This definitely happens too, but have you ever had to deal with customer service departments unwilling to think anything is something other than the most obvious? Or dealt with a hard to diagnose medical condition and had doctor after doctor keep insisting on going through the same useless-to-you diagnostic flow chart until you finally find one willing to actually think with you?
In some contexts, there’s also the opposite problem of people seeing a hard to understand problem and insisting they need to investigate when that’s not necessary for finding a solution. In analogy to the (yes, very possibly false) vanilla ice cream story, the man could have tried switching brands of vanilla, or walking to the aisle instead of buying from the endcap, or buying multiple pints of ice cream during normal grocery shopping to last the week instead of making a special trip, without ever bothering to investigate. Or, if you have symptoms that your doctor thinks come from an inoperable congenital defect, but the solution for the symptoms is the same medication whether you have the defect or not, then there’s no value in finding the etiology, and no real reason for them to insist on expensive tests, but they often will anyway before treating, and pointing out this fact doesn’t always help.
This definitely happens too, but have you ever had to deal with customer service departments unwilling to think anything is something other than the most obvious? Or dealt with a hard to diagnose medical condition and had doctor after doctor keep insisting on going through the same useless-to-you diagnostic flow chart until you finally find one willing to actually think with you?
In some contexts, there’s also the opposite problem of people seeing a hard to understand problem and insisting they need to investigate when that’s not necessary for finding a solution. In analogy to the (yes, very possibly false) vanilla ice cream story, the man could have tried switching brands of vanilla, or walking to the aisle instead of buying from the endcap, or buying multiple pints of ice cream during normal grocery shopping to last the week instead of making a special trip, without ever bothering to investigate. Or, if you have symptoms that your doctor thinks come from an inoperable congenital defect, but the solution for the symptoms is the same medication whether you have the defect or not, then there’s no value in finding the etiology, and no real reason for them to insist on expensive tests, but they often will anyway before treating, and pointing out this fact doesn’t always help.