I've decided that I'm done being pissy about this kind of response, or thinking that it's something that can be coached away. I choose to look at it like any other cultural communication difference - something that you learn about, try to give some grace to, and work a little harder to bridge (unless you're defusing a bomb, performing surgery, flying an airplane etc.).
In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."
For me, it really comes down to is whether or not I believe the responder is acting in good faith. If you can't assume good faith, the shape of the response isn't the actual problem.
Of course, my opinion of them is also related to how often their interpreted answer or conversational contribution is "I don't know", and how often they choose to interject with that when it's not necessary. I suppose the latter is cultural too; perhaps I should be clearer in open forums whether I expect them to answer.
To me, acting in good faith means saying something like "I'm not sure, but Claude says this, which sounds right: [short informative clip from Claude's wall of text]". Don't pretend it's your response, make sure it has info you think is useful, and edit it down.
I'd prefer just "I don't know." I can ask Claude on my own.
> To me
> I'd prefer
This is exactly my point. To some people, direct communication, especially "no", is extremely rude. To some people, a head bob (easily confused for a "yes" in other cultures) merely means acknowledgement, or "maybe". To some people, extended silence indicates deep consideration or respect.
Globalization resulted in a need to tolerate these differences, and in my experience, trying to "fix" them is considered rude (I suppose that's also a cultural norm!). I just think it's interesting to observe that there is such immediate intolerance of this new behavior. Of course I understand it, and I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on, there are probably so many ways of considering it.
In my culture, I prefer not to wear clothing in public. I also prefer not to be confined to toilets when transferring personal products.
Maybe there are some universal conventions we can accept.
Common, if you are in indirect culture, you will HINT that you dont know or that the answer is no and the other person will get it.
These stories are not about people who are from indirect cultures being frustrating to the direct person. They are about people who paste stuff into claude and unnecessary large wall of text - written in direct style.
When I started managing international teams (long ago) the first months were painful for us all because I didn't understand some culturally didn't feel they could tell me 'no'. I was used to American devs that would happily flat out tell me 'I'm not doing that' or calling me out when I was being too phb style oblivious. Made me change my initial one on ones with new team leads to focus on 'how should we communicate'. I didn't realize how much I was requiring co-workers under me in the org chart to meet me where I was. Huge eye opener.
I realized the same obliviousness on my part made some of my people feel like I was 'good old boys club' because I was more relatable to other white guys into sports (I used American sports analogies up to that point because that was how the management I rose up with talked). I felt awful for making people feeling bad/stressed/in an out group.
> In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."
It's still a bad attempt at help. Objectively net-zero utility at best.
If it's really just "culture" but they genuinely want to help, then they can in fact be coached. If they're only interested in appearances, well, I agree training isn't going to help.
With lmgtfy, the point was to show that you can do that with Google, how you can do it, and you shouldn’t ask (not in the nicest way for sure). With replying with an LLM answer, you pretend that I cannot do the same. The equivalent would be a link to an LLM chat. There is a clear intent difference. The LLM answer version doesn’t want to teach the how.
> lmgtfy
https://google.com/search?q=LMGTFY
Copy/pasting a question to LLM and pasting back the output isn't an attempt ar being helpful. It's the equivalent of a lmgtfy link.
But the point OP is making is that it's entirely possible that the person doing this _does_ see it as them being as helpful as possible. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck, or that it isn't annoying, though. I dunno, just seems like a coin toss to me: was this backed by good intentions or not? Without other "evidence", assuming that it was well-meaning but misguided feels better for _both_ of us (at least in my experience).
Having good intentions doesn't give a free pass to be obnoxious.
Sure but that goes both ways in a conversation.
Good intentions don’t excuse bad behavior, and shouldn’t oblige one to silently accept it.
why should you be the one who has to work a little harder though?