In my experience, people tend to only skim when what they’re reading is long or complicated. So I find it fairly hard to believe that most people aren’t reading something like the Linda problem close enough to understand it—especially undergraduates at high end universities and trained doctors.
My thinking about this topic is strongly influenced by my experiences from situations where I was in charge of organizing something, but without any formal authority over the people involved, with things based on an honor system and voluntary enthusiasm. In such situations, when I send off an email with instructions, I often find it a non-trivial problem to word things in a such a way that I’ll have peace of mind that it will be properly understood by all recipients.
In my experience, even very smart people with a technical or scientific background who normally display great intelligence and precision of thought in the course of their work will often skim and misunderstand questions and instructions worded in a precise but unnatural way, unless they have an incentive to make the effort to read the message with extra care and accuracy (e.g. if it’s coming from someone whose authority they fear). Maybe some bad experiences from the past have made me excessively cautious in this regard, but if I caught myself writing an email worded the same way as the doctors’ question by T&K and directed at people who won’t be inclined to treat it with special care—no matter how smart, except perhaps if they’re mathematicians—I would definitely rewrite it before sending.
Matt_Simpson:
My thinking about this topic is strongly influenced by my experiences from situations where I was in charge of organizing something, but without any formal authority over the people involved, with things based on an honor system and voluntary enthusiasm. In such situations, when I send off an email with instructions, I often find it a non-trivial problem to word things in a such a way that I’ll have peace of mind that it will be properly understood by all recipients.
In my experience, even very smart people with a technical or scientific background who normally display great intelligence and precision of thought in the course of their work will often skim and misunderstand questions and instructions worded in a precise but unnatural way, unless they have an incentive to make the effort to read the message with extra care and accuracy (e.g. if it’s coming from someone whose authority they fear). Maybe some bad experiences from the past have made me excessively cautious in this regard, but if I caught myself writing an email worded the same way as the doctors’ question by T&K and directed at people who won’t be inclined to treat it with special care—no matter how smart, except perhaps if they’re mathematicians—I would definitely rewrite it before sending.