I would, in fact, consider that interpretation to be unambiguously “not understanding what they were being asked” , given the question in the post.
Two points:
“Not understanding what they were being asked” isn’t an explanation. This is a common (really, close-to-universal) gap in people’s attempts to understand one another. If these students didn’t “understand” (noting the ambiguity about what exactly that means), what were they doing instead? “Being stupid”? “Not thinking”? “Falling prey to biases”? None of this tells you what they were doing.
I think what I described is a perfectly fine way for someone to interpret the question.
For that second point, let’s look at the wording again:
…psychology students were asked to estimate how long it would take them to finish their senior theses “if everything went as poorly as it possibly could,”…
“How long it would take”. Which someone could reasonably interpret as implying that it would, in fact, get done. (Many (most?) people would consider the question “How long does this take if it never gets done?” to be gibberish.)
And in the context of a senior thesis, it’s useless to think about it in terms of it getting done in (say) 20 years. It’s gotta get done soon enough to graduate. I think in most cases within a single college term?
So given the context of the question, there are some reasonable constraints a mind might put on the question.
…which you’re interpreting as them “unambiguously” not understanding what was actually said.
This attitude about there being an objectively correct interpretation of what was said, and that it matches your interpretation of what was said, and that when people hear something else they’re making a mistake, is another way to describe the STEM thing I was talking about.
This works in STEM disciplines basically by definition. It’s actually a great power tool. You troubleshoot differences in interpretation by coming to shared agreements about how language works and what concepts to use to interpret things. It makes sense to find out who was in fact wrong. And you do so in part by emphasizing and presenting the argument that justifies your interpretation.
But that communication strategy doesn’t work in most places.
The “secret way” I use to communicate with non-rationalists is to assume absolutely everything they do and think makes sense on the inside, and I try to understand that way of making sense. It’s not about making them interpret things differently; that’s STEM thinking and only works with others who have agreed to STEM communication protocols. Instead, I try to get some clear sense of what it’s like to be them, and I account for that in how I communicate.
And in particular, I have to make a point of setting aside my confidence that I’m using correct interpretation protocols (or even that there is such a thing) and that they’re not responding to the words that were actually said. That’s anti-helpful for communication.
Given the context, I imagine what they were doing is making up a number that was bigger than another number they’d just made up. Humans are cognitive misers. A student would correctly guess that it doesn’t really matter if they get this question right and not try very hard. That’s actually what I would do in a context where it was clear that a numeric answer was required, I was expected to spend little time answering, and I was motivated not to leave that particular question blank.
My answer of “never” also took little thought (for me). I thought a bit more about it, and if I did interpret it as assuming the thesis gets done (which, yes, one can interpret it that way), then the answer would be “however many days it is until the last date on which the thesis will be accepted”. Which is also not the answer the students gave.
It’s a bad question that I don’t think it would ever even occur to anyone to ask if they weren’t trying to have a number that they could aggregate into a meaningless (but impressive-sounding) statistic. It’s in the vicinity of a much more useful question, which is “what could go poorly to make this thesis take a long time / longer than expected”. And sure, you could answer the original question by decomposing it into “what could go wrong” and “if all of those actually did go wrong, how long would it take”. And if you did that you’d have the answer to the first question, which is actually useful, regardless of how accurate the answer to the second is. But that’s the actual point of this whole post, right? And in fact the reason for citing that statistic at all is that it appears to demonstrate that these students were not doing that?
Two points:
“Not understanding what they were being asked” isn’t an explanation. This is a common (really, close-to-universal) gap in people’s attempts to understand one another. If these students didn’t “understand” (noting the ambiguity about what exactly that means), what were they doing instead? “Being stupid”? “Not thinking”? “Falling prey to biases”? None of this tells you what they were doing.
I think what I described is a perfectly fine way for someone to interpret the question.
For that second point, let’s look at the wording again:
“How long it would take”. Which someone could reasonably interpret as implying that it would, in fact, get done. (Many (most?) people would consider the question “How long does this take if it never gets done?” to be gibberish.)
And in the context of a senior thesis, it’s useless to think about it in terms of it getting done in (say) 20 years. It’s gotta get done soon enough to graduate. I think in most cases within a single college term?
So given the context of the question, there are some reasonable constraints a mind might put on the question.
…which you’re interpreting as them “unambiguously” not understanding what was actually said.
This attitude about there being an objectively correct interpretation of what was said, and that it matches your interpretation of what was said, and that when people hear something else they’re making a mistake, is another way to describe the STEM thing I was talking about.
This works in STEM disciplines basically by definition. It’s actually a great power tool. You troubleshoot differences in interpretation by coming to shared agreements about how language works and what concepts to use to interpret things. It makes sense to find out who was in fact wrong. And you do so in part by emphasizing and presenting the argument that justifies your interpretation.
But that communication strategy doesn’t work in most places.
The “secret way” I use to communicate with non-rationalists is to assume absolutely everything they do and think makes sense on the inside, and I try to understand that way of making sense. It’s not about making them interpret things differently; that’s STEM thinking and only works with others who have agreed to STEM communication protocols. Instead, I try to get some clear sense of what it’s like to be them, and I account for that in how I communicate.
And in particular, I have to make a point of setting aside my confidence that I’m using correct interpretation protocols (or even that there is such a thing) and that they’re not responding to the words that were actually said. That’s anti-helpful for communication.
Given the context, I imagine what they were doing is making up a number that was bigger than another number they’d just made up. Humans are cognitive misers. A student would correctly guess that it doesn’t really matter if they get this question right and not try very hard. That’s actually what I would do in a context where it was clear that a numeric answer was required, I was expected to spend little time answering, and I was motivated not to leave that particular question blank.
My answer of “never” also took little thought (for me). I thought a bit more about it, and if I did interpret it as assuming the thesis gets done (which, yes, one can interpret it that way), then the answer would be “however many days it is until the last date on which the thesis will be accepted”. Which is also not the answer the students gave.
It’s a bad question that I don’t think it would ever even occur to anyone to ask if they weren’t trying to have a number that they could aggregate into a meaningless (but impressive-sounding) statistic. It’s in the vicinity of a much more useful question, which is “what could go poorly to make this thesis take a long time / longer than expected”. And sure, you could answer the original question by decomposing it into “what could go wrong” and “if all of those actually did go wrong, how long would it take”. And if you did that you’d have the answer to the first question, which is actually useful, regardless of how accurate the answer to the second is. But that’s the actual point of this whole post, right? And in fact the reason for citing that statistic at all is that it appears to demonstrate that these students were not doing that?