Public figures often avoid answering a question; going off in a different direction without recognizing that they didn’t answer it. (Sometimes they even say ‘I answered your question’ even though they didn’t.
I wish they still said ‘no comment’.
Non-answers without acknowledgement seems bad for public epistemics as well as for good governance and public choice.
In the linkpost, I report on a quick Anthropic/Claude analysis of the extent to which Harris and Trump actually answered the questions they were asked in last night’s debate. (TLDR: neither did, but Trump did substantially worse.)
I suspect it would be easy to make a fairly useable tool to judge ‘was the question answered?’ in real time. I think bringing this into debates and interviews could add a lot of value.
Checking public figures on whether they “answered the question” quick analysis from Harris/Trump debate, and a proposal
Link post
Public figures often avoid answering a question; going off in a different direction without recognizing that they didn’t answer it. (Sometimes they even say ‘I answered your question’ even though they didn’t.
I wish they still said ‘no comment’.
Non-answers without acknowledgement seems bad for public epistemics as well as for good governance and public choice.
In the linkpost, I report on a quick Anthropic/Claude analysis of the extent to which Harris and Trump actually answered the questions they were asked in last night’s debate. (TLDR: neither did, but Trump did substantially worse.)
I suspect it would be easy to make a fairly useable tool to judge ‘was the question answered?’ in real time. I think bringing this into debates and interviews could add a lot of value.