Comment by derektank
21 hours ago
It’s hard to imagine what a guesser is feeling if you don’t understand the differences between their expectations and yours as an asker, and vice versa.
21 hours ago
It’s hard to imagine what a guesser is feeling if you don’t understand the differences between their expectations and yours as an asker, and vice versa.
You are presupposing that the internet forum comment on which all this is based has correctly modelled the world and that this asker-guesser thing is indeed real.
Usually it takes one or ideally several studies, with large groups of people, with a solid hypothesis and some strong, rigorous protocol.
Until then, it's not worthless, but it's at best an inspiration.
Social stuff is rarely that easy, seducing, cute, with two clear, beautiful categories of people.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
It makes sense to judge models by how useful they're in some situation, and compare them by usefulness in context[0]. It doesn't make sense to ask which is right, because they're all wrong.
Here, at least for me, but I guess(!) many other HNers, the "Askers vs. Guessers" model is very useful.
Would some RCT studies be nice? Sure. I don't expect them to prove the model to be accurate. But it doesn't have to be, that's not the point. Just pointing out that there's some variability between people along these lines is very useful.
Diverse modes loosely held, eh?
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[0] - Consider Newtonian vs. relativistic motion. The latter is more accurate and gets you better results at large scales - but in almost all circumstances in life (up to and including landing a probe on the Moon, or landing a shell in someone's back yard), the Newtonian model is much simpler and therefore much more useful.
Of course we could say that all models are "wrong" because they are simplifications of the reality. But there's wrong and wrong. We don't usually say a model like the Newtonian motion is wrong, it's not a very useful way to deal with models.
Newtonian motion has been shown to be repeatable and to accurately predict motion within limits. It has scientific backing.
The asker-guesser model isn't even shown to be a simplification of the reality. And actually, later in that High-context and low-context cultures [1] Wikipedia article:
> A 2008 meta-analysis concluded that the model was "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".
Which is scientific speak for bullshit.
There's a world between scientifically backed "wrong" Newtonian movement and random internet forum comment backed social model found to be "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".
The Newtonian movement is an evidence-backed simplification. The asker-guesser model is a persuasive illusion.
Are you really comparing some internet commenter with Newton and the broader scientific community?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
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