this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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Most people figure out the context and fill in the details.
I'm reading this wondering if this is tounge in cheek, or if you really have no idea how you really just doubled down on that autism.
Yes and I think non autistic/ADHD people do that like unconsciously, right? Fill in the context?
Whereas a huge part of autism for a lot of us IS "caring about the details" very consciously and needing those details explicitly stated to understand what I think others just understand?
That's my simplified understanding.
That's always I possibility. If you're genuinely arguing it, then it makes the whole discussion fairly dismissive and too reductive to be of any value. But, I'll entertain it for a bit.
Your argument here is the good'ol "but you get what they're trying to say here?", or as you put it "figure out the context and fill in the details", right? Why stop there tho? Surely you should follow it up with an argument as to why you object to removing such guesswork, with better formulated questions?
Neurotypical people wouldn't feel that there was any guesswork, as all the context and details are already covered by the words in the sentence, the situation the sentence is being said in, or the subtext of that sentence being the one they chose to say. You wouldn't be disambiguating anything, just redundantly restating things.
Funny thing with logical contradictions is that it works both ways. Your argument implies that neurotypicals cannot understand certain questions. In particular, "how likely are you to recommend our products to friends & family", literally, at face value.
Weird argument to make, don't you think?
Well fuck me. How can i make it this far in life not realizing "would you recommend this to..." explicitly implied the hypothetical. I've always thought "I guess maybe if it came up, but when the hell would this ever come up? What a dumb ass question.." Even answering no because no one i know would even know what this product is.
Fucking fuck I'm a dumb ass. Lmao
It's not so much your argument, as being the implication of what you are saying.
There was some hint of condescension in your language as to this being a lack of ability in one side to (paraphrasing) "get the obvious context", and at the same time attribute this to (I'm assuming) social intelligence, or rather, a lack thereof.
What I'm saying, is that you cannot have it both ways here. If the questionnaire aims to get accurate responses, from everyone, you need accurate questions.
Many people you might think this applies to, are perfectly fine understanding the literal meaning, and also any number of "let's assume the question is asking something else instead"-variations. Not that this even matters, as just by accepting the possible existence of variability in how different groups might "be able to understand the obvious context clues", the way you unify responses in the sense of "answering the same question", is by making questions less ambiguous.
Which brings me back to my comment as to how communication works. Concept - symbols - concept. This is always dependant on overlapping agreement in translations at either end, which also depends on context, explicit and implicit. My only argument, the one that you considered might have been tongue in cheek, is that if you want coherent responses to a question, you are better served by a wording that minimises the need for a shared implicit context.
The specifics of my example, I'm guessing, is what you confuse with the more general point. I'm sure that even tho we disagree as to where to draw the line, the general point is still valid.
To refer back to the original post, you are taking things too literally, and in doing so, missing meaning that is present in the symbols. As a rough analogy, DXT1 GPU texture compression has two modes. Both start by storing two colours, then they diverge. They both store a number from zero to three per pixel, but in one mode, zero to three all mean interpolating between the two endpoint colours, and in the other mode, zero to two are for interpolation, and three means that the pixel is transparent. There's no bit explicitly storing which mode's being used, but the information is there. The two stored colours should also be interpreted as two numbers, and if the higher one is first, then you use the first mode, and if the higher one is second, then you use the second mode. If the colours were interpreted too literally, they'd only be seen as colours, but an implementation can see that there was a choice to put the colours in a particular order, and read into that. There's no abiguity, people just need to know about the rule and apply it.
For communicating with the public, there are enough people that are barely literate that asking the simplest version of a question is going to cover more of the population than one that adds all the necessary qualification to ensure someone that takes everything literally knows it's a hypothetical.
You and test don't exist in a vacuum: you can conjure context from your knowledge about the world.
Not denying that. Do you think that is the argument here?
Point is - the question from test is good enough.
If you only want answers from the type of people who can conjure this information, and do so in the same way, sure. What a weird thing to assume about the people answering the question, huh?
I mean, additional questions and struggle from the respondent are valuable insight by itself in this context.