Horsing around
I just agreed to do some more Gallup poll things.
It's interesting to observe how difficult it can be for me to answer what I consider poorly-formed questions. And that I consider nearly all questions to be poorly-formed when the asker cannot add any additional context to the text of the question they are asking, because they are (quite understandably) reading the question from a list and are probably specifically trained to avoid "helping" the questionee parse the question, since this would bias the results depending on who does the asking.
I kind of wanted some help with "household", though. Is my household one person (me), or is it the 17 adults that I share common living space with? If there are kids in the house, but they aren't my responsibility, does that count? I decided to go with the IRS sort of definition and said that my household is just me, one person.
Do I feel that The Economy is getting better or worse? Okay, I can translate this by adding either "...for me as an individual taking into consideration only my own direct benefit" or "for residents of the United States of America considered as a whole", but in neither case does this really help me answer. What does the asker think The Economy is? What if I think it's something completely different, and thus give an *answer* that is meaningless to the asker? I suppose that really they just want a gut response of feeling based on the trigger words in the question. I feel like I'm being too flippant if I give that sort of answer, though. I want to *really* answer things, and in everyday life this means tackling deconstruction of the question more than it does the answer. The *question* is where the real content to be uncovered exists. (In everyday life, when a person brings you a question, they are usually bringing you their answer, which you can help them discover by mutual refining of the question.)
It's interesting to observe how difficult it can be for me to answer what I consider poorly-formed questions. And that I consider nearly all questions to be poorly-formed when the asker cannot add any additional context to the text of the question they are asking, because they are (quite understandably) reading the question from a list and are probably specifically trained to avoid "helping" the questionee parse the question, since this would bias the results depending on who does the asking.
I kind of wanted some help with "household", though. Is my household one person (me), or is it the 17 adults that I share common living space with? If there are kids in the house, but they aren't my responsibility, does that count? I decided to go with the IRS sort of definition and said that my household is just me, one person.
Do I feel that The Economy is getting better or worse? Okay, I can translate this by adding either "...for me as an individual taking into consideration only my own direct benefit" or "for residents of the United States of America considered as a whole", but in neither case does this really help me answer. What does the asker think The Economy is? What if I think it's something completely different, and thus give an *answer* that is meaningless to the asker? I suppose that really they just want a gut response of feeling based on the trigger words in the question. I feel like I'm being too flippant if I give that sort of answer, though. I want to *really* answer things, and in everyday life this means tackling deconstruction of the question more than it does the answer. The *question* is where the real content to be uncovered exists. (In everyday life, when a person brings you a question, they are usually bringing you their answer, which you can help them discover by mutual refining of the question.)