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Aleksander comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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You might as well ask, "Who is the president of America?" and then follow up with, "Ha ha got you! America is a continent, you meant USA."
I don't think you're making the argument that Yvain deliberately wanted to trick people into giving a wrong answer -- so I really don't see your analogy as illuminating anything.
It was a question. People answered it wrongly whether by making a wrong estimation of the answer, or by making a wrong estimation of the meaning of the question. Both are failures -- and why should we consider the latter failure as any less significant than the former?
EDIT TO ADD: Mind you, reading the excel of the answers it seems I'm among the people who gave an answer in individuals when the question was asking number in millions. So it's not as if I didn't also have a failure in answering -- and yet I do consider that one a less significant failure. Perhaps I'm just being hypocritical in this though.
Confirm. ;) (Nope, I didn't misinterpret it as EU.)
Even if people recognized the ambiguity, it's not obvious that one should go for an intermediate answer rather than putting all one's eggs in one basket by guessing which was meant. If I were taking the survey and saw that ambiguity, I'd probably be confused for a bit, then realize I was taking longer than I'd semi-committed to taking, answer make a snap judgement, and move on.
The continent is basically never called just “America” in modern English (except in the phrases “North America” and “South America”), it's “the Americas”.