I know this seems like a question with an obvious answer but it is surprisingly non-obvious: Why do you need to know how long it takes to drive to the conference venue? Or to put it another way: what decision will be influenced by their answer (and what level of precision and accuracy is sufficient to make that decision).
I realize this is just an example, but the point is it’s not clear what decision you’re trying to weigh up is even from the example. Is it a matter of whether you attend the event at the conference venue or not? Is it deciding whether you should seek overnight accommodation or not? Do you have another event you want to attend in the day and wonder if you can squeeze both in? etc. etc.
Another thing is I’m the kind of person to default to “I don’t know” because I often don’t even trust my own ability to give an estimate, and would feel terrible and responsible if someone made a poor decision because of my inept estimation. And I get very annoyed when people push me for answers I do not feel qualified to answer.
A common experience I have is that it takes like 1-2 paragraphs of explanation for why I want this info (e.g. “Well I’m wondering if so-and-so should fly in a day earlier to travel with me but it requires going to a different airport and I’m trying to figure out whether the time it’d take to drive to me would add up to too much and also...”), but if they just gave me their ~70% confidence interval when I asked then we could cut the whole context-sharing.
I know this seems like a question with an obvious answer but it is surprisingly non-obvious: Why do you need to know how long it takes to drive to the conference venue? Or to put it another way: what decision will be influenced by their answer (and what level of precision and accuracy is sufficient to make that decision).
I realize this is just an example, but the point is it’s not clear what decision you’re trying to weigh up is even from the example. Is it a matter of whether you attend the event at the conference venue or not? Is it deciding whether you should seek overnight accommodation or not? Do you have another event you want to attend in the day and wonder if you can squeeze both in? etc. etc.
Another thing is I’m the kind of person to default to “I don’t know” because I often don’t even trust my own ability to give an estimate, and would feel terrible and responsible if someone made a poor decision because of my inept estimation. And I get very annoyed when people push me for answers I do not feel qualified to answer.
A common experience I have is that it takes like 1-2 paragraphs of explanation for why I want this info (e.g. “Well I’m wondering if so-and-so should fly in a day earlier to travel with me but it requires going to a different airport and I’m trying to figure out whether the time it’d take to drive to me would add up to too much and also...”), but if they just gave me their ~70% confidence interval when I asked then we could cut the whole context-sharing.
Would you say that as a convention most people assume you (or anyone) want a specific number rather than a range?
I’d say most people assume I want “the answer” rather than “some bits of information”.
To be honest I’m not sure on the difference? Could you phrase that in a different way?
And do you think they feel they ought give you a specific number rather than a range that the number could exist in?