this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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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.