Comment by floxy
19 hours ago
I'm going out on a limb and say that pretty much all human cultures are guess cultures. What if every woman was sexually propositioned thousands of times per day? Maybe I should ask every person I ever see if they'll give me $1,000, maybe some will say yes. And then I'll expand my horizons, since my normal day routine doesn't take me by enough potential benefactors. Spam is essentially an ask-culture failure.
I’m an asker, but I’m not going to waste my day asking everyone for $1,000 because I know it’s unlikely anyone will.
“Asking” is for things you don’t already know the answer to, and “no” or “I don’t know” are acceptable answers.
As mentioned in the article, it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy. What you're describing seems to be on the very extreme end of ask culture.
Indeed. Most of human social interactions, throughout a lifetime, are non-verbal. That does not mean it's the most efficient or socially expedient way to communicate. I would say that it has a larger domain of communication failure states than direct questioning. Perhaps that's part of why language has persisted and supersedes non-verbal communication in most social domains.