived in. Then I went to college in New England, got involved with Camberville geeks, and people communicated much more explicitly with value judgments on people who did not do the same and there was a lot of cognitive dissonance. The obvious connection is that South has pretty strict laws protecting a parent's right to corporally discipline a child, which is considered child abuse in New England.
So in high school everyone I knew had been beaten by their parents; this was just normal and how the world worked, and going to an authority figure -- even a concerned, well intention one -- meant there was nothing they could legally do, beyond encourage the child to behave better and make their parents happy, because the alternative was state mental hospitals or a very poorly funded child welfare system that needed the people who literally would not have made it out of childhood alive without police intervention. Nearly all of my friends were suicidal, and grappling with serious emotional problems as an adult. Our parents had almost universally been treated the same way by their parents as kids, so we were pretty protective of them.
This isn't just a sociological or regional difference thing; there are, of course, plenty of kids in the South who are not abused, and plenty of kids in the North who are badly abused. Ask Culture only works in an environment where it's okay to say no, everyone is comfortable saying no, and there are no power differentials; Guess Culture only works in an environment where everyone knows each other and can anticipate each other's needs and feelings. In the average tech conference, neither of these things are going to be true. So the answer is never as simple as "Ask Culture is better, if we just communicated explicitly this would all be easy."
I suspect that was a really draining and difficult post to write, and want to give you a lot of kudos for writing it.
no subject
I usually think about this in terms of regional differences. I grew up in a fairly rural part of Florida, and literally everyone I knew there was Guess Culture and communicated implicitly; saying "I want" was considered incredibly rude and demanding. The same held true in other parts of the South that I visited or lived in. Then I went to college in New England, got involved with Camberville geeks, and people communicated much more explicitly with value judgments on people who did not do the same and there was a lot of cognitive dissonance. The obvious connection is that South has pretty strict laws protecting a parent's right to corporally discipline a child, which is considered child abuse in New England.
So in high school everyone I knew had been beaten by their parents; this was just normal and how the world worked, and going to an authority figure -- even a concerned, well intention one -- meant there was nothing they could legally do, beyond encourage the child to behave better and make their parents happy, because the alternative was state mental hospitals or a very poorly funded child welfare system that needed the people who literally would not have made it out of childhood alive without police intervention. Nearly all of my friends were suicidal, and grappling with serious emotional problems as an adult. Our parents had almost universally been treated the same way by their parents as kids, so we were pretty protective of them.
This isn't just a sociological or regional difference thing; there are, of course, plenty of kids in the South who are not abused, and plenty of kids in the North who are badly abused. Ask Culture only works in an environment where it's okay to say no, everyone is comfortable saying no, and there are no power differentials; Guess Culture only works in an environment where everyone knows each other and can anticipate each other's needs and feelings. In the average tech conference, neither of these things are going to be true. So the answer is never as simple as "Ask Culture is better, if we just communicated explicitly this would all be easy."
I suspect that was a really draining and difficult post to write, and want to give you a lot of kudos for writing it.